Free Solitaire Spirit: Three Times Around the World Single-Handed by Les Powles

on
Solitaire
. Orland would visit and the teachers and girls from the school stayed with me until lights out. After their departure the main entertainment was provided by bats performing acrobatics in the open rafters to the screams and groans of pregnant women – so much better than any late night horror film, with the added spice of finding yourself a blood donor if the bats included you in their act.
    During the second week things improved and my head pains eased. I learned a few Portuguese words – and the names of the girls who were visiting me. The doctor’s wife would sit with me at night and we would read together from an old English textbook of hers, trying to increase her tiny vocabulary. Little old ladies would stay for hours without speaking, just holding my hands. Lovely young ladies would lean over, their black hair cascading down the sides of my cheeks, and would slowly moisten luscious red lips and expect me to repeat some Brazilian words after them as they tried to teach me their language.
    The night before my release a fisherman, a new patient, came to my room to complain about the noise. Although I thought it a bit of a liberty, I asked the young ladies to take away their tape recorder. I would learn the Bossa Nova another night, I explained.
    â€˜What’s your next port of call?’ the fisherman asked.
    â€˜Barbados,’ I answered.
    â€˜How long will it take?’ he queried. When I said two days, he told me it was impossible. We argued awhile and he left, saying he would give me some charts. Next morning he handed me two of Brazil which I promptly gave back, saying I had no intention of going there. He looked at me as though I’d just landed from another planet and pointed to a chart showing Tutóia.
    â€˜No,’ I said. ‘We’re on Saint Lucia.’
    He pointed to a town 80 miles away called Sao Luis. For a moment I stared at the charts, expecting my head to explode.
    I was in Brazil.
    I was 1,000 miles south of the Caribbean St Lucia and had sailed over the Equator to hit a reef 100 miles south of the Amazon. How could I have made such an incredible blunder?
    On my return to
Solitaire
, I re-read the instructions for taking a noon sight for latitude. ‘Declination, North and South. These two elements are additive or subtractive according to the following simple rule. Same names add. Different names (one N and one S) subtract.’ On September 23rd, when halfway across the Atlantic, the declination had changed from North to South (the sun moving south of the Equator) and I had added instead of subtracted it.
    The day I hit the reef the declination was 8°S, so from 16°S should have been subtracted the assumed latitude 14°40´N for that day. I had hit the Brazilian coast about 1°20´ south of the Equator! Eighty miles further south is Sao Luis, the capital and port in that area of Brazil, its call sign SLI. Had I carried the
Admiralty List of Radio Signals
I would have found that St Lucia’s call sign in the Windward Islands was, in fact, SLU! But the elementary error that had brought me to this pass I now found difficult to live with. Ina sense that second week in hospital saw the start of my wish to make a second, non-stop voyage around the world.
    Before
Solitaire
could continue I had to do something about her broken bottle-screw and loose rigging. As I had no spares I removed one from the twin backstays, replacing it with four links of anchor chain, and used it on the forestay. Once more
Solitaire
had tight rigging.
    Feeling pleased with myself, I heard a disturbance on the shore. A man in brightly coloured shorts ran up and down waving his arms and jumping in the air. We watched him awhile until I concluded that it might be a new dance craze and sent Tony over to see if he would like a partner. He was captured and brought out to
Solitaire
where his crew-cut and accent proclaimed him an American. He revealed that he was the