A Voyage For Madmen

by Peter Nichols

  At one time, the single-hander under sail could hope that the approaching ship would see him and alter course, as it is legally obliged to do: a vessel under sail has right of way over an engine-driven ship. Sailors could reasonably expect that any oncoming vessel would have a man in the bow peering out into the dark ahead who would see their little light and send a message back to the bridge, and the ship would turn away. But by the 1960s, this was increasingly not the case. As ships have grown larger and their systems more sophisticated, manpower aboard has been cut back. A supertanker may have fewer than twenty men aboard, and at any given time a third of that complement will be off duty, asleep, or below reading. A few shipping lines still maintain a good lookout, posting a man on the bow in radio contact with the bridge. Other ships, particularly those registered under the less demanding requirements of flags of convenience, are not so scrupulous. Lookout may be by radar alone, and if the radar doesn’t pick up a boat, it’s invisible. Yachts, particularly wooden yachts, do not make good radar pictures. They’re small, their radar echoes may be lost in ‘sea clutter’ – just more waves on the radar screen. And as sailors often find when calling a ship by radio to ask what sort of radar picture their boats make, the radar may be turned off.

  The bridge of a large tanker may be a quarter of a mile astern of its bow and 150 feet above the water – something like the view from the upper floors of a condo in Miami Beach looking out at the Florida Straits. The crew on the bridge can see the big stuff, other ships, from up there, but little sailboats can go unnoticed. At night, a sailboat’s navigation lights, close down to the water, will almost certainly not be seen farther than half a mile away, even if anyone’s looking – scant minutes to collision. Then, if seen, the manoeuvrability of a large ship is poor and slow.

  The curve of the earth, it soon becomes apparent at sea, is quite pronounced. The horizon seen from the deck of a small yacht is about three miles away. Beyond 3 miles, a ship will be ‘hull-down’ below the horizon: only its superstructure is visible. Eight miles away, the whole ship will be below the horizon. Conditions of haze, cloud, rain, fog, or a large swell on a sunny day can reduce this to yards. A ship moving at 18 knots (the speed at which the average container ship might travel; many travel faster), unseen when the sailor comes on deck to make a careful scan of the sea before going below again, can steam up over the horizon and run a yacht down in twenty minutes or less.

  Clearly, most sensibly, it’s up to the sailboat to stay clear of the ship. The single-hander, therefore, must wake, climb on deck and look around every fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes – there is no rule, it varies from single-hander to single-hander.

  Knox-Johnston, the merchant seaman who had been trained aboard rigorously well-run British ships, had a touching, old-fashioned faith in the idea that all ships maintained a lookout. Before his voyage was over, this faith would be shattered. Near land and shipping lanes, he dozed in the cockpit, ready to wake and alter course. Mid-ocean, he was as untroubled by doubts as he was when swimming, and tended to sleep for hours at a time when the weather was fine and Suhaili didn’t need attention.

  But Suhaili was not without her problems. Even in quiet weather, the bilges were filling with water, and Knox-Johnston was having to pump them dry twice a day. She had leaked before, on the voyage from India, and he had noticed it again on the run from London to Falmouth. Now the leak was worse. A little water in the bilges is not uncommon for any boat, and more the rule for wooden boats of conventional plank-on-frame construction like Suhaili. But the amount of water now flowing into the boat was significant, and Knox-Johnston was worried that this might indicate a weakness in the hull.

  Becalmed south of the Cape Verde Islands, he pulled on a mask and snorkel, jumped overboard, and swam down underwater to inspect the hull. The trouble was immediately apparent: a long gap showed in a seam between planks just above the keel, near the spot where the foot of the mainmast was anchored into the keelson. There was a similar gap in the same place on both sides of the hull. As Suhaili rolled slightly, Knox-Johnston could see the seam opening and closing with each roll. He surfaced, hauled himself aboard, lit a cigarette, and considered the problem. He was worried that the floor timbers – not the floorboards, but the thick-sawn members that joined the hull frames to the keel and held the bolts that kept the heavy iron ballast attached to the bottom of the boat – might be weakening. A failure with the floors could be catastrophic, even resulting in the bottom of the boat coming apart and falling off. Most of the floors were covered by water tanks built into the boat, but Knox-Johnston poked around in the bilges, inspected those he could see, and did what he could to convince himself that the floors were not failing. It was simply a caulking problem, he decided – the only problem he could realistically fix.

