A Voyage For Madmen

by Peter Nichols

  Crowhurst specified a sleeker profile to his boat, without the large cabin Piver had drawn that would be vulnerable to the great sweeping waves of the Southern Ocean. He wanted his boat to be flush-decked with only a small, rounded doghouse immediately forward of the cockpit – a very sensible and seamanlike arrangement, and faster and cheaper to build. He proposed a number of ideas and modifications for his boat that seemed, to Eastwood, well-considered and – some of them – brilliant.

  Among them, the cornerstone of his innovative scheme for trimarans, was his system for preventing a capsize: if the boat heeled over dangerously far, electrodes in the side of the hull would send a signal to a switching mechanism (Crowhurst called it his ‘computer’), which would fire off a carbon dioxide cylinder connected to a pipe inside the hollow mast, which would inflate a buoyancy bag at the top of the mast. This would prevent the boat from completely capsizing. At that point, partially inverted, Crowhurst would pump water into the upper hull, which, as it grew heavier, would push downwards and eventually flip the trimaran back upright.

  His onboard ‘computer’ would do other things too. It would electronically monitor stresses in the rigging, sounding warning lights and alarms if loads became critical. Hooked up to a windspeed indicator, it would automatically ease sheets and sails.

  The wiring and pipes for carbon dioxide were among the features that John Eastwood was to incorporate into the boat. Crowhurst told Eastwood, and claimed in publicity fliers he was sending out everywhere, that these features had been tested and were ‘now operating sucessfully’ and were the results of a ‘development project’ by Electron Utilisation Ltd.

  But no such development project had yet taken place in his workshop in the former stable behind his house in Bridgwater.

  A friend described Crowhurst at this time as ‘grappling with problems and therefore euphoric’. He was always the cleverest member of his circle of friends, and his charts and arguments and research must have appeared dazzling to them. But it was not a case of his impressing only those around him, who were not experts, who knew less than he, who lacked Crowhurst’s intense authority and ability to amass and overwhelm with knowledge. He had also impressed Angus Primrose, the designer of Bill King’s Galway Blazer, at the London Boat Show in January. He had convinced the pragmatic Stanley Best. He had impressed John Eastwood. Even the Sunday Times had reported that he was an ‘experienced sailor’, comparing him favourably with the ‘rash younger men’. Donald Crowhurst had an extraordinary talent for making people believe him. His power lay in the fact that he had completely convinced himself.

  9

  SIX HUNDRED MILES SOUTH of the equator, 600 miles east of Brazil, beating into the southeast trade winds on the port tack (the boat’s port – left – side facing the wind and thus taking the strain), John Ridgway was ‘horrified’, as he wrote in his log, to see the deck bulging around the aft portside shroud plate.

  This plate was fixed to the deck by two bolts extending down through the underside of the deck where they were secured with nuts and washers. The flat area of deck was taking all the load from the mast and sails, and showing it. Part of the wire rigging holding the mast up was secured to this plate. This is typical of the lightweight construction used in day-sailers and weekend cruisers. A boat properly designed for ocean voyaging would have its rigging anchored to chain plates – long, thick straps of steel or bronze that are through-bolted to the hull or an interior bulkhead, spreading the loads from the mast downwards and through the main structural members of the boat. What Ridgway was looking at now in horror was clear evidence of inadequate construction straining under excessive load. What he feared, quite rightly, was that the shroud plate or the deck could fail and English Rose could lose her mast.

  He dropped the sails, removed the wire attached to the plate, and unbolted the plate. He replaced it with a new one, through-bolting it through a backing block of plywood on the underside of the deck. This, he hoped, would reinforce the deck around the plate which had shown cracks in the fibreglass gel coat. But when he inspected his repair the next morning he saw that the plywood was now bending with the deck around the plate and was, he recorded, ‘creaking ominously’.

