At two o’clock in the morning of my last night on the peninsula, I crawl out of my tent for a pee. I look up and nearly forget why I have gotten up. It is absolutely still and quiet calm. The sea is soundless and the sky is crystal clear. The air is so still and stable that the stars aren’t even twinkling. Each star is as hard and unwinking as a laser. The lesser magnitude stars are so bright that it is difficult to pick out the familiar constellations. The Milky Way is splashed across the sky like a spilled bag of diamonds. Suddenly I comprehend that I am not looking at a pattern of light against a two dimensional background but I am seeing the disc of the galaxy, edge on. I experience a moment of vertigo as the sense of the vastness of even our small corner of the universe fills me. For an instant I am no longer standing on the surface of the earth, but I am clinging to the side of some gigantic space ship, about to fall off and go wheeling away among the stars. The feeling quickly passes, but it is a rare glimpse into our place in the universe. Perhaps we humans aren’t equipped to contain such immensities for more than a few heartbeats. The chill night air soon drives me back to the warmth of my sleeping bag.

The breeze begins to turn into a real wind sometime around about half past eleven. It occurs to me that if this is the start of the predicted stronger wind later in the afternoon, now will be good time to eat my lunch before I get too busy. It’s a good strategy, as soon after that the wind gets stronger and I keep busy reefing the sails to reduce the area. Reefing the standing lug sails that comprise Hornpipe’s rig involves dropping the whole sail into the boat, shifting the tack pennant, tying in the reef points as you come aft, then shifting the sheet to the reef clew. After that, you hoist everything back up again, haul down on the tack pennant to tighten the luff and then sheet in. It doesn’t take long, as I have the main halyard and tack pennant lead aft – perhaps two minutes. When the mizzen is up, the boat behaves very well with the main down, sitting there quietly hove to while the mizzen and tiller look after themselves.

As the wind increases, I first reef the mizzen and the immediately the boat’s motion is more comfortable. Within twenty minutes the wind increases again to the point where I have to take the first reef in the main sail. The boat is again more manageable but within another twenty minutes the wind rises again to the point where I need the second reef in the main. The wind keeps rising until finally I drop the mizzen sail altogether. By the time I am down to just the double reefed main, in early afternoon, we have made a lot of progress across the Strait, and don’t have far to go. The wind, however, is really strong, and more to the point, the sea state is beginning to catch up to it. I estimate the wind to be twenty knots with gusts higher than that. We find out later that this is wrong, that the wind is in fact a steady thirty knots, gusting to at least thirty-four, on the edge of being a gale. That is a huge amount of wind for a small open boat. Waves by now are routinely four to six feet high, with occasional waves to eight feet. At the bottom of the wave troughs I can’t see over the tops. The day remains clear and sunny though, and with the sea sparkling blue in the sunshine, the foam showing bright white from the breaking waves and the snow-capped peaks on the mainland shore shining in the distance, it is irrepressibly beautiful. It is hard to feel properly apprehensive about the high wind.

The breeze begins to turn into a real wind sometime around about half past eleven. It occurs to me that if this is the start of the predicted stronger wind later in the afternoon, now will be good time to eat my lunch before I get too busy. It’s a good strategy, as soon after that the wind gets stronger and I keep busy reefing the sails to reduce the area. Reefing the standing lug sails that comprise Hornpipe’s rig involves dropping the whole sail into the boat, shifting the tack pennant, tying in the reef points as you come aft, then shifting the sheet to the reef clew. After that, you hoist everything back up again, haul down on the tack pennant to tighten the luff and then sheet in. It doesn’t take long, as I have the main halyard and tack pennant lead aft – perhaps two minutes. When the mizzen is up, the boat behaves very well with the main down, sitting there quietly hove to while the mizzen and tiller look after themselves.

As the wind increases, I first reef the mizzen and the immediately the boat’s motion is more comfortable. Within twenty minutes the wind increases again to the point where I have to take the first reef in the main sail. The boat is again more manageable but within another twenty minutes the wind rises again to the point where I need the second reef in the main. The wind keeps rising until finally I drop the mizzen sail altogether. By the time I am down to just the double reefed main, in early afternoon, we have made a lot of progress across the Strait, and don’t have far to go. The wind, however, is really strong, and more to the point, the sea state is beginning to catch up to it. I estimate the wind to be twenty knots with gusts higher than that. We find out later that this is wrong, that the wind is in fact a steady thirty knots, gusting to at least thirty-four, on the edge of being a gale. That is a huge amount of wind for a small open boat. Waves by now are routinely four to six feet high, with occasional waves to eight feet. At the bottom of the wave troughs I can’t see over the tops. The day remains clear and sunny though, and with the sea sparkling blue in the sunshine, the foam showing bright white from the breaking waves and the snow-capped peaks on the mainland shore shining in the distance, it is irrepressibly beautiful. It is hard to feel properly apprehensive about the high wind.

I find out something about my boat then. Hornpipe is essentially a rowboat hull, and with its tucked up transom, it is a displacement hull. I find out that the boat will in fact surf, which is a capability that displacement hulls are not thought to possess. At the top of those bigger waves, the wind strains the doubled-reefed main sail, the rudder starts to vibrate and hum and the boat takes off, surfing on the centre part of the hull. The experience is like the scene of the parting of the Red Sea in the Cecil B. DeMille movie “The Ten Commandments”, with a foaming wave thrown out either side, high above the gunwales. After a few seconds of this, the peak of the wave gradually slides past under the boat and the boat subsides down off the surf into the following trough. On the milder surfs, when I have time to look, the GPS routinely records peak speeds of eight knots, and once more than nine.

I realise that I really have too much sail up and will be much better served by having only the mizzen sail up or the even the mizzen with the reef in it. But I have left it too late and am afraid to let the boat lie to while I shift masts to put up the mizzen in the centre mast position. I am afraid of rolling too far and maybe capsizing. Even without dropping the sails, I am worried about either broaching or having one of those breaking seas break on top of me from behind. This is not just a theoretical problem, as on the top of one wave in a bigger than usual gust, the boat starts to turn and the wave top begins to drive it further. I haul with all my strength on the rudder and hoist myself to the high side while I watch the gunwale get closer and closer to the water as a rush of fear spikes my adrenalin. Somewhat shakily, I manage to get the boat back under control. Time loses its meaning as I focus on my steering to avoid a repeat. My world has narrowed to only water, wind, breaking waves and sunshine.

In the pre-dawn darkness, I listen to the weather forecast, the lighthouse and ocean buoy reports on the VHF as I pack my gear and get ready. I’ll move out as soon as even a little bit of light appears. I am the only boat in tiny Jones Cove, north of Cape Caution. It is the nearest protected cove to the Cape to wait in readiness for rounding it. Cape Caution! For the small boat sailor voyaging along the Inside Passage, it’s the equivalent of rounding Cape Horn, and frankly, I am very nervous about getting round it safely in Fire-Drake.