  Having convinced himself that caulking – hammering twisted lengths of cotton into the seams and covering it with (normally) putty – was the answer, he had to figure out a way of doing it 5 feet underwater. He tied a hammer on a line and lowered it over the side to dangle in the right place. Then, dressed in a dark shirt and jeans to hide the whiteness of his body from any cruising sharks, he went overboard.

  The job was impossible. He tried hammering the cotton into the seams, using a screwdriver in place of the traditional caulking iron, but it wouldn’t stay in the seam and came out every time he surfaced for air. After a fruitless half hour he climbed back aboard.

  He decided to sew the bead of cotton on to a long, narrow strip of canvas, which he then coated with Stockholm tar to stiffen it. Then he pushed copper tacks through the canvas. He lowered himself over the side, swam down underwater, held the long strip with the bead of cotton inside the seam, and started hammering the tacks into the planks. After repeatedly rising for air and diving back down, the long band-aid was finally nailed in place. But for how long? He worried that the canvas would wear away. It needed a tougher covering. Back aboard, he made a strip of copper from long sheets left aboard by the Marconi engineers who had installed his radio. On deck, he hammered tacks through the copper, intending to go overboard again and nail it over the canvas.

  First, to warm himself after two and a half hours in the water, he made a cup of coffee. While drinking it in the sun, he noticed a dark grey shape cruise close by the boat: a shark. He watched it, hoping it would go away: killing it could attract more sharks. But ten minutes later it was still circling the boat, so he got out his .303 rifle, threw some toilet paper into the water, and waited. On its first pass, the shark swam below the paper, but then it turned, came back, rising towards the paper. As its head broke the surface, Knox-Johnston fired. The shark convulsed furiously for half a minute and then was still and slid away down into the deep. Two pilot fish that had been swimming with the shark peeled away as it disappeared into the depths and took up station beneath the shadow of Suhaili. For half an hour he kept a lookout for more sharks, but then a light wind arose and forced him back into the water to finish his repair. He spent another hour and a half nailing the copper strip over the caulking on the port side, every minute of it expecting a dark shape to appear. By then the wind had risen to agitate the water and push Suhaili on, forcing him to leave the starboard side until the next calm. He had been in the water for four hours.

  Two days later, Suhaili was becalmed again, and Knox-Johnston repeated his underwater caulking job on the starboard side. The leaking stopped almost completely.

  8

  A YEAR AFTER he had loaned Donald Crowhurst £1,000, Stanley Best, the Taunton businessman who had made his fortune selling caravans, had become disenchanted with the poor sales of the Navicator and the prospects for Electron Utilisation, and he wanted his money back.

  In a letter dated 20 May 1968, Crowhurst wrote to him arguing that, contrary to what Best might think now, the company was about to capitalise enormously on his own entry in the Golden Globe race. He was planning to have a trimaran built, and he stood every chance of winning. The trimaran, he wrote, was a new and controversi
al type of sailboat, poised to become ‘the caravan of the sea’. Moreover, he continued, ‘the trimaran is a highly suitable platform for the electronic process control equipment. The only equipment available so far is crude and works along entirely the wrong lines … If the practical utility of the equipment I propose can be demonstrated in such a spectacular way as in winning the Sunday Times Golden Globe and/or the £5,000 prize and it is properly protected by patents, the rapid and profitable development of this company cannot be in any doubt’.

