We sailed across the Atlantic, in the Spring of '98, with a motley crew on board our 72' staysail schooner. The star of the trip, was a Californian surfer, name of Randy Dale. He came over to the boat to see if he could get a ride across the 'pond' from Mindelo on Sao Vicente in the Cape Verde islands, where he had ended up, a disappointed man, having had no surfing luck on the island of Sal, in spite of what had seemed like a hot tip. When you work hard to earn enough money to fly to where the surf is and the surf isn't there, it's like a year wasted! It wouldn't have been so bad if there had been anything else to do instead but, if you've ever visited the Cape Verde's you'll know that they can't exactly be described as exciting. Or even beautiful, unless the barren look appeals. The last thing we needed was a beach bum to add to the boatload of unlikely candidates we had already accumulated. As far as we knew, surfer equals beach bum and this one was going to have to find some other sucker to take him away from the islands. There isn't a lot of transport leaving the islands in a westerly direction. A weekly cargo ship will take you to Dakar on the coast of West Africa but that's no help if you want to go West. You can fly to the Canary Islands, but it's very expensive and, again, you're flying towards the North which is no help. Few yachts stop in the Cape Verde islands. We wouldn't have stopped either, but there were just the two of us and we'd had a rougher and longer trip from the Canary islands than one would hope for, with the wind hell-bent on pushing us back the way we had come, most unusually for a time of year when there should still be a decent trade wind blowing you along in the right direction. As our search for the trade wind had taken us right down to Sao Vicente, we decided to stop, drop the anchor and get a couple of nights of proper sleep in, to equip us for the next couple of thousand miles without sight of land. Those who make it their business to give advice to yachting folk about routes, and places along those routes, had written little about the islands, suggesting that other than in an emergency, they weren't recommended as stopovers. Thinking this a little unfair on the locals, who could probably do with a slice of the revenue that 'yachties' tend to bring to their stopping-places, we had decided to see for ourselves, since in a couple of days we planned to be on our way, anyway. Things happened, nothing particularly devastating, except that we ended up needing cash and were unhappy to discover that our debit card, which only works in those automatic cash machines, was of no use to us on Sao Vicente where there is no such machine. The result was that we were in Mindelo three weeks, awaiting a transfer from Spain, and that is how we had come to accumulate four 'crew' already, the day Randy Dale turned up. He seemed so at ease when he and his local friend arrived alongside in the dinghy, I took it that he knew the skipper. The skipper took it that I must know the guy because I had welcomed him aboard with no preamble! Randy Dale is not small but there is no extra weight on him. He sported a shock of curly blond hair and freckles in abundance. His face was open and innocent, his smiles whole-hearted and carefree.
His age was impossible to determine at the time, he could have been anywhere from twenty-five to forty years old. It turned out he was in his late thirties. When we heard that he was a surfer, both the skipper and I started shaking our heads. No way! We already had a Croatian poet, so pale and thin that a gust of wind might carry him away and three assorted Austrians, only one of whom appeared in the slightest bit practical by nature. How assorted those Austrians were, we soon found out, but not soon enough to prevent us having to spend three weeks at sea with the two ill-assorted ones, but that's another story... What we definitely didn't need, were not going to have, was a Californian surfer!
" Oh, but you can't leave me here " he said, so plaintively that the skipper and I both melted and burst out laughing. That man turned out to be a superb sailor, a great companion and an absolute genius at fishing. He caught at least one fish each day, large enough to feed the seven of us, and on some days we had to put extra fish in the freezer. We'll save the details of that side of the man for the fishing page, but he really had the knack. It turned out that he had been lost at sea, a few years previously, for quite some time. When we said that his story would make a fantastic book, he assured us that a writer was already working on the project. We don't know if the book has been published yet, but we will certainly want a copy if we get a chance to acquire one. We are certainly not going to spoil anything by giving any details here! It is mentioned only because it might explain his resilience, his patience, his one-ness with sailing and the sea and the serenity with which he seemed to handle everything. Under his guidance, our poet became fitter and stronger, learned to catch fish and clean them and generally grew in stature and substance. We had formed three 'watches' (turns at steering the boat and taking care of business) and it was my good fortune to be teamed up with Randy. We all took turns at washing the dishes, except the skipper who did all the cooking, partly because he was the only gourmet chef aboard and partly because he didn't have regular watches to do, it having been agreed that his energies should be reserved for the possibility of times when the four inexperienced members of the crew couldn't cope with conditions and Randy Dale and I were too exhausted to steer. Randy soon learned that he could get me to take his turns at washing dishes on one condition. He had to sing a song. It was always the same song. The one that was playing on the radio in Stanley Kubrick's film, 'Clockwork Orange'. It starts out "I want to marry a lighthouse keeper..." and I wish I had written the words down. Randy would stand up, reminding one of recitations in the schoolroom, with his hands clasped behind his back, and deliver the whole song, smiling at how easy it was to get out of doing the chores. Washing dishes was the only work he seemed glad to avoid, though. He did more than his fair share of all the other things that had to be seen to and when the weather turned rough, he liked using the boat like a giant surfboard and surfing the waves, while lesser mortals were only too pleased to hand the wheel over to him and skulk down below! Frankly, doing a spot of dishwashing was a small price to pay for the entertainment. The skipper and I are both agreed that we would be glad to have Randy along on any trip, however far we were going, and that he would be welcome to stay aboard when we got there, for as long as he liked. There are very few people we could honestly say that of! If you meet him on one of the surfing beaches of the world, salmon fishing in Alaska, or anywhere else, you can tell him we said that. And we mean it. You may be thinking, and I certainly am, that you could write something a lot more relevant to the topic of this page than I just did. I hope I'm right because it's your turn! As Randy Dale, eventually, taught the ship's parrot (well, she's a macaw actually) to say, once and once only, just before he flew out of Trinidad, bound for Mexico: "Surf 's Up!". Linnet Woods, Managing Editor and First Mate of the Leopard Normand III Les Greenhill of the S/Y Brian Beru tells us that the surfing around Faial in the Azores is pretty good, although protective clothing is necessary from November to April or May - it's quite chilly during the winter months. |
Calling all wind-surfers, board-sailors, water-skiers, parascenders, surfers, swimmers and anyone else whose interests lie at the surface of the sea.
