A small miracle happened to me recently. It was a message from the past, and so many memories flashed through my mind. It’s not often that one small thing can bring so much joy. But this unexpected phone call certainly did. 

First, a little backstory. Many years ago, in 1966, there was a young Australian bloke who built a small wooden boat he hoped to sail around the world. This young man of 24 was Andy Wall. He lived in Avalon, Australia, just north of Sydney. The boat design was called a Carmen Class. It was 30 feet long, with 27 inches of freeboard aft, blue gum timber frames and a flush deck, with a tiny dodgerlike doghouse covering the cabin hatch. Andy named his boat Carronade, after the small but powerful cannons used on the British warships of yore.

From the moment construction began, Andy knew that this small boat would be his home and his conveyance to grand adventure. When construction was complete, Andy and his two mates, Des Kearns and Ken Mills, set off from Pittwater, Australia.

To go below deck, one had to bend at the waist and crawl through the small hatch. Once below, there was a mere 5 feet of headroom. Carronade had no toilet, just a sturdy black bucket. She had a small kerosene stove and a tiny 1-cylinder Volvo that had to be hand-cranked to start. She had a pipe berth in the forepeak where all the sails were stowed, a small settee bunk, and a cramped chart table—that was it. There were no tanks, just jerry cans for water and fuel, and a tiller for hand steering. 

In the cockpit, there was a beautiful Sestrel binnacle compass with an artistic fleur-de-lis pointing north. Andy had no clue how to celestial navigate, but he had the good sense to get all the proper equipment: his grandfather’s sextant, a Walker log for dead reckoning, a Zenith Trans-Oceanic radio, a nautical almanac, and the tables and paper charts needed to navigate. Most importantly, he had a little book by Mary Blewitt, Celestial Navigation for Yachtsmen.

Anyone who has tried celestial navigation knows that it ain’t easy. As Carronade and her crew made their way across the rough and rugged Tasman Sea, Andy was not at all sure his sights and novice calculations were accurate. Luckily, the weekly seaplane delivering supplies from Sydney to Lord Howe Island flew overhead just as Andy was second-guessing his exact position. Andy took a quick compass bearing of the plane’s course using the Sestrel compass. Following that course, the boat and crew made their first landfall. Andy had become pretty proficient in his celestial navigation, but it was that plane and that little compass that got them safely to their first landfall. 

Carronade’s route across the Pacific followed a zigzag of islands beckoning to these three lads. From Lord Howe Island to New Zealand, to the Austral Islands south of Tahiti, then French Polynesia (where Ken Mills flew back to Australia and Bob Nance came aboard). Next, Hawaii, San Francisco, the Marquesas, and back to Tahiti again. Their longest passage was from Papeete nonstop to Cape Horn. From there, they headed up the east coast of South America, and then on to the West Indies, the Bahamas and finally to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where I met Andy. 

That little compass saw it all! Andy and I had our honeymoon sailing little Carronade across the Atlantic, stopping in Bermuda and the Azores, and making landfall in Falmouth, England. We spent two years—1972 and 1973—cruising England, Holland and Belgium, and then back home across the Atlantic via Spain and the Canary Islands. 

When Andy and I arrived in Fort Lauderdale, Billy Nance (the brother of Andy’s crew Bob Nance) was standing on our dock waiting to take our lines. He offered to buy Carronade and suggested we build a bigger boat. “I know an Australian who has made a mold of the three-time winner of the Sydney to Hobart Race, Freya. Why don’t you build a bigger boat, start a family, and I will take Carronade back to sea?” 

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And so began the story of Kandarik, our Freya 39, which now sits alongside my dock, full of tales of her own. But, back to the story of our compass. Sadly, after six crossings of the Atlantic, Andy died suddenly in 2008. Twelve years later, in summer 2020, I received a phone call from Skip Granger. He had owned Carronade after Billy Nance, and eventually sold her. I had lost touch with Skip until he called me out of the blue.

“Pam, it’s Skip here. I have Carronade’s original compass in my garage. Would you like it?” 

Would I like it? Yes! That amazing compass guided Andy, his crew, and myself through many adventures and around the globe. I rushed over to Skip’s house, and put the battered, old and weary compass in my car. The binnacle and compass desperately needed refurbishing— I replaced the liquid in the compass, and my friend Cathy put a new coat of paint on the pedestal, varnished the teak spacer, and polished the binnacle back to its original shine.

I don’t know why Skip had the compass after selling Carronade, but I guess he can explain that someday. The important thing is that my son, Jamie, now has this precious legacy of his father.

Pam Wall and her family circumnavigated aboard their 39-foot Freya sloop, Kandarik. Wall is a sailing consultant and speaker who loves teaching and encouraging cruisers. For more, visit pamwall.com.

The post The Compass That Could Tell a Story appeared first on Cruising World.

It’s called Devil’s Backbone for a reason: It’s a dangerous stretch of rock, coral and shifting sand shoals along Eleuthera’s north shore. Winding through this spine lies the passage from Spanish Wells to Harbour Island. By most counts, a local pilot is required.