  What he said made sense. Multihulls were the coming thing. In 1960 an American, Arthur Piver, had built his own 30-foot trimaran, Nimble, out of cheap plywood for $2,000 and sailed it across the Atlantic from Fall River, Massachussetts, to England, with a stop in the Azores, in twenty-eight days at sea at an average of 136 miles per day. This was within hours of Eric Tabarly’s (nonstop) record-breaking passage of twenty-seven days, four years later in the 1964 OSTAR. In 1961, Piver sailed from Los Angeles to Honolulu in his 35-footer, Lodestar, in fifteen days at an average of 150 miles per day. These were unheard-of speeds for cruising boats in the open ocean. In England, James Wharram started building slender-hulled catamarans based on Polynesian craft and sailed them across the Atlantic. Yet these two vanguard designers were considered cranks by the yachting community, which generally discounted the long-term seagoing possibilities of such light, unballasted craft. But then two catamarans did well in the 1964 OSTAR, and the impressive win by Derek Kelsall in his trimaran Toria in the rugged 1966 Round Britain race began to swing the balance of opinion. Eric Tabarly took one ride aboard Kelsall’s trimaran and decided to build his own for the 1968 OSTAR.

  Multihulls had too many advantages to ignore: they were more for less. Being far lighter than monohulls, they were cheaper to build. Large and spacious inside, with double bunks and large galleys, they sailed upright with very little heeling, and they gave their crews a drier, more comfortable, less frightening ride than traditional sailboats. Many sailors whose wives had not enjoyed sailing found that they were happier and more willing to come for a weekend cruise aboard a catamaran or trimaran. And multihulls sailed fast – two or even three times the speeds of single-hulled vessels of the same length. They were the racing vessels of the future.

  Multihulls had one downside, however: without the ballast keel and self-righting properties of traditional sailboats, once they flipped over they stayed that way. If anything, they were more stable upside down than right side up, with their mast and sails poking down into the depths acting as a splendid lightweight keel. This happened only rarely, when an overcanvased boat was pushed too hard by a racing crew. But a primary piece of equipment that Donald Crowhurst was working on, he told Stanley Best, and would employ in his vessel, was a revolutionary, electronically activated, self-righting mechanism that would prevent such a capsize.

  If Stanley Best had asked anybody about trimarans in 1968, they would have confirmed most of Crowhurst’s claims. A new generation of multihull designers and builders was appearing all over England, and their boats and blue-water voyages were making news. The English Prout brothers were building some of the largest catamarans afloat, and their designs were among the most popular in Europe. Tabarly had sparked the interest of the French, who are perhaps quicker to embrace change and less burdened by traditional boat aesthetics than the English. They were soon enthusiastically sailing trimarans and catamarans around Europe and across the Atlantic. Multihulls were poised for growth, and, if Crowhurst’s gadgets worked well on a fast sail around the world, Electron Utilisation could hop aboard for the ride.

  But Crowhurst had never sailed aboard a trimaran. His knowledge of them came from magazine articles. Seeing a mounting field of other Golden Globe competitors in the final stages of preparation, his sudden enthusiasm for trimarans was born of urgent necessity. If he was to have a boat built, it would have to be cheap. And he would depart late, at the very back of the field, so it would have to be very fast. A trimaran was the logical solution.

  At the moment when Stanley Best was about to sever his connection with him, Donald Crowhurst hooked him with his grand idea and reeled him all the way in. Best could not later explain it. ‘I, who have always invested in a certainty or a rigorously calculated risk, suddenly jumped into this mammoth undertaking, which I didn’t really comprehend, with only the shadowiest prospect of a proper reward. It was, I suppose, the glamour of the idea, the publicity and the excitement – and the persuasiveness of Donald. He was, when all is said and done, the most impressive and convincing of men.’

  Sometime in late May or early June, Best agreed to pay the building costs of a trimaran, although he expected Crowhurst to continue to seek other sponsors to share the expenses of the voyage. If Crowhurst won, Best’s investment would prove a good one. If he did not win, they hoped that his participation in the race would still prove a highly visible advertisement for the products developed by Electron Utilisation. But Stanley Best attempted to protect himself from total loss: the agreement they drew up stipulated that if Crowhurst did not complete the voyage for some reason, he would have to pay Best back the cost of the boat. This meant that if he failed to make at least a good showing in the race, Crowhurst would lose his business and find himself bankrupt.

