Quest for Adventure

by Chris Bonington

  ‘I got out the cotton and twisted up some pieces in 18-inch lengths, a convenient length to handle, although ideally I should have done the job with one piece. Next I put a long length of line on a hammer and lowered it overside near where I had to work, finally I dressed myself in a blue shirt and jeans to hide the whiteness of my body, something that sharks, great scavengers, always associate with refuse, and strapped my knife to my leg. I put the cotton on deck where I could reach it from the water and taking my largest screwdriver as the most convenient caulking instrument, I went overside.

  ‘The job was impossible from the start. In the first place I would run out of breath before I had hammered enough cotton in place to hold it while I surfaced, and each time I came up for air I lost all the work done. Secondly, the cotton was just not going in properly, and even when I changed the screwdriver for a proper caulking iron I made no progress. After half an hour of fruitless effort I climbed back on board and tried to think of some other way of doing the job.

  ‘A while later I was busily engaged in sewing the cotton on to a strip of canvas 1 1/2 inches wide. When the whole strip, about seven feet of it, was completed I gave it a coating of Stockholm Tar and then forced copper tacks through the canvas about six inches apart. I went into the water again and placed the cotton in the seam so that the canvas was on the outside: I then started knocking the tacks into the hull to hold the whole thing in place. The finished job did not look too bad but it was a bit ragged at the edges and I thought that it might be ripped off when the Suhaili got moving again, so I decided to tack a copper strip over the canvas to tidy it up. The copper strip was, in fact, left on board by the Marconi engineers when they fitted the new radio and I am afraid that I had not drawn their attention to it when they finished.

  ‘So far, although I had kept glancing nervously about me while I was in the water, I had seen no fish at all. But whilst I was having a coffee break, having prepared the copper strip and made holes for the tacks so that I would have an easier job under water, I suddenly noticed a lean grey shape moving sinuously past the boat. The sharks had found us at last. I watched this one for ten minutes hoping it would go away as I did not want to have to kill it. I was not being kind to the shark; if I killed it, there would be quite a lot of blood in the water and the death convulsions would be picked up by any other sharks near at hand who would immediately rush in, and I would not be able to get the job finished.

  ‘After ten minutes though, during which the shark kept circling the boat and showing no signs of leaving, I got out my rifle and, throwing some sheets of lavatory paper into the water, waited for the shark to come and investigate. On its first run round the shark passed about three feet below the paper, but then he turned and, rising slowly, came in again. I aimed the rifle at the shape and, with finger on the trigger, squeezed the trigger. There was an explosion in the water as the shark’s body threshed around but within half a minute the threshing ceased and the lifeless body began slowly to plane down until it disappeared into the blue. For the next half hour I watched carefully to see if any other sharks would appear, but apart from two pilot fish, which, having followed their previous protector down until they realised he would never feed them again, now decided to join a larger and apparently stronger master, Suhaili and I had the sea to ourselves. I went overside and in an hour and a half had the copper tacked over the canvas on the port side. A light wind getting up forced me to leave the starboard side until we were next becalmed. But in any case I was quite chilled from four hours’ immersion, and also a little tense from constantly glancing round expecting to see a shark coming in behind me, and I was quite glad to give the job a rest for a while.’

  Two days later he caulked the other side. Throughout the voyage down the Atlantic he went swimming, showing a confidence and knowledge of the sea that was to help him throughout the trip. He would dive in off the bow and swim as hard as he could, as the boat pulled ahead of him and then, in the nick of time, pull himself up on the stern stanchions. It took fine calculation not to be left alone in the middle of the ocean.

  There were other crises. His battery-charging motor failed and he took the magneto to pieces, trying to find the fault. It was only when he came to re-assemble the engine that he realised he had forgotten to bring a feeler gauge for setting the gap between the points. ‘I eventually got round this by counting the pages of this book – there are 200 to the inch, therefore, one page equals 5/thousands. I wanted a gap of between 12–15/thousands, thus three thicknesses of paper.’ And the charging motor worked again.