I began hearing about the Backbone while in the Abacos on my Tartan 34, Jade. A handful of boats was piled in Little Harbour, staging for crossing the Northeast Providence Channel to Eleuthera. Folks at Pete’s Pub in Little Harbour hunched over beers and cocktails and talked about the Backbone’s danger and beauty, and even the more-seasoned sailors told me to hire a pilot boat and make the run.

A few days later I was in Spanish Wells, known as the hub of commercial fishing in the Bahamas. The harbor is basically a canal or mangrove river that you enter from the south through a gap in a coral wall. Rows of fishing boats lie tied to the docks that line the north side of the harbor, and the main street runs along those docks.

A friend had flown into the Eleuthera airport to sail for 10 days, and we splurged on a mooring and paddled my little Soar inflatable canoe across the harbor to explore the town. The main drag follows a traditional working waterfront. There aren’t palm trees and beaches; it reminded me of Maine—commercial fishing boats, a large shipyard, old men sitting in the shade talking, kids with fishing poles, and barges, ferries and commerce all focused on the water.

A man in a golf cart quickly stopped and asked where we were going, and soon we were in his cart for an impromptu tour of the island. He’d been a fisherman and pilot there his entire life, but now, in his 80s, he was retired. He honked and yelled at friends, showed us the town and his house, and pointed out recent changes to the landscape. The ride took over an hour, and by the end of it, I asked him about the Devil’s Backbone.

“Do we really need a pilot?”

He became animated, nearly offended. “You need a pilot,” he said. “Definitely. I’ll find you one.” He took out his cellphone and made a call. No answer. “Call me in the morning,” he said and gave us his number. “My name is A-1. I’ll get you a deal on a pilot. Call me. A-1.”

I was a bit hesitant. I’d already asked the guy we’d rented the mooring from about the trip. His name was Bandit, and he was a pilot too. But the price was high enough that I’d been considering taking my chances with the Backbone without a guide, but if A-1 could get us a deal, that seemed worthwhile.

Back at the boat, I deliberated. I examined the chart and searched the internet for information but found nothing beyond warnings. One cruiser’s blog said they’d used their AIS to track transiting boats, and then painstakingly plotted the coordinates to use as waypoints for a track. Even with those, they said, they were on high alert.

We returned to shore for dinner. Another local in a golf cart picked us up. He said he’d been a bargeman for decades and had done the run across the Backbone thousands of times. “Get a pilot, mon,” he said. “You never done it before; get a pilot.”

In the morning, we rendezvoused with the crew on a boat named Tyee who I’d met back in North Carolina. They were a young Russian couple from Boston with a 2-year-old. We decided to be sensible. We’d split the cost of a pilot. I called A-1 to see what he had.

When he answered, he wasn’t the kind octogenarian he’d been. He was hard business, angry. “You already talked to Bandit. You go with Bandit.” And he hung up.

Read More: from Jon Keller

So we went with Bandit. I was a bit confused about the switch in A-1′s personality, but quickly concluded that the pilots are an organized group that sets a price and sticks to it.

Bandit was similarly unhappy with us, but he told us to follow him. There were three boats going through, and he’d be aboard the lead boat. Our share for his services came to $75.

The day was flat-calm and sunny, and we exited the harbor single file and rounded the rocky tip of Eleuthera. The run was beautiful, though on a day with any winds out of the north, it would be impassable. Reef to the north, beach and surf to the south, and our three boats snaked through it all. Other boats were out there, all with pilots—the guides’ small skiffs with outboards trailing behind the yachts they were aboard.

Coral heads passed by, dark shapes looming in the water as we zigzagged toward the beach, then cut back out. A few miles later, we were through it all, with Current Point off the starboard bow. From there, it was a clear shot to Ramora Bay and Harbour Island.

We anchored beside Tyee and snorkeled the outside reef. Bandit continued with the third boat to Harbour Island. We talked with Tyee’s crew about the Backbone, and agreed that the entire thing was blown way out of proportion—on a decent day, a competent cruiser who’d navigated reefs could make the run. We’d barely veered from the rhumb line on our chart plotters. But there’s also an interesting cultural aspect to the pilots—a cruiser has a local aboard their boat, and they get to hear their stories and pick their brains for local knowledge.

We anchored that night in a surprisingly popular anchorage off Man Island, then headed to Harbour Island the following day. Then a band of bad weather hit and kept us stormbound in Ramora Bay, the Devil’s Backbone unnavigable to any boat.

A week later, we left without a pilot. The water was still upset, sloshing with leftover storm slop, and we could see some residual swell breaking over the outer reef. We made the passage easily enough without ol’ Bandit, but we did see two cruising boats bound for Harbour Island that were aground on an uncharted sand shoal. They were on the radio, calling for a pilot boat, and Bandit was on his way.

After a voyage south, Jon Keller is back writing from his home in Maine.

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