‘I am disappointed. I thought I could claim a day or two at 200mpd on the way down to the Equator, so I set-to to calculate the start to finish Great Circle distance for the three best days. I did not need to proceed far. I could see at a glance that the distance was nowhere near 600 for the three days 22–25 March. The best day only just scraped into the 200 class. It had a change of latitude from 12˚32’N to 9˚11’N, which is at least 200 miles.’
Good Friday, 9 April: ‘During the night something unusual happened. I had a solid sleep of four and a half hours. This was after making a cup of peppermint tea at 3 a.m. when I decided to set more sail. However, I was sitting on the step in the galley section, looking for a piece of nylon cord, when something hit the side of the boat with a bang and knocked me sideways. At first I assumed it was a wave though nothing came aboard, but later decided it was a squall which had struck Gipsy Moth out of the blue. It blew up to 30 knots for a minute or two, then settled back to 23 knots. The upshot was that no more sail was set and back to the bunk I went with the peppermint tea.’
The days seemed so short. My Good Friday chores included making a plotting chart because I had nothing satisfactory for this area of the ocean; then I had to work out the distance home and forecast an ETA. There was a deck agenda to prepare and the time had come to jettison the remainder of my eggs. They had done me well with two visits to the Tropics during the four months since they were loaded on board. It was amazing how well they had kept considering they had only been greased with Vaseline and there was no refrigerator or even an icebox on board (a frig would use up too much fuel on a long voyage). Now a big proportion of the remaining eggs were ‘off’and it turned me up opening them one by one until I found one which seemed good—and then only seemed good because it did not smell bad but just very doubtful. I had a remarkable supply of dried fruits and nuts left, thanks to Sheila’s careful victualling, and these would give me ample protein.
There were still squalls about as we ran north; ugly-looking, darkish clouds, but small. It seemed that Gipsy Moth was running into a belt of turbulence at the edge of the Trade Wind zone where the Trade Wind overflows its banks, so to speak, and mixes with the colder air alongside. I wish we used that lovely French word for Trade Wind, ‘L’Alize’, which seems so well to express their nature when in one of their benevolent, fine light breeze moods. Gipsy Moth’s heading was slowly swinging round and veering eastwards for home; it was now NE by N. It is true that after deducting magnetic variation this became only 018˚, but until recently the wind had been pushing Gipsy Moth west of north. Of course if it were not for the pounding, the heading could have been made much more easterly, but 60˚ off the wind created all the trouncing and heel that was tolerable, and by 10 April Gipsy Moth was at position 22˚N 55˚W, out of the squall zone, and I was able to head up to windward, changing course from 010˚ to 055˚, which was 45˚ off the apparent wind.
The next day, Sunday 11 April, was Sheila’s birthday, which Gipsy Moth celebrated with a fix-to-fix run of 182 miles, from a distance sailed of 200. There were only 2,802 miles to Plymouth where Sheila would meet me, and after I had finished my navigation at about three o’clock I sat in the cockpit in the afternoon sun and drank a toast to her with a small bottle of Champagne. I also wished happiness to Edward and Belinda Montagu who were married on this same date, and they and Sheila have what is now almost a tradition of holding a party together. It was wonderful sitting in the sun in perfect sailing conditions, thinking of them and Gipsy Moth’s home in Edward’s Beaulieu River, with Gipsy Moth herself gliding along at 7½ knots fairly close-hauled. This is the most lovely part of the oceans that I know; it has a peaceful, happy, relaxed atmosphere which I daresay is unique and would make it an ideal place for one’s soul to take off if it wished to leave the earth. The only thing to mar my day was not being able to get through on the R/T to Sheila that evening to wish her ‘many happy returns’. I had trouble throughout the voyage trying to make radio contact with the BBC, The Observer, and my family. I hated the necessity to make the calls (however worthy the object) because they always seemed to be booked for a time when navigation or Gipsy Moth desperately needed attention.
There was another serious aspect to it all in that because of the battery time spent in my abortive attempts to get through I had been using fuel for charging the batteries in a way I had never anticipated. I had stocked up at Bluff with what I thought would be sufficient for my usage, but I was making great inroads into it.