  But there were moments of doubt, when he was tempted to abandon the voyage at Cape Town. He describes his feelings:

  ‘This, I think, was the second period of my adjustment. When I had got over the initial problems and doubts, a short period of acceptance of the new environment arrived. This was followed by a second, longer stage of deeper and more serious doubts. Surviving this, I had my second wind, and was able to settle down to things. I got through it by forcing myself to do some mental as well as physical work. For example, I began to write out a description of the Admiral [his self-steering gear, devised by himself]. The self-steering seemed simple enough, but trying to write out a description was far from easy. Anyway, the effort took me out of my depression.’

  Almost every sailor venturing into the Southern Ocean has his boat knocked down sooner or later; it happened to Knox-Johnston almost immediately, just three days after getting down into the Roaring Forties. His description of the event, like that of all his fellow solitary sailors, was amazingly matter of fact.

  It was the evening of 5 September. The wind had changed during the day, blowing with increasing strength from the west, quickly building up the waves to meet the old seas created by the early wind direction. It was a conflict of waves that created a savage cross sea, with waves coming in from every direction. As night fell, Knox-Johnston reefed the mainsail down and left the boat under the tiny storm jib, which drove her along, under the guidance of the Admiral. He lay on his bunk, fully dressed, his damp waterproofs still on, with just a sheet of canvas to cover him. At last he dropped off to sleep, lulled by the roaring of the wind in the rigging and the crash of waves against the hull. He was woken cruelly in the pitch dark, as heavy objects crashed down upon him and he became aware that the boat was lying on its side. He struggled to get out of the bunk but was pinned, as if in a straitjacket, by the canvas sheet weighed down with the debris hurled upon him. Just as he struggled from under it, the boat heaved itself upright, throwing him across the cabin in the opaque darkness. Picking himself up, he fumbled for the hatch leading out on to the deck, dreading what he was going to find, convinced that the mast had been carried away when the boat lunged back up again against the immense clinging force of the sea. He pulled the hatch open, pushed his head out into the darkness through the wind-driven spume and could just discern the mast and boom; he could hardly believe that they were still there.

  The boat was bucking like a wild stallion in the cross seas; he could see the angry gleam of the foam against the dark of the night but could barely discern the deck on which he was standing. He never used a safety harness, feeling that it restricted free movement. As he hauled himself from stay to stay, up the tossing deck, he felt every piece of rigging to make sure it was in place and got halfway up to the bow when another huge wave smashed into the boat, covering him, lifting him off his feet; all he could do was to cling on to the rigging as the roaring black waters tried to tear away his grasp. Once the freak wave had swept on its way he struggled back to the cockpit and adjusted the self-steering; he could not see in the dark whether or not it had been damaged and climbed back down into the shambles of the cabin, which was ankle-deep in water, with tins and packets of food, books, articles of clothing sloshing around in it.

  The first priority was obviously to reduce the water level. He was reassured by the familiar effort and motion of pumping out the bilges; the adrenalin generated in the last few moments began to set
tle. Once he had pumped out most of the water he started to tidy up the appalling mess of soaked food, clothing and equipment. It was while doing this that he noticed a torrent of water pouring down from the side of the coach roof, where it joined the deck of the boat. On closer inspection, he was horrified to find that there were cracks all the way round, that the huge impact of the waves was slowly tearing the coach roof from the deck, with the frightening prospect of leaving a gaping hole nearly thirteen feet by six for the waves to thunder into. If this happened there was no way he could have saved the boat from foundering. There was nothing he could do in the dark or while the storm was at its height. He could only wait patiently for the wind to drop. The following morning, after a good breakfast while waiting for the seas to quieten down, he went through his stock of tools and spare parts to find some long bolts with which to strengthen the cabin. He spent the rest of the day painstakingly drilling through the hard teak of the deck and cabin sides to reinforce the fastening of the cabin. It was another two days before he could start repairing the self-steering gear, and even then he was completely immersed by the waves on several occasions.

  Life was lonely, acutely uncomfortable and very dangerous but, more than that, it stretched out in front of him, as to any solitary sailor, for such a long time-very different from the experience of a mountaineer who, at times, is probably under greater risk but over much shorter periods of time. An expedition rarely lasts more than two or three months, of which the climb above the relative comfort of Base Camp is measured in weeks at the very most.

