A WORLD TO THE WEST - a voyage around the world
Maurice R. Cloughley, Copyright 1997, Published by Horsdal & Schubart Publishers, Ltd., Victoria BC Canada, 366 pages, Paperback

 Is it now “commonplace” to have sailed around the world?

 Not quite, but circumnavigating has certainly become frequent. All sorts of people do it every year in every type of boat (okay, more big than little), some taking many years, others dashing around in less than a year.

 So, given the plethora of circumnavigating accounts, why read this book? One - because it is very well written. Two - because the author maintains a fine balance between “the romance and sometimes the awful horror of it.”

 In truth, I sometimes thought the book should be a must-read bible for everyone contemplating a world voyage; that they might better comprehend the demands and frights of ocean travel. Yet Cloughley’s writing is much more than “danger writing.” His descriptions of joy and overwhelming beauty easily balance the hours of grim storms. In the end, it is an encouraging account while remaining a sobering one.

 Cloughley and his wife Katie did, after all, safely complete their circumnavigation, in 1968, in a boat more spartan than those used by present day circumnavigators. Nanook is a 34’ wooden boat with few amenities. Cloughley navigated by sextant, the perils and frustrations of which are frequently mentioned. Oh, how GPS has changed our voyaging! No watermakers aboard Nanook, no generators, no pressure water, no computers, no weather FAX, etc, etc. Not that Cloughley scorned such amenities, rather they just weren’t readily available 30 years ago.

 But gear is not his focus. It’s the voyage. Maurice and Katie were two sun starved teachers on Ellesmere Island, Canada (that’s way north, baby!). I don’t suppose there is another place that would generate more dreams of warm water cruising. After 11 years of teaching in the Eskimo culture, they went boat shopping in England and happened upon their dreamboat. Nanook was Australian built by a shipwright who had sailed her to Europe. The boat was equipped and tested. Maurice and Katie were not.

 Near novice sailors, certainly innocent, they crashed out of England into a terrible series of Atlantic and Mediterranean winter gales. Katie was immediately very sick as she often would be throughout the voyage and even Maurice “felt depressed at the thought that we had probably bitten off more than we could chew, and that in reality we were entirely unsuited to the kind of thing we were now embarked upon.” The voyage through the “civilized” Med only reinforced his notion, exposing them to some of the worst conditions they would encounter anywhere. “By morning the gale was much worse. Force 9 by my estimate and gusting often well into Force 10. . . The grey seas were tremendously long and streaked with spume, with yawning great valleys between them that seemed about to engulf us in a watery void. . . Katie lay below all this time. She was afraid and thoroughly sick. . . Long hour followed long hour. . .  (Later) We motored in a sweaty haze all the way across a flat blue mirror to the sunny ridges of Malta.” Aw, the fickle Med!

 And more to come! “It was well that we entered Lazaretto Creek (Malta) when we did. . . By 0600 there was not doubt about it. We had to get out of bed and tend our lines for the fury of a full gale. . . How Nanook heaved and snubbed in the wind as water whipped over her bows . . Behind us trees crashed to the ground and all up and down the quayside yacht owners and crews dashed about in the rainy chaos doing whatever they could think of to hold their boats off. . . And still Greece lay upwind, a long hard slog unless the wind changed.” Which it really never did.

 Eventually, following many testing days rounding the southern tip of the Peloponnesus (“we sailed 358 miles. . . To make good a distance of 160 miles”) they reach the Island of Spetsai and gratefully set up for a winter’s stay.  “We were now beginning to realize what an unpredictable and difficult place the Mediterranean is for a boat under sail.”

 So they take a ferry to Egypt and journey up the Nile by train and bus, experiencing the adventures inherent within such travel. In the Spring, Nanook sets out over the “wine dark sea” to Turkey and a boat load of officials who consumed “2&1/2 hours before we were through this entry process and I calculated that our arrival had consumed 11 man-hours of government time.” Still, they were enchanted by the Turkish coast and delighted in their anchorages. (When) “. . . A tranquility descends on the Nanook and her crew that makes even the worst passage seem worthwhile. . . We now relaxed to gaze in wonder at the ancient city of Cnidus.”

 “We had run out of fresh supplies so I rowed over to the caique in hopes of landing a fish. I explained in very fractured Greek that we would like to buy from them a little of whatever they’d been able to catch. “Oh of course,” they replied. “Pass up your bucket” They waved away my proffered drachmas and passed the bucket back. Inside were two little sponges.” So much for living off the sea!

