ATLANTIC BY TALL SHIP
Climbing the main mast to fix a jammed sheave, I found myself 100 feet above the Atlantic Ocean, and our yacht was nearly midway across this vast empty tract of sea. It was somewhere I’d dreamed of being as a youngster, while listening to the tales from my seafaring family.
The 95-foot schooner had been the largest and most beautiful in the marina, I thought, as I gazed across a sea of masts in the Bay of Gibraltar. So I made my mind up to get aboard whichever way I could, for I’d heard she was Atlantic-bound.
In the 1980s the Gibraltar waterfront was a bustling place of sailors and bluewater yachts. Many had come across the Mediterranean, some through the Suez Canal; for in those days Gulf pirates weren’t so desperate.
The northern yachts had bashed their way south across the wild Bay of Biscay to enjoy the warm weather of the Portuguese Algarve before a final desperate lunge against the prevailing easterly Levanter wind to reach the British port of Gibraltar. So here we all were, in various states of readiness to ‘cross the pond’, ‘go south then starboard when the butter melts’ or, put less colourfully, to sail the Atlantic.