  On 9 September, still just short of the Cape of Good Hope, Knox-Johnston summed it up in his log: ‘I have bruises all over from being thrown about. My skin itches from constant chafing with wet clothes and I forget when I last had a proper wash so I feel dirty. I feel altogether mentally and physically exhausted and I’ve been in the Southern Ocean only a week. It seems years since I gybed to turn east and yet it was only last Tuesday night, not six days, and I have another 150 days of it yet ... Why couldn’t I be satisfied with big ships?

  ‘The life may be monotonous but at least one gets into port occasionally which provides some variety. A prisoner at Dartmoor doesn’t get hard labour like this; the public wouldn’t stand for it and he has company, however uncongenial. In addition he gets dry clothing and undisturbed sleep. I wonder how the crime rate would be affected if people were sentenced to sail around the world alone instead of going to prison. It’s ten months solitary confinement with hard labour.’

  Every adventurer must question his motives when the going gets rough. There was little let-up in the next 150 days, but Knox-Johnston kept going, pushing the boat as hard as he dared because he knew that he could finish the course, but he wanted to do more than that – he wanted to win. Just south of Australia, the self-steering gear finally packed in completely. Once again he thought of giving up. But his natural optimism soon bubbled back. He had come so far, was so far ahead of the field, it would be a pity to give up. He resolved to push on to New Zealand before coming to a decision. His fellow competitors were a long way behind. Moitessier and Loick Fougeron had set out on 21 August, Bill King three days later.

  It is interesting to note the way the younger men, all in their twenties, had set out at the earliest possible moment, fully aware that they would be entering the Southern Ocean in the final throes of the Southern winter, while the older men in their forties and, in Bill King’s case, his fifties, had chosen the later departure date which hopefully would give them an easier passage through the Roaring Forties. In addition, Moitessier and King had larger boats, being forty feet long, though Fougeron’s thirty-foot cutter was no bigger than those of the younger men. Neither Fougeron nor Moitessier would carry transmitters, wanting, for aesthetic reasons, to sever all links with the land; Fougeron did start, however, with a companion, a wild kitten from Morocco called Roulis. It did not last long, for the kitten made mayhem of his cabin, pirating food and even chewing the plastic covering the wires leading to the aerial of his radio. After a few days he put it aboard a passing ship and returned, with some relief, to a solitary life. He and Moitessier were undoubtedly the most experienced long-distance solitary sailors, but Fougeron did not even reach the Roaring Forties. He was caught by a severe storm, knocked down during the night in much the same way that Robin Knox-Johnston had experienced. Afterwards he wrote:

  ‘I curl up in the cramped bunk and wait for the unbridled sea to win its victory over me. What to do? The boat lunges sideways, driven by a frightful force. I am flattened violently against the side and then in the middle of the bubbling waters everything goes black. A cascade of kitchen materials, books, bottles, tins of jam, everything that isn’t secured and in the middle of this song and dance I am projected helter-skelter across the boat. At this moment I believe that it is the end, that the sea will crush me and prevent me ever coming to the surface again.’

  The boat recovered and the mast was intact, but Fougeron had had enough; he resolved to head for the nearest port and abandon the voyage.

  Commander Bill King did get down into the Southern Ocean, but his speed down the Atlantic had been slow. He lacked the ferocious drive that had kept Chichester racing against himself, even when exhausted, and complained in his dispatches of feeling a lack of vitality; but it was the design of his boat that finally forced him out. The junk rig, which made it much easier for a single-handed sailor to control, had inherent weaknesses. The masts were not supported by stays and therefore terrific strains were exerted on the housing. When his boat was knocked down by a wave about a thousand miles south-west of Cape Town, the main mast was twisted by the force of the water, so he had no choice but to return to Cape Town.

  This left Bernard Moitessier, who had already gained 2,000 miles on Bill King’s Galway Blazer, and was undoubtedly going faster than Robin Knox-Johnston. The Sunday Times even began to postulate whether Moitessier could catch Suhaili, whose progress so far had been steady, but slow. It is extremely unlikely that Moitessier was ever particularly interested in the voyage as a race. He commented just before setting off: ‘The people who are thinking about money and of being the fastest round the world will not win. It is the people who care about their skins. I shall bring back my skin, apart from a few bumps on my head.’