 Eventually back across the Med and down the North African coast with stops in Morroco. From the old slave town of Dakar they set off for the Cape Verde islands narrowly escaping a rundown by a mysterious black ship. Then on to Panama: “17th Nov. Another dull boisterous day. . . Have taken no sun sights since leaving San Tiago thanks to overcast skies and laziness. Life is taken up by lying in bunks reading, or gazing in distaste at the turbulent grey chaos outside. 21st Nov. Perfect weather continues. 25th Nov. What started off as a pure blue sky at sunrise (albeit no wind) has now resolved itself into dramatic clouds, great towing cauliflowers of cumulus and black-bellied anvils rumbling angrily at our lonely little boat. We feel so vulnerable.” 28th Nov. Becalmed half the night. Another exquisite day but still not enough wind. . .” Dec. 1 Both getting awfully bored with the crossing. Dec. 2nd Only 180 miles to go. We spend hours together eagerly discussing all the things we’ll do once we get ashore. Movies, fresh water showers, T-bone steaks, beers, pastries are all high on the list. I struggled for an hour over the diesel this morning but it is dead.”

 “How good to set foot on land again!” (Barbados) the first of many pleasant landfalls throughout the Windward islands. Nanook enjoys pleasant sailing and her crew enjoys the diverse contacts with islanders. Eventually, ever Westward, to Grenada, Curacao, Columbia, sailing through just enough storms to keep them alert.  Eventually anchoring among the San Blas islands where Maurice is impressed by the Cuna Indian’s “well developed commercial instincts.”

 Passage sharing with other sailors, they transit the Panama Canal and set off the Galapagos. “Sailing out of the Gulf of Panama and across to the Galapagos can be quite a trick. Steer direct and the sails fall idle . . . Steer towards the South American coast and another branch of the Humboldt will carry you backwards. . . The whole region is one of baffling currents impinging on each other repeatedly. . .For the next week the sailing was terrible with overcast skies, calms and light head winds. In one 24 hour period we made good only 11 miles. . .We relieved the boredom of the long days by doing odd jobs about the boat while an amazing variety of sea creatures gave us something to stare at. . . We had no thought of disturbing these creatures let alone killing them and the time came when we could not even bear to troll for the beautiful dorado for those fish seemed to be so full of the joy of life. . .”

 The Galapagos provided just the right mix of nature and socializing with fellow yachtsmen, the stuff that voyaging dreams are made of. Then off for the isles of Polynesia, island groups “someone, . . .has likened . . . to three quite different but equally desirable women. The Tuamotus are like the plain, cheerful, unsophisticated girl next door, all sunshine, bare feet and freckles. The Societies are much more mature, alluring and overtly sexy, the femme fatale type. But the Marquesas are like a queen, even more beautiful than the others but remote, regal and full of dark melancholy. And so we found then.”

 After eleven years in the dark arctic, Polynesian cruising proved to be everything they had dream of. They loafed, they swam, dived, visited ashore, explored inland, endured a storm or two, in short, soaked up paradise while leaning toward the next voyage, the next anchorage. “I am afflicted with a permanent impatience to be always somewhere else . . . No sooner would our anchor dig in than we would back at the chart table contemplating the next passage . . .” Sound like anyone you know, dear reader?

 Paradise has it’s dark sides of course, and Maurice and Katie found most of them. “We spent two weeks in the Vava’u area . . . Generally a village was to be found ashore near these sheltered localities so that we were badly pestered at times by incessant streams of people wanting to sell garden produce and basketware, or worse, just want to come aboard out of a curiosity that always took several hours to satisfy. “I’m never going to visit a zoo again,” Katie, said one day as we motored off to an uninhabited island for a day’s respite.”

 Or “18th, Dirty, filthy stinking conditions. A terrible night of constant sail changes and dirty squally weather. During the day a prolonged squall of quite appalling force hit us like a steam engine and sent us flying with the Sumlog needle unable to get up past 10 and me out on the sprit fighting to get the jib down. The seas around me fairly smoked under the onslaught. I just cannot guess the strength of that incredible wind but it was much stronger than anything we have ever experienced before. . . Very strong winds, Force 8, 9 or 10 all day.”

 But storms were followed by enjoyable exploration through the New Guinea islands which they found relatively free of modern tourism. Then down to Cairns on the eastern Australian coast before threading their way north inside the Great Barrier Reef, turning the corner into the Torres Strait and then West toward India “. . . And the Pacific was at last behind us. What a vast ocean it is, stretching back, in our vision, to the Miraflores locks on the other side of the world. What variety and interest it contains within its far-flung rims. Beauty and danger and the delight of discovery are still there in abundance and always will be. . . What people live there on those islands, and how well they still understand how to live!”

