Articles about our Founder, Richard Baldwin, and
his sailing experiences
Solo sail
was 'incredible'
Published -- 07 February 2004
By Glenn Montgomery Belfast: Dick Baldwin's sailboat slid down a
20-foot wave and started up the other side, only to stall out and hang there
at a 70-degree angle. "It just kind of stopped," recalls Baldwin. His Luders
33 did not have enough momentum to make it up the wave and was in danger of
sliding backward.
"I was concerned, but not frightened," says the Belfast man, who admits when
he hatched his plan to sail solo to Tortola in the British Virgin Islands, he
was angling for some adventure, and that is exactly what he got. "It was
incredible, just what I wanted to experience," says the man whose boyhood
fantasies were fueled by the real-life solo exploits of Sir Francis Chitchester.
Baldwin experienced that and more during a voyage that started Sept. 29 when
he left Belfast Harbor and featured a 1,174-mile open-water crossing from
Beaufort, N.C., to the Caribbean island of Tortola.
During his month and a half at sea, Baldwin dealt with the highs and lows of
bluewater sailing, witnessing the majesty of towering seas and the satisfaction
of surviving them on the one hand and being wet, cold, seasick, and exhausted on
the other. Day after day he faced challenges alone, his only companion a small
greenish-brown bird who hitchhiked most of the way.
It was not Baldwin's first solo offshore experience, and he does not plan for
it to be his last. The Belfast man, a physical therapist with an office in
Rockport, made the first attempt at satisfying a lifelong itch for long-distance
sailing by entering the Bermuda One-Two Race in 2001. Departing from Newport,
R.I., he made the 635- mile journey by himself to Bermuda for the first leg of
the race, then was joined by Belfast compadre John Slaughter for the return leg.
"The 'One-Two' wasn't quite enough," says the man who as a 10-year-old would,
unbeknownst to his parents, camp out in a 9-foot dingy in the Connecticut River
with a sleeping bag and a kerosene lantern. "We had pretty good weather," he
recalls of the Bermuda race. "It was not too, too challenging." He ended up not
having to brave big seas, and while he was alone on the boat for the first leg,
Baldwin says he had the radio companionship of his fellow competitors.
Last summer, Baldwin actually had planned an encore entrance into the
every-other-year Bermuda One-Two, but summer-long engine woes scuttled that
possibility and kept him in port. Not wanting the entire sailing season to be a
loss, the Belfast man cast around for another adventure.
"I'd always wanted to sail the whole East Coast," says Baldwin, who thought
about setting his sights on the Florida Keys before coming up with a grander
plan. "Jeez, I might as well go to the Virgin Islands," Baldwin decided, having
conjured up visions of a long ocean crossing to an island with crystal clear
water and beautiful beaches.
Baldwin says he felt he had reached a stage in his life when such voyages
were possible. "I felt I had kept my nose to the grindstone," he says, having
completed 31 years in the physical therapy business. All three daughters had
graduated from college and were out living on their own, and he had the OK from
wife Rosemary. "She knew when she married me that I'd be taking a pretty major
sailing trip someday, and it had finally come."
It was on a Monday morning in late September when Baldwin guided his boat,
Passages, out of Belfast Harbor. Joining him for the sail down the Maine coast
was son-in-law Albert Edwards, who made the trip to Portland.
Baldwin, after a night onshore with daughter Anna and her husband Albert,
departed from Portland, starting the solo portion of his trip to Tortola that
was to take him 2,000 nautical miles.
From Portland, he sailed down the East Coast, stopping on Cape Cod as well as
Atlantic City; Norfolk, Va.; and Beaufort, N.C., striking out from the latter
and not touching land again for 18 days and two hours.
It was early in the trip that Baldwin faced his roughest weather. When he
left Cape Cod on a mid-October afternoon heading for Atlantic City, the forecast
was calling for 25-knot winds. A stiff breeze to be sure but certainly no
problem for Baldwin and the 33-foot bluewater cruiser he had chosen specifically
for its offshore capabilities.