By 13 April the distance to Plymouth was 2,474 miles and I was reading up the sailing directions for the clippers, which were recommended to cross the 40th meridian at 40˚N latitude in winter and 44˚N from April on. I had been planning to cross it at 36˚N and hoped that I was not trying to be too clever as I was when going round the world in Gipsy Moth IV. I had thought that in a modern yacht I could do better than the clippers by sailing closer to the wind than they could, but I flopped badly. Their lore on ocean passages was the result of thousands of voyages, and afterwards I read that the Cutty Sark’s fastest point of sailing was 45˚ off the apparent wind, which is closer winded than Gipsy Moth V can sail in a rough sea.
As we made our northing and the weather grew colder—or rather less hot—I dug out my sleeping-bag from the after-peak and hunted up some shirts and warm clothes. The wharfie’s long oilskin coat which I was given in Sydney in 1966 came into its own again for the nights as well as the hard weather days. The fashionable short ollie smock is a genuine bum-freezer unless oilskin trousers are put on as well; whereas with the long coat I can sit or kneel on the cockpit seats to work the leeward winches, which I have to do because the seats are so broad, without getting my pyjama trousers wet, and it is a single piece of clothing I can slip on quickly instead of two I struggle into with difficulty. If only the long coat had a neck fastening to keep the rain and spray from going down my neck, I should use it even more than I do.
Three days later, on the 16th, my position was 32˚56’N 43˚35’W, and I had only 2,038 miles to sail to Plymouth. It was also the day on which my troubles started. During the afternoon I heard the motor cough and stop. It started again, but I checked how much fuel was left and the gauge showed empty. Owing to the heel there was likely to be some in the tank, but it could not be much. Of course my batteries only needed charging for the lights and the R/T but they were important. Sailing into the English Channel singlehanded, with only feeble oil lamps and no navigation light and more than a thousand steamers a day going to and fro is criminal, unless watch is kept all night. And I jibbed at staying on watch all night as well as working and watching all day. I decided to put in to Horta in the Azores for more fuel, and that evening one of the Portishead operators relayed a message to Sheila asking her to telegraph Peter Azvedo, who with his father runs the Café Sport at Horta, warning him of my arrival. Peter is a sort of nautical ‘Kim’, a friend to all the yacht cruising world.
I dug out paraffin bottles from the under-settee cubby-holes, hunted up hurricane lamps from the after peak, the cockpit bin, and a third one from beside the chart table, filled and cleaned the lamps and trimmed the wicks, and filled the bottles with reserve paraffin. I was depressed and at first quite taken aback that I should be so low on fuel through my carelessness. However, I got three lamps lighted, and felt I had had enough for the day, but it was not so. After the R/T session, on looking at the steering compass with a torch, I found that Gipsy Moth was not heading close enough to the wind and I changed the setting of the windvane. Presently I found that she was still not pointing high enough and I gave the vane a fresh twist. There was still no change in the heading and, on turning the torch on to the vane, I found that it was right over trying to put the self-steering rudder on. I thought at first it must be due to an exceptional load of Sargasso weed caught astride the self-steering rudder. When I went to the counter to examine it, I found the length of soft cord connecting the vane to the self-steering rudder had parted, the same cord that I had renewed for the same cau
se only recently. I cursed it and went to hunt for something tougher. Gipsy Moth began playing up, coming up to the eye of the wind with sails flogging, even when I tried to balance the ship’s rudder with a piece of shockcord. I was scurrying to and fro like a fevered mouse hunting for crumbs. When I had a collection of cord together and went back to the counter. I found the real trouble. Something had pushed the skeg rudder unit astern and bent the pillar between it and the vane unit above. At the same time a screwed-in sleeve inside the pillar had become unscrewed or been forced out on to the gear below and was chewing up the steel parts of that, incidentally cutting the skeg rudder cord and at the same time being crushed, bent and cut about itself. I didn’t know what this screwed-in sleeve was intended for, perhaps just for strengthening, and it looked as if the self-steering gear might still be made to work if I could cut or get rid of the protruding piece of sleeve. My extra large screwdriver would make no impression on it at all. I fetched the hacksaw from the fore cabin and tried to saw the sleeve off, but in the dark I could not see what was happening and the submerged parts of the skeg-rudder unit kept swinging in the slipstream and interfering with the hacksaw. After several failed attempts to saw or prise the protruding sleeve away, I decided it was not ‘on’in