VOYAGE OF DISCOVERY
How a transatlantic adventure gave one family their lives back
Soon after my 40th birthday, my two sons and I became ill with a flu-like bug and didn’t pull out of it. We had been healthy, happy, productive people. My elder son, Dan, then 12, missed a year of school, struggled back part-time for a year, then recovered. My younger son, Louis, only six, missed every other year at primary school, then with the move to secondary level collapsed and spent four years in bed. Literally in bed.
For months I clung to the hope that I’d recover, but as the years passed, I became terrified that I might not. By this stage, all of us knew we had ME, also called chronic fatigue syndrome. But that label couldn’t be more misleading, because it’s nothing like tiredness. It’s as if your body is on pulsing red alert, unable to deal with input – light, noise, people. Visiting shops was impossible and conversation exhausting. It would be seven years before I could go inside a supermarket. TV was too much. Most of the time I lay in bed or on the sofa at home in Edinburgh, getting up to make simple meals and potter in the garden.
Though ill, in the holidays we went out to our boat share in Majorca and spent our days in deserted coves. We could manage that. It was gentle and quiet, the sea reassuring and soothing. I would lie on my bunk and listen to the waves lapping
against the hull while my husband, Stefan, hauled sails and the boys fished.
Slowly, slowly I started to pull out, with massage and healing hands on my body giving me tiny increments of energy. For 15 years my life was overtaken by ME, but I was beginning to see glimpses of the woman I’d once been, like a mirage sparkling far on the horizon.
In compensation for the lost years, Stefan and I started dreaming of crossing an ocean and began to search for a sturdy boat. We tracked down Scarlet, an old 47ft Cardinal, in Long Island in the US. She couldn’t be brought to us so we had to go out to her. It was winter when we first saw her, the temperature minus 20 – the boat shed hemmed in by stacks of ice and snow – but standing under her, seeing her strong keel and then her wooden deck and snug cabins, it was love at first sight.
She was called SPATS because, the owner said, he and his wife were always yelling at each other. Some sailors say it’s bad luck to rename a boat. Others say it’s okay if you keep the first letter. We rechristened her Scarlet, after Scarlett O’hara – with irony, because she was blue!
The following summer Stefan and I returned with Louis, then 20, to bring her home. When we pulled up the anchor and set off, the three of us shared the same sense of amazement and unreality. Were we really about to cross the Atlantic?
The first week was freaky. We sailed into icy fog, the top of the mast hidden. We sat in the cockpit, frozen to our bones and wretchedly seasick. I started to worry about my son. By the fourth day we were so weak we made the heartbreaking decision to turn back – after all the joyous preparations, all the anticipation, all the hope. We turned Scarlet round and pointed her at America. The adventure was over.
But the fates had other ideas because the Gulf Stream held us and played with us like a toy. In 24 hours we moved only one mile towards the shore while drifting further and further south. And Scarlet was letting in water. Soon I was paddling up to my ankles below deck as our mattresses and clothes became soaked. Stefan found the leak in the anchor locker drain and Louis plugged it with polythene bags, but we would stay wet for a while yet.
We didn’t make it back to America. After sailing round in circles, we were spat out into flat calm. Then the wind filled Scarlet’s sails. The turning point came on Stefan’s watch, in the middle of the night with dolphins swimming alongside. We edged up until we were on course and began a perfect arc of a journey that would take us to the other side of the Atlantic.
During two days of calm, we let Scarlet drift. I hauled on to deck the mattresses, cushions, pillows, bedding, towels and clothes. I hung things from the rails and the sails and anything that would hold a clothes peg. Scarlet looked like a travelling circus but our stuff steamed in the sun.
By the time the wind picked up again, everything was dry and smelling of sunshine. On we went. In the evenings, I did my balancing act below deck, cooking one-pan meals with rice or pasta, often thrown across the cabin by a gust of wind and an over-tilted boat, ending up on the floor. One day I counted 37 bruises. After our meal we watched the sunset, always different: watercolour streaky or fiery reds, pinks and purples. The sky was so big. So very, very big. It put everything else in perspective.
One of us always had to be on watch in case a tanker appeared on the horizon. They could bear down on us in minutes and couldn’t stop. One morning, there was a loud shout from Louis up on deck.
‘A WHALE!’ he bellowed. ‘Mum! Get up here quick!’ I staggered on deck in time to see a massive creature heading straight for our bows. We felt the bump as the whale swam under the boat, then surfaced on the other side. He was the same size as our boat. ‘I saw his eyes,’ my son said. The next glitch was a total loss of power that we couldn’t restore. We had no lights, no fridge and only a hand-held navigational aid. We were down to tins and packets.
Knowing land was near after three weeks and 2,300 miles on the ocean was both momentous and sad, because we had grown to love our life on Scarlet. We dropped anchor on the tiny island of Flores in the Azores, among cheerful fellow travellers. Our first meal on land was fish and chips with ice-cold beer. We raised our glasses, but there was an undercurrent of worry because Louis was terribly ill again. Instead of sailing 1,350 miles to Tenerife in the Canaries, he would fly home. Sadly, Stefan and I sailed on without him.
Looking back, I’m moved by the memories of my family pulling together – my husband at the helm, my son navigating, me below deck. Life was reduced to the basics – staying safe, looking out for one another, accepting each moment, being at one with the boat and the ocean in all its moods. We didn’t have one cross word.
I found joy, exhilaration and peace on that trip, emotions I’d barely glimpsed in 15 years when I was a pale, almost lifeless shadow of myself. The sense of achievement never leaves me. You have to be physically and emotionally tough and unafraid, though I have a necessary respect for the sea. Through storms and gales there was heavy work to do, heaving ropes and pulling down sails, and none of it fazed me.
Stefan and I had been sailing together for 30 years and that incredible ocean crossing felt like a full stop. A year on, we sold Scarlet and have since been building a house in France. Louis moved to a part of Scotland where life is slow and the sky is almost as big as over the ocean. He’s in his element there and has just bought his own small boat. He’s not fully fit, but he’s happy.
As I began to pull out of ME, I set up Linen Press, the only indie women’s press in the UK. I felt if I could cross an ocean under sail I could do anything. When you’ve been laid off like a broken bit of machinery in a scrapyard for a very, very long time, you give thanks every day for normal health, and your priority list – like ours on Scarlet – becomes short and simple. After all, there are only a few things in life that really matter. ◆ The Red Beach Hut by Lynn Michell (IQ Press) is out now
‘If I could cross an ocean under sail, I could do anything’