But as the day wore on and night came, the wind velocity continued to
increase, as did the size of the waves battering the 1969-vintage craft. Baldwin
sailed all night, using only his mainsail, which he had triple-reefed to make it
as small as possible.
When dawn came, Baldwin got to see precisely the kind of situation he was in.
"I was quite shocked at how big the waves were," he says. Three particularly big
walls of water slammed over the side of Passages, half-filling the cockpit with
water.
As time wore on, Baldwin began to wear down. "I was getting pretty tired. I
took all the sails down and tried to sail with bare poles. I realized this was a
pretty good-sized storm for me," he says.
At first, Baldwin tried to run with the sea, keeping his boat going directly
downwind. It was a rollercoaster ride as the sloop slid down the side of a
20-foot swell and attempted to climb the steep shoulder of the wall of water
ahead. Without benefit of sails, the boat did not have the momentum to make the
climb, and Baldwin feared that his craft would start sliding backward.
"I immediately turned into the wind," he says. Baldwin then decided to let
the boat find its own passage. He lashed the tiller down, secured everything on
deck, and closed himself in the cabin below for what turned out to be a wild
ride. "I let the boat find its own way through the storm," says Baldwin, who
felt confident he would be OK. "This is a pretty renowned boat for
ocean-sailing. I knew this boat wasn't going to fall apart."
Because the bow of his ocean-going sloop is higher than the stern, the wind
did not play equally on the craft, and it did not stay perpendicular to the
direction of the waves. "It was somewhat broadside to the sea," Baldwin recalls.
The sailor had secured everything below decks, but nevertheless, he says,
"Things were rattling and rolling."
Baldwin sat on the floor of the boat and operated a hand pump, a necessity
because water squirted through the slats covering the entryway to the cabin and
also sloshed down the stairway whenever Baldwin went topside to check on things.
Because of the rough ride, Baldwin was seasick for a day and a half.
"There was an 18- hour period when I couldn't eat anything," says the sailor,
who tried twice to force a cracker down but threw up each time. "It was hard to
do anything. I just wanted to lay there in my bunk and try to stay in it."
After two days of really big seas, Baldwin put up a triple-reefed mainsail
and guided his boat to calmer waters, eventually making it in to Atlantic City.
While in port, he examined his food supply and made an interesting discovery
when he opened a Styrofoam carton and examined the half-dozen eggs inside. All
six had holes worn right through one end, the result of friction on the
storm-tossed boat.
"There was unbelievable motion in that boat," says Baldwin.
After Atlantic City, Baldwin sailed to Norfolk and then to Beaufort, N.C.,
from there heading out to sea on the 1,174-mile course bound for Tortola. During
the 18-day crossing, he only saw five ships and one sailboat, and his only human
contact was radio communication with the sailboat and two of the ships.
Baldwin, however, was not alone. On his first day out of Portland, as he
headed for the Isle of Shoals, he felt an insistent tapping on the back of his
arm as he raised a sail. There Baldwin was, eight miles off shore, and yet he
turned and found himself face to face with a little land bird.
"He hung around for about an hour," says Baldwin, who got within three or
four feet of the little creature. "Then I didn't see him any more. Five days
later I went down to the cabin and as I was going down, I saw this streak going
by me."
It was the little bird, who promptly flew out of sight. A little more than a
week later, that incident was repeated, with the bird racing past Baldwin as he
walked down the steps into the cabin. As had happened before, the bird flew out
of sight. Baldwin was perplexed why the bird had opted to stay with the boat,
which had sailed into four harbors for a few days of rest and re-supply before
heading out again into deep water. "It had plenty of chances to fly away."
A week out of Beaufort, he heard what he thought was a squeak or a chirp. "I
thought it might be a loose bulkhead, but I couldn't find that or the bird,"
remembers Baldwin, who, as before, did not think he would see the little
creature again.