the dark and that the whole skeg-rudder unit would have to be unshipped and brought aboard so that I could clearly assess what the total damage was and what could be done about it, if anything. I certainly would not be able to make good the 800 miles to Horta in my estimated five days if I could only keep Gipsy Moth sailing in the right direction when I was at the helm, and even achieving some sort of balance with a lashed helm would add two or perhaps more days to the voyage. I decided to turn in and sleep on it, after doing the best I could to set Gipsy Moth on a heading, but determined that after I had trimmed her as well as I could, I would leave her to do what she liked. It was more important to get some sleep so that I could start on the job in daylight with a fresh brain. By now I had been working at the self-steering gear for two hours and the cabin looked like a junk shop outhouse, strewn with tools, cordage, bottles of paraffin, hurricane lamps, oilskins, life-saving harness and, just to make the scene more dreary, a pile-up in the galley of about two days’washing-up. My sleeping-bag was a comfortable bolt-hole from it all. I did wake up a few times in the night when Gipsy Moth began to pay off downwind as I could tell by the sound of the sails, whereupon I gave the lee tiller line a pull from my bunk and went to sleep again. As it turned out at dawn, Gipsy Moth had kept a fairly good heading about 20˚ farther off the wind than was ideal, and at the cost of my having hardened in two of the sails to balance the trim, which slowed her down somewhat.
I was up at 0500 and started work at once dismantling all the lines and preventers so that I could get the skeg-rudder assembly on board. I drew the main axle by knocking it through its bearing with a big screwdriver and a maul, but then I found the rudder top frame jammed in its parent frame above. However, by hitching a line to the skeg shaft near the waterline and pulling on that I managed to free the skeg-rudder unit from the frame above. It dropped down and away astern with a rush in the slipstream. But after that, things went better. The unit was heavy and cumbersome and it was a tricky operation with the slipstream trying to wrench it from my grasp while I manhandled it up to the counter and struggled to work it up over the pulpit on to the deck. I only had one accident when I let one of my fingers get pinched between two moving parts. This spattered the deck considerably, but a plaster dressing and some surgical spirit applied externally, with a good shot of brandy applied internally, dealt with that. At last the loft-long unit was lying on the counter and lashed down. I sawed the extruded sleeve off, once again blessing Bart for getting me such a fine hacksaw. I marvelled at the way the steel frame had been chewed up by the extruded sleeve. It seemed miraculous that no essential, irreplaceable part had been smashed. The tube standard or pillar was considerably bent at the bottom and the rudder assembly cocked up, say 15˚, but I thought it would work all right if it did not get another blow or load such as must have caused the damage. Later, I came to the conclusion that the cause of the trouble must have been an exceptionally heavy pile-up of Sargasso weed on the fore edge of the skeg. The pressure of a cartload of this stuff straddling the skeg with Gipsy Moth sailing at 7 knots would be destructive. I was lucky the damage was no worse. When I handled the skeg-rudder assembly back into the water, the slipstream again swept it out horizontally astern and I found it was as much as I could hold. I could see that I would never be able to coax it into position and hold it there while I refitted the axle unless I took way off Gipsy Moth. So I tacked, leaving the big jib aback which effectively stopped her, and then I got the unit into place and drove the axle through with my maul. The operation had taken three hours. I felt immensely relieved and lucky that things were no worse, collected all the tools and gear together, got Gipsy Moth sailing under the control of the self-steering once more and had the other half of the brandy, hot with lemon, for breakfast.
On the 23rd Gipsy Moth seemed to have the smell of the flesh-pots of Horta in her nostrils; I had been taunted by the winds ever since I gave my forecast of five days to Ilha Faial, but now she was galloping along. I only hoped it was in the right direction because the weather was too thick for any glimpse of the sun or chance of a sun fix. However, there is a radio beacon at Horta which I had picked up and that put Gipsy Moth to windward of Faial, which was what I wanted.
Soon I could see the mount 473ft high at the south end of Horta Harbour, behind which lies the whaling station, and I started reducing sail as I ran down towards the end of the mole. Presently along came the pilot launch, and a minute or two later João de Faria, the Chief Pilot and our friend of 1960, when Sheila and I sailed in from New York in Gipsy Moth III after the first Singlehanded Transatlantic race, was aboard, giving me a great hug. And there was Peter, the little friend of all yachtsmen, smiling on the pilot launch. It was like coming home after a long time away.