  This didn’t worry him. He was deeply convinced of his ability to pull it all off. This was the great challenge, the supreme showcase for his talents, something he had sought all his life. This would change the long run of bad luck that had dogged his parents’ lives and his own. Any outcome less than his sweep of the prizes and the fame and glory was an impossibility he was unable to countenance. If Stanley Best wanted to consider it for the security of his investment, Crowhurst was happy to agree.

  He was already negotiating with boatyards. Time was now extremely short; no yard would undertake to build the finished boat from scratch in time for Crowhurst to get away before the Sunday Times’ 31 October deadline, five months away. But Cox Marine in Essex, a sizeable boatyard with a production line of trimaran orders that could not be interrupted, suggested that they could build the three hulls, and another builder, Eastwoods, not far away in Norfolk, could assemble the hulls and complete the boat. John Eastwood and his partner John Elliot agreed. It would be a big job for their small yard, but they recognised and embraced the opportunity. As with the boat-builders who supplied Ridgway and Blyth with their unsuitable craft, the notion of a nonstop circumnavigation was exciting; any boat that came back from such a voyage would bring fame and business to its builder.

  The boat Crowhurst wanted was a Victress-class trimaran, 41 feet long overall, 22 feet in beam – a sister ship to Nigel Tetley’s trimaran. Cox Marine was already building another Victress, so they were ideally set up to pop out another three hulls at short notice. The Victress was another design by the pioneering American Arthur Piver, whose reputation hadn’t been hurt too badly by his own disappearance and presumed death at sea aboard one of his own boats in 1968. His boat might have capsized, but it might also have been run down or suffered any of the mishaps sailors always risk when going to sea.

  While Crowhurst and his building teams were working out details, they read in the 23 June issue of the Sunday Times that Royal Navy Commander Nigel Tetley intended to enter his Victress in the Golden Globe race. Tetley’s departure date was given as sometime after August. This quickened all their pulses, but Crowhurst was not perturbed. His revolutionary self-righting equipment would mean that he could push his boat harder, closer to the edge, than Tetley would dare and, if it happened, recover from a capsize and sail on.

  In a very short time, Crowhurst’s dream had started to come true. He had found the money and construction had begun on his boat. Such was the power of his ideas. The hardest part, the convincing of others, was now behind him. What remained was simply the implementation of the plan, and Crowhurst had drawn up a chart that ‘proved’, mathematically, the near-certainty of his double win.

  Crowhurst gave himself a significant edge over
Tetley and Tahiti Bill Howell, both racing similar boats and both, according to the chart, with a good head start over him. He might have supposed his revolutionary innovations would provide additional speed, or that he was the tougher man, and would drive his boat harder. Tetley was unknown, but Tahiti Bill’s years at sea and tens of thousands of miles as a single-hander had been well-recorded in the yachting press, and Crowhurst’s disregard of this was wilful.

  But the signal fault in his chart was his failure to allow for the wild card of the sea itself, the great leveller that always makes a mockery of men’s best-laid plans, and the luck, good and bad, that is inevitably found there for one and all. Crowhurst’s chart was the sort that could have been made only by a man who knew nothing of the sea.

  Cox Marine delivered the three Victress hulls to Eastwoods on schedule on 28 July, and the real building of Donald Crowhurst’s boat began. A hull (even three of them) is simply a single component of a yacht: it’s the platform on to which everything else is added. It is the fastest part to complete. Plywood hulls, such as those for a Victress trimaran, can be made in a matter of days by a skilled crew, especially when a boatyard, like Cox, has already produced an identical set of hulls, leaving behind ready-to-reuse moulds, templates, and experience. Most of the time and the money spent building a yacht are in the details. This is where Crowhurst’s boat bogged down.

  John Eastwood spent Sunday 28 July (the same day the three hulls were delivered to Norfolk), with Donald Crowhurst at his home in Bridgwater. They talked about the details from nine in the morning until nine that evening, and Eastwood was impressed by Crowhurst’s grasp of the many complex details, his technical facility, and his imaginative mind.