  Ridgway still did not grasp the reason for it all. As a sailor he assumed (as do many buyers of yachts) that the experts knew what they were doing; that, knowing of his plan, English Rose’s designer and builder had produced a yacht for him that was capable of meeting the conditions he expected to encounter. But they hadn’t. Whatever calculations and conclusions the Westerly design and construction team had reached about this specially ‘beefed-up’ boat’s suitability for its voyage, they were woefully wrong. Those who should have known better had sent Ridgway off around the world in the hope that his adventurer’s pluck and determination and star quality would compensate for their boat’s utter unsuitability. They hoped he would somehow simply pull it off. It was like a cooper who knows nothing about waterfalls building a barrel for a man who knows nothing about barrels but insists he can ride one over Niagara Falls.

  But Ridgway failed to see this. He continued to believe the problem must be the result of the collision with the trawler.

  I tried to puzzle it out all day. I had photographed the cracks on 1 July. I recorded then, ‘I do not believe these too ominous.’ But at the back of my mind I had begun to wonder why there should be cracks on the port side and not the starboard side. The conclusion I reached was that when the trawler hit the starboard bow, on the first day of the voyage, the impact must have cause a sudden ‘whip’ in the mast, which could have strained the plates on the port side. Whatever the cause of the damage, the result had been a steadily increasing bulge in the deck around the chain plate. Had I not replaced this plate on the previous day, I am convinced that it would have pulled out during the night with disastrous results. The piece of wood only slowed down the inevitable process.

  But there had been no damage to the port side; any problems resulting from the whipping of the mast would have become evident on that first day. His guesswork gave him an alternative to what he could not imagine: that English Rose was simply showing the signs of being where she manifestly did not belong.

  This would have been a grim situation for a cheerful competitor, but to a man who was severely lonely and depressed, it was the end. The ‘ominous creakings’ had done for him. On the evening of 16 July, after just over six weeks at sea, John Ridgway gave up. He eased English Rose away from her windward slog and headed for Recife, Brazil, the nearest downwind port with a British consulate.

  He spent five days sailing west in a funk of bitter disappointment with himself, despite the fact that his appetite recovered and he tucked into special treats, like Scotch grouse, packed for holidays and special moments in the race. He thought of all the people who had helped him, whom he now felt he had let down. ‘I don’t think I have ever given up in my life before,’ he wrote in his logbook. ‘Now I feel debased and worthless. The future looks empty …’

  On 21 July he sailed into Recife, and out of the race.

  Ridgway’s sponsor, The People, would not see its hero defeated by a bit of technical mumbo jumbo. Its headlines back in England provided a nobler exit: ‘Ridgway Beaten by Mountainous Seas and Gale-Force Winds’.

  10

  IN THE SUMMERY WEEKS after John Ridgway gave up, it was a quiet race. Chay Blyth’s radio was not working (even working, it had poor range and the newspapers reported that his silence was no cause for alarm), and Robin Knox-Johnston, whose powerful Marconi radio was functioning, reported steady but not spectacular progress down the Atlantic. Cricket scores held more people in thrall in England. In the United States, where flower power, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the presidential campaigning of Hubert Humphrey and former Vice President Richard Nixon were news, few people would have been aware of the two Englishmen sailing down the Atlantic in their tiny, unglamorous boats.

  In the middle of August, Hurricane Dolly swerved north of the A
zores and headed for Europe. Bernard Moitessier and Loïck Fougeron – the ‘dry, calm French single-handers’ the Sunday Times had called them when chiding the rash early starters – and Bill King were all ready to leave Plymouth and join the race. But Dolly was producing winds in the English Channel stronger than the three sailors cared for at the start of their voyage. They remained in port, getting regular weather updates from the meteorological office at the Mount Batten RAF station near Plymouth, doing last-minute jobs on their yachts and growing anxious.

  The Sunday Times had wanted to give Moitessier a radio so he could transmit reports to them. He refused, on the grounds of preserving his peace of mind, but he did accept a Nikonos camera and dozens of rolls of film in screw-top aluminium canisters: these he could pack with exposed film and messages and shoot on to the decks of passing ships with his slingshot. He had mastered the slingshot as a boy in Vietnam and he told the newsmen that a good slingshot was worth all the transmitters in the world. The pack of yachting journalists hovering over every moment of the Golden Globe racers’ preparations enjoyed Moitessier. They photographed him demonstrating his slingshot technique and printed his ascetic harangues: ‘This is not for making money – screw the money … Money is all right as long as you have enough for a cup of tea. I don’t care for it any more than that.’ They described him as ‘thin as a streak and brown as a brazil nut’ and reported that while he was waiting for a break in the weather, he hoped to see Disney’s The Jungle Book.