9. Knockdown
I left Horta on 30 April. João took the helm until Gipsy Moth was in the Canal do Faial, the channel between Faial and Pico. Then he signalled to his pilot launch which came and took him off. I was sad to leave Horta, although I was longing to be home again.
All day it was slow going but in fine weather, with gentle breezes. For a while in the evening Gipsy Moth was becalmed and only sailed six miles over a four-hour period. In one way I was contented enough to go slowly because I was in a lazy, listless mood, but I could not clear the archipelago of islands before dawn next morning so I had very little sleep. I had the same trouble when leaving Horta in 1960 with Sheila—of not being able to settle down to a sleep until Graciosa was astern.
At 0630 the next morning I could see Praia, the town of Graciosa, on the north-east side of it, and at 0900 I noted that with the big runner boomed out to starboard ‘Gipsy Moth had a businesslike press-on gait, with a slight roll to port, a gurgle of water along the hull as she rolled back which gave a feeling of power and speed.’
Sunday 2 May, noon. ‘Run fix-to-fix 115 miles, sailed 121.25. Distance to Plymouth 1,091. Distance sailed since leaving Plymouth 17,400 miles.’
Nightfall came with heavy rain and poor visibility. I dropped the mizen stays’l, which was making a lot of noise, clanking and flapping, and seemed to be obstructing the airstream on to the heads’ls for the most of the time and only pulling periodically itself. Gipsy Moth was playing her devilish trick time after time of imitating a steamer’s engine beat, which never fails to make me apprehensive and nervy. Half an hour after midnight I was woken by the change of movement of the boat and waves, to find Gipsy Moth heading south instead of north-east. The wind had veered, bang! from S to NW; so Gipsy Moth was now headed into the seas raised by the southerly wind which had been blowing all day. The movement was horrible, jumping, twisting, snatching and rolling. I could not stand, even in the cockpit, without holding on to something. I was faced with getting the runner down, then the pole, then gybing
and coming up to the wind. However, I plugged away and it was not as bad as I had feared. I had to be very careful how I moved about and it was a long job because of having to hang on to something all the time. Going up the mast, working at the heel of the pole and then lowering the pole turned out the easiest part because I had things to hang on to there. I used the topping-lift to lower the pole off the mast after I had freed it. The whole operation took two and a half hours.
I changed the windvane down to a smaller one but it was decidedly not my night; by the time I had finished Gipsy Moth was becalmed and aback and I had the tiresome job of working her round to her proper heading as she bounced about on the old sea. When the wind came I expected it to go back to the south so that I should have the joy of rigging the boom and all that once more. However, I decided to turn in. Gipsy Moth could do what she bloody well liked. I was chilled, shivery and seasick, and above all I was fed-up with the extraordinary antics of the wind.
At 1100 on the 3rd I donned my harness to go and raise the tops’l, only to find that Gipsy Moth was on the wind and no tops’l could be used. I could not see anything wrong with the weather to account for the wind’s odd behaviour. It seemed that a tiny secondary with wide open isobars giving near calm winds had passed through on a north-easterly track. The barometer was high and had scarcely moved. I had only recorded it twice in the past twenty-four hours, 1023mb at 1300 and 1022mb at 1825 on 2 May; the next reading given was not till 2000 of the 3rd.
Monday 3 May, noon. ‘Run only 91 miles for 124.5 sailed. Position 40˚51 ‘N 23˚21’W. Distance to the Hoe 994 miles.’
At 1733: ‘A dull, dreary, grey sea, grey sky and grey light, with drizzly fog cutting visibility to about half a mile. I spent two hours on deck clearing up after last night. This included freeing the mizen topping-lift which was wound round the backstay insulator at the top. The wind is veering once more and I could do with a poled-out sail again but not today, thank you. I am grateful I am not racing and can take it easy if I want to. I am now looking forward to lunch; I am keenly hungry for once and have some sweet potatoes on the boil. I wish I had something appetising like Peter’s red mullet to go with them. My remaining tinned fish is dreary, though I may have one tin of bonito left which is the best. However, the sweet potatoes fried after parboiling are delicious on their own. I slipped up in not looking for tinned fish at Horta; the Portuguese turn out good stuff.’
The Romantic Challenge Page 19