  He took everything the sea could do to him in his stride, even when a cargo ship, which he had closed with to hand over some mail, collided with him. He simply repaired the damage and sailed on, completely at ease with the sea, happier to be alone in the middle of the ocean than on dry land. In this respect he was different from Knox-Johnston who, though equally a seaman, was not a natural loner. Knox-Johnston was able to adapt to the situation he was in from necessity, because he had to reach his goal of being the first man round the world single-handed; but he looked forward to his return to everyday life.

  Moitessier, on the other hand, embraced the experience of being alone on his boat for its own sake. He wrote: ‘The days go by, never monotonous. Even when they appear exactly alike they are never quite the same. That is what gives life at sea its special dimension, made up of contemplation and very simple contrasts. Sea, wind, calms, sun, clouds, porpoises. Peace and the joy of being alive in harmony.’

  Robin Knox-Johnston was approaching New Zealand as Moitessier sailed down into the Southern Ocean. Having come to terms with the total loss of his self-steering gear, in a short period free from storms Knox-Johnston had refined his system for balancing out the boat so that she would sail herself, both when running under reduced canvas and also when reaching. He had nearly crossed the Tasman Sea and was coming up to Fouveaux Strait. Soon he would be in the South Pacific, with the long clear run to Cape Horn before him. He always listened to the weather forecasts from the nearest radio station and, on the evening of 17 November, at the end of it came another message for the Master of the Suhaili: ‘Imperative we rendezvous outside Bluff Harbour in daylight – signature Bruce Maxwell.’

  Knox-Johnston knew that a cold front wi
th its accompanying storm was on the way, but reckoned he would be able to meet Maxwell, a journalist from the Sunday Mirror, before it arrived, hand over his story and, perhaps even more important, actually talk to someone in the flesh – an attractive thought after all the lonely weeks in the Southern Ocean. But the front rolled in faster than he had anticipated. The following evening, just off the Fouveaux Strait, force-ten winds, heavy rain and poor visibility were forecast; all this and he was being blown on to a lee shore. He made ready the warps that would keep Suhaili’s stern pointing into the waves to prevent her broaching, took a compass bearing on a light he identified as the Centre Island lighthouse and then waited for the storm to strike. He wrote: ‘I put the kettle on; it was still quiet outside, although as black as pitch, and I thought of Bruce sitting in a comfortable hotel lounge with a large beer in front of him. Perhaps we’d be drinking together in twenty-four hours. This last thought stuck with me and I had even begun to welcome the idea when it struck me how disloyal I was being to Suhaili.’

  The clouds rolled in, the rain lashed down, the waves started to race past as he sailed into what he thought was the middle of the strait. He was uncomfortably close to land in this kind of weather and was being driven inexorably closer. Somehow he managed to claw his way round a headland into calmer waters, the immediate danger was over; but he still wanted to make his rendezvous with Maxwell, though he realised that he would not be able to reach Bluff Harbour in those wind conditions, especially as his engine was now completely seized up. He resolved, therefore, to head for Otago harbour, which looked as if it would be more sheltered. He reached it the following day, nosed his way cautiously round the headland and then, to his horror, realised he had run aground. He reacted immediately to the crisis; it was a sandy bottom, so would not damage the boat and, hopefully, when the tide rose again Suhaili would float herself off. He dived below for the anchor, grabbed it and leapt into the shallow water, walking along the bottom carrying the thirty-pound anchor. As it got deeper and the water went over his head he jumped up every few paces to get a quick breath of air, until he felt he had gone far enough and was able to dive to the bottom, to dig in flukes. He could now rest assured that the boat would not be driven further up the sand as the tide came in, though he was still faced with the problem of getting her out again. At least it was going to be easy to make his rendezvous. Some boats came out to investigate the lonely yacht, but Knox-Johnston kept them at a distance, refusing all offers of help. He was determined not to break any of the race regulations.