  The BBC’s shipping forecast on the morning of Thursday, 22 August, called for favourable winds for the next two days, but also fog. In Plymouth, however, it was sunny and the weather looked good. Moitessier and Fougeron, their boats anchored in the harbour, called to each other across the water from their moorings, discussed the forecast, and decided to risk the fog rather than wait until Saturday and have the wind turn against them. And they wouldn’t depart on a Friday. ‘Sailors do not like to leave on Friday,’ wrote Moitessier, ‘even if they are not superstitious.’

  Bill King didn’t like the possibility of fog. He told the Frenchmen he would wait until Saturday.

  Moitessier’s wife, Françoise, cried as he raised sail, and he was brusque with her. ‘Listen, we’ll be seeing each other again soon! After all, what is eight or nine months in a lifetime? Don’t give me the blues at a time like this!’

  She was taken off Joshua in a press launch, which then followed the two French boats out of the harbour. Her wifely feelings didn’t fit Moitessier’s mood of tension and exhilaration. He was anxious to be off.

  I felt such a need to rediscover the wind of the high sea, nothing else counted at that moment … All Joshua and I wanted was to be left alone with ourselves … You do not ask a tame seagull why it needs to disappear from time to time towards the open sea. It goes, that’s all.

  It may have been exciting being Bernard Moitessier’s wife, but it was never to be a full-time position, as Françoise must surely have realised by then.

  The two Frenchmen sailed close-hauled down Plymouth Sound in a light southeasterly. Joshua steered herself as Moitessier, wearing only swimming trunks, stood on deck adjusting sails and rolling a cigarette. Fougeron brought his Moroccan kitten, Roulis, on deck for the press photographers in the launch. Once past the breakwater they eased sheets and headed down-channel. Then Joshua pulled ahead.

  Moitessier had spent months going over Joshua’s gear and rigging, renewing everything necessary for what he considered would be the greatest sailing adventure of his life. Coming back from Tahiti with Françoise, the boat had been loaded with all the equipment and spares two people would take for an extended voyage through the tropics, as well as the junkyard of conceivably useful spare parts, pieces of timber, miscellaneous hardware, and lengths of metal that all boats seem to collect over the years. In Toulon he had offloaded most of it, and later in Plymouth he had further lightened the boat by removing the engine, his anchor windlass, the dinghy, a suitcase full of books, charts, and sailing directions for places he did not expect to go, four anchors, 900 pounds of anchor chain, much of his spare cordage, and 275 pounds of paint in cans. He kept aboard a minimal two anchors, 200 feet of chain, and a coil of nylon anchor line that would stretch his anchoring capability to the deepest of harbours. Also, he rearranged the gear inside the boat better than before, keeping the bow and stern light and buoyant and the heaviest items low down, near the centre of the boat.

  Where Robin Knox-Johnston had packed aboard Suhaili everything he thought he might conceivably use, Moitessier stripped his boat of all but the basics. These two men, probably the most experienced seamen of all the eventual Golden Globe competitors, adopted a fundamentally different approach to loading their vessels. As the race developed the choice was to prove perfectly correct for each.

  Lighter and in better trim than she had ever been, with her skipper near the peak of his skill, Joshua flew as she never had before. In his first week at sea, Moitessier averaged nearly 150 miles per day, a tremendous speed for a 40-foot monohull, and more than twice as fast as Knox-Johnston’s first week average of 71 miles per day. It had taken Knox-Johnston twenty-six days to reach the Cape Verde Islands off the coast of West Africa; Moitessier was there on 8 September, just seventeen days out of England. When eventually these times became known in England, it was clear that Moitessier, despite his later start, had every chance of catching up and overtaking the two front runners, Blyth and Knox-Johnston.