 Cloughley then details the “good life” they observed (and lived) on two unnamed (and unspoiled) Melanesian and Polynesian islands. The friendly people they interact with seem out of a 1950s National Geographic magazine. Nearly stone age, but inventive, adaptive, and most important, full of laughter and goodwill. Nanook leaves both islands with a tearful crew vowing to return.

 Wing and wing westward along the Indonesian chain to Bali where the richness of Balinese art, culture, music, and architecture prompts Cloughley to write “. . . Why Bali in particular? It is only one of a long chain of islands. Yet none of the others will bear comparison. Why not Sumbawa or Flores or Lombok? The difference must lie in the fact that Bali is a Hindu land in a sea of Islam.”

 Christmas Island with a bunch of other cruisers, on to the Cocos, rough passage onward toward Rodrigues with Kathy seasick below for days on end. An all-night dance party in the hills of Rodrigues picks up their spirits before ever westward to Mauritius. Then around the tip of Madagascar and through big waves and even bigger winds into Durban “The seas got up steeply as we approached the narrow dredged neck of water leading into the harbour. We ran on roaring through the breakers that smashed themselves high on the breakwaters at the entrance and then we were suddenly in a wide smooth harbour surrounded by coast hills and a big city” as well as a bath, dinner and fellowship with fellow trans-Indian Ocean sailors.

 Six weeks are spent in Durban traveling, doing boat work and having dental work done. Around the Horn with fair winds and a southern ocean that “glowed at night with luminescence. . . I thought we were being signalled by a ship, for the sails were lit with bursts of light. . .I soon realized that the light came from the bows where white waves surged and spread and sank away again as we rushed on through the seas.”

 Rolling west around the horn in modest conditions “we’d been smugly congratulating ourselves on an easy winning of the passage . . . We now got our comeuppance. . . I could make no sense whatever of the lights and general features of the port ahead of us (Cape Town) . . . The wind tore at us and I was blinded by the dust laden gale . . . A tremendous blast of wind laid us far over, burying one of the decks in water. A huge stone wall loomed over us close by.” Many tries later then enter the port to lie in their bunks, fully clothed never “remembering ever being so scared before.”

 Then up the cold South Atlantic in loose company with Tryste a B.C. Trimaran to St. Helena, an island they found charming if somewhat sleepy.  Again west to Brazil and a month’s stay in “Rio, an exciting place filled with vitality. Every day we rowed ashore to absorb more of it.” And they discover that “Brazilians tended to regard a yacht more as an occasional pleasure and symbol of wealth and status than as a serious means of conveyance over long distances. We were therefore something of an oddity to our friends at the I.C.I (yacht club). For a mere two people to actually cross an ocean in such a small thing was incomprehensible to them. Why endure such hardships?”

 He answers such questions while cruising about the coastal Brazilian islands. “We were left along again to relax into our old routines, to wake-up when we wanted and go where we wished with no thought for the schedules of landsmen, cook only what we felt like cooking and to eat as much or as little as we required, to work or to play as the fancy took us, to wear anything at all or nothing at all, and to talk without restraint about anything or to relapse into companionable silence.”

 North to Salvador, a port they wished they could stayed in for “a year or so.” Around the Brazilian corner and up through the Windward islands, enjoying every port and all the different cultures mixed within them. Employment deadlines force them into a pressured passage north to Halifax, Nova Scotia. All too soon they are out of the tropics and experiencing cold for the first time in years. After worrying through days of unrelenting fog, they get a navigation fix and enter Halifax harbor, their circumnavigation complete.

 “I know of no freedom so absolute as the freedom of the small-boat ocean sailor. Returning to life among the Eskimos of the Arctic was a matter of mixed emotions. The sudden adjustment to living in a house and going to work as other landsmen do, even Arctic landsmen, at 8:30 every morning, Monday to Friday, and conforming to all the understood imperatives of a middle class consumerist society, these things took some adjusting to. . .” Which makes for musing . . . Are we adjusted, trapped, or merely normal people who can’t, won’t or shouldn’t set off across the ocean? Hummm.

 If you are dreaming of, or planning for, your own ocean voyage, this is a highly recommended read. After spinning out the tale so well, Cloughley finishes up with several pages of cruising hints and helps. If you are unlikely to every venture offshore, read the book anyway as you won’t find a better vicarious experience. A World to the West is a classic.