It was 10 days later that Baldwin experienced two strange but unrelated
events. He was nearing the end of his journey but was still 12 miles from his
destination of Tortola when he began to see coconuts floating on the surface of
the water.
"At first I thought that some barge full of coconuts must have sunk," he
says.
But before he unraveled that mystery (he found out later in Tortola a huge
rainstorm had washed the tropical fruit into the sea) he was presented with
another re-appearance of his winged friend, who Baldwin spotted when he looked
down into the cabin.
"I called to him," recalls Baldwin, who was starved for company of any kind
after 17 days at sea. "I thought, this is so cool."
His little buddy, which he later identified as a Cerulean warbler, obliged,
walking over his foot, between his legs and eventually perching for about
three-quarters of a minute on his knee. The creature then walked around the boat
before eventually flying off, only to return.
"He flew off and came back four times," says Baldwin, who suspects the bird
had misjudged the distance to land. When Baldwin was within two miles of Tortola,
his little friend flew off for the last time, apparently having been aboard the
boat with Baldwin for 45 days.
Later, Baldwin was to discover one of the food sources that had kept the
creature alive. He found a box of wheat thins with peck marks through the
cardboard and plastic liner.
After his own arrival on land, Baldwin was joined by his wife, and the two
sailed throughout the British Virgin Islands for two and a half weeks. The
couple was also joined for a few days by daughter Anna and her husband.
While Baldwin had thought about sailing the boat back to the United States to
Beaufort where it would be left in a boatyard for the time being, he finally
opted to leave it in Tortola.
After his big solo crossing, followed by the Virgin Islands stint, Baldwin
decided he'd had enough time at the tiller. "I couldn't do it forever. I was
ready to get back to work. That surprises me," says the sailor. "We must be here
for a reason. We're supposed to do something, not just play all the time."
Does that mean Baldwin has satisfied his deepwater sailing itch and his quest
for adventure? Not exactly, though even Baldwin himself is puzzled by his desire
to willingly seek to do something so full of hardship.
"Sixteen of the 18 of those days," Baldwin says of his open-water crossing,
"the boat was soaking wet." Baldwin's muscles ached from trying to sail a
constantly pitching boat, and he had to deal with the seasickness that was a big
factor in his 18-pound weight loss.
He had suffered from nausea during his bout with big seas as he headed toward
Atlantic City and endured a second round of it when he started his offshore
voyage after leaving Beaufort. It set in the first night after he left that
North Carolina town. "For the next five days all I had was raisins and water,"
he recalls. "I didn't even open the icebox for the first five days. I couldn't
even look at food."
Baldwin had some revelations on his trip. "I found it wasn't quite as much
fun, the actual sailing, as I thought it was going to be," says the Belfast man,
who in those first nausea-filled days after Beaufort considered shortening his
venture and going instead to the Bahamas or even to Florida.
There were times during his journey, Baldwin says, when he thought to
himself, "What am I doing? I'll never do this again." But, he says, once he made
it to his destination, his attitude changed. "Fantastic," he would tell those
who inquired about the trip. "The big reward is when you get in. Once you've
accomplished it, it begins to set in that you came through, you met the
challenge." The voyage was, he says, "uncomfortable and not always fun, but was
very challenging and reward ing."
Is he sated now?
"It sure helped, but I'm not totally satisfied," he says. While he admits
it's probably "not in the cards" to think about an epic trip to Tahiti �
thoughts of which he had entertained � he still wants to do some more
long-distance trips.
At some point he'll sail the boat from Tortola to Florida, and he's
considering going from there to Bermuda and then perhaps doing the return leg of
the Bermuda One-Two back to Newport.
"I'm hoping that by the time I get the boat back to New England I'll be
totally satisfied," he concludes.
Full Story
For More Information Contact:
Educational Passage
415 Lincolnville Avenue, Belfast, ME 04915
Tel: (207) 338-4087
Internet:
Richard.Baldwin@EducationalPassages.com
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