  Late into his preparations, Commander Bill King had found that the project was costing him far more than he had anticipated – as can happen with most things, but with boats in particular. He quickly had to find another £7,000. He got a few hundred selling film and television rights; a publisher advanced him money for a book about his voyage. But he was still far short. So he plundered his life savings, sold all his cattle and sheep, leased the grazing rights on his farm, and sold his car.

  When he had first thought of his voyage, it was something he was doing for himself; he hadn’t seen it as a race, which had come as an unwelcome surprise. But the staking of all his financial resources on his effort now left him with a feeling that would be common to all his rivals, each of whom eventually found every aspect of his life taken over by this race: he had to win.

  King sailed from Plymouth on Saturday morning, 24 August, two days after Fougeron and Moitessier. Galway Blazer II ghosted out of the harbour with an honorary escort of three naval vessels; a navy cannon on the breakwater fired a salute. The sea was quiet in the channel, but the light wind had turned, as Moitessier and Fougeron had feared it would, and was now blowing from the southwest, dead ahead of King. The junk-rig was at its best with the wind on the beam or from aft – the predominant conditions expected on this circumnavigation, and for which King’s boat had been expressly designed – but it could not point nearly as close to a headwind, especially a light one, as conventionally rigged modern yachts. He began tacking down-channel, off to a slow start.

  With just over two months’ head start, Robin Knox-Johnston was then at 33 degrees south, 13 degrees west, or about 1,500 miles west and a little north of Cape Town, South Africa. He was well south of the tropics now; the weather was growing colder and the wind stronger. He was approaching the Southern Ocean, which officially began at 40 degrees south, just 420 miles ahead. But Suhaili was showing more signs of wear, and this was beginning to sap Knox-Johnston’s confidence.

  The halyard winch brakes were failing: while raising or reefing the mainsail and headsails, the brakes were letting go and dropping the sails on to Knox-Johnston’s head. This would be no more than annoying in fine weather, but in strong winds, which had already arrived, it could make sail-handling impossible.

  He fixed the brakes temporarily, but on 6 August he noticed that the main gooseneck – the hingelike piece of hardware connecting the main boom to the mast – was beginning to come apart. Failure of the gooseneck would leave him without effective use of his mainsail, which would slow him drastically; coming a
t the wrong moment it could result in damage that would force him out of the race.

  That night, Knox-Johnston wrote in his log that during the day he had seriously considered giving up and making for Cape Town. He tried to cheer himself up by singing along with a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta on his tape recorder and imagining his sea heroes, Drake, Frobisher, and Nelson, looking down on him.

  But heroes were not much good as company. Like everyone else in the race – including, occasionally, Bernard Moitessier – Knox-Johnston suffered from loneliness. The first minutes of his voyage, when the boat carrying his family turned back to Falmouth, had been devastating. Two months later, on a Saturday night, listening to Lourenço Marques radio from South Africa, he wrote in his log: ‘I feel lonely tonight. Listening to L.M. has brought back memories of South Africa … I can remember the parties all too well.’

  It was his own considerable dogged ingenuity, his rising to challenges, that sustained him. After a radio exchange with a South African station, he found that his battery charger was not charging, and he took it apart. When he’d cleaned grease off the spark plug points, he realised he had no feeler gauge aboard to reset the spark plug gaps. He made his own by counting the pages of his logbook: the gap needed to be between 12/1000 and 15/1000 of an inch. Two hundred pages to the inch meant that each page was five-thousandths of an inch thick. He set the spark plug gap of 12-15/1000 using three pages and the charger worked. There was a way, it seemed, around any difficulty.

  As he neared the Southern Ocean, Knox-Johnston began preparing for the storms he knew were coming. He stored most deck gear below; storm sails, sea anchor, spare lines and lashings were placed ready for quick deployment. From the bulk stores in the forward cabin, he topped up the frequent-use containers of kerosene (light and cooking) and gasoline (battery-charging) that he kept in the saloon. He put away his tropical clothing and got out sweaters, jeans, and socks.