“The high whistle of the wind through the halyards, and above all the pale blue illimitable sky, cold and serene, made me deeply afraid and conscious of my insignificance. / Far below, the ship was an impressive sight. For a time the whole of the after deck would disappear, hatches, winches, everything, as the solid water hit it, and then like an animal pulled down by the hounds, she would rise and shake them from her, would come lifting out of the sea with her scuppers pouring.”

So wrote Eric Newby in “The Last Grain Race” during his passage to the Horn when sailing from Australia to England in 1939 with a cargo of grain and square sails overhead. His epic tale of life before the foremast in the last days of sail is but one thread of the myth of the south, woven by generations of hardy mariners getting blown off their feet in the Furious Fifties.

Instead I am presented with the Fickle Fifties, totally becalmed and spinning listlessly on an oily sea totally bereft of a ripple of wind, to say nothing of spindrift and storm tossed peaks.  We currently have everything on board stacked as far forward as we can get it in order to push the bow down and help lift the draggy stern out of the water. We are very gently shooshing along upwind with Code 0 and just a gentle tinkling ripple down the side of the boat tells me we are still moving. I had expected to be stacking everything in the back of the boat lest we trip over the bows while surfing the raging seas but its not to be, this time.

Its frustrating to have worked for years to get here on a racing boat, all the time hoping to satisfy my curious thirst for the ultimate thrill ride only to come up against the evil triple zero. 0.00 knots of boat speed. It would like making a pilgrimage to Monte Carlo to play dice on the highest tables in Europe only to roll snake eyes all night long unrelenting green felt of the Craps table.

Aboard Cessna Citation, our lives continue as normal with 3 hour watches. If we are lucky enough to have a few moments of stable wind from the right direction we can put on the automatic pilot and watch the bubbles pass serenely in the inspection windows in the hull. However, the bubbles soon stop and the siren song of the pilot alarm breaks the reverie and we are called again to stupidly hang onto the tiller as the boat wallows listlessly. Normally after 3 hours on watch one is glad for the break after been pummelled and abused by the ocean, but here one needs a break lest one go mad from being impotently powerless to make headway.

In this sense our conditions are worse than the fearsome doldrums because of the overbearing calms. The doldrums are a battleground of competing weather zones and with patience and strategy (go south!) there is always a goal ahead and a cloud to chase. Here we don’t have the luxury of an approaching squall line because the air is squeaky clean and silently still, the only sound is the wrenching mainsheet and the ringing in your ears. I’m as yet unsure of whether its better to edge along the side of the ridge to the south or whether to plow on toward the east as the system moves on. In fact, its easy, because such choice is illusory and currently we have no more choice as to our own course as we do over where, and whether, the wind blows.