A Voyage For Madmen

by Peter Nichols

  Soon it began to grow light outside, but daylight, when it came, offered little help in fixing his position. Visibility was about a mile, and all he could see was rough water. He feared he would sail down the strait past Bluff without seeing it, so he adjusted the tiller again, putting the boat back on a course to close the land.

  Staring into the misty grey cloud-swept air he constantly saw phantom apparitions of land. But at 0730, one of these resolved into an unmovable shape, dead ahead. It was the sailor’s most exquisitely fashioned nightmare: land, a lee shore in a storm, and Suhaili was being swept fast towards it. The wind at his back was now so strong that Knox-Johnston seriously wondered if the mast or sails could bear the strain, but he had no choice. He had to set the mainsail and try to claw away to windward. As he raised the mainsail, he could feel Suhaili shuddering and burying her decks under the strain. He set her on a course that he hoped would clear the looming land, and then he began to haul in the big blue warp and sea anchor, which were holding the boat back, keeping him pinned near the shore. These had tangled together into a vast, thick, 720-foot-long braid, impossible to untangle, dragging heavily astern as Suhaili, driven by the gale, tried to leap and pull ahead. Desperation and determination helped him pull the tangle aboard. By the time he got this heap of line into the cockpit, the cliff to leeward appeared much closer. He could even see the spume from waves breaking at its foot. But it came to an abrupt end in a headland further down the coast, and Knox-Johnston wondered if this was, in fact, Bluff.

  Suhaili drove through the big seas and water exploded over her with every wave. But with the warp and sea anchor aboard, she began to haul away from the land, and beating to windward, she held her course nicely. Knox-Johnston’s back and arms were aching, his hands red and throbbing. He went below to make himself coffee. The motion inside the cabin precluded any possibility of boiling water, but he had taken the precaution of filling his thermos with hot water during the night. As he held a hot mug in his raw hands and smoked a cigarette, he was aware of a feeling of euphoria. He and his boat were being subjected to their most supreme test, and so far they were getting through it.

  When he went back on deck a few minutes later he noticed that the seas were down, although the wind was still fully galeforce. He realised he must be in the lee of Stewart Island, and closing with land. Soon, indeed, land appeared close to starboard, and he tacked and headed north.

  A ferry rolled heavily out of the mist ahead. It altered course and steamed over to Suhaili, coming close enough for Knox-Johnston to shout above the noise of the wind to the crew. They knew who he was and told him that Bluff lay 9 miles north.

  At 1030, Bluff appeared ahead, identifiable by its lighthouse. But out of the protecting lee of Stewart Island, Suhaili was once again exposed to the full force of the storm, and now the tide had turned and was setting hard east through the strait. Although Knox-Johnston tried beating to windward again, Suhaili was swept away like flotsam. He started to reef the sails to slow down, but the mainsail halyard chose this moment to jam at the top of the mast and the best he could do was raise the boom and tie it and the flapping sail to the mast. He streamed his tangle of warps once more and headed off downwind. The storm continued all day, blowing at force 10 (48 to 55 knots) until early afternoon. By dusk he was clear of Foveaux Strait. There would be no going back now. Still hopeful of meeting Bruce Maxwell, he adjusted the tiller until Suhaili was now being blown northeast, paralleling the coast. He went below and slept until daylight the next morning. The storm was over.

  That evening he sailed around Tairoa Heads into Otago Harbour, 130 miles northeast of Foveaux Strait. The ‘harbour’ turned out to be an inlet sided with green hills and sand dunes, not the industrial port he had expected where he might have attracted attention and sent word to Maxwell. He blew his foghorn off the signal station but got no response. As he sailed slowly back out of the channel, the wind turned light and flukey around the headland cliff, and while he was trying to tack away from the rocks ashore, Suhaili stopped moving – she had run softly aground.

  The bottom appeared to be sand, and the tide was ebbing. Knox-Johnston went below and brought an anchor back on deck. He tied a line to it, stripped off and jumped overboard. He walked along the bottom towards deeper water – away from the shore rocks – and continued walking when the bottom deepened and the water rose above his head, bouncing up for air every few seconds. Finally he sank the anchor into the soft bottom and swam back to the boat. It was his first view of Suhaili from a distance in five months: she looked dirty and rust-streaked. She began to heel over as the tide dropped.

  A man called down to him from the cliffs above. He said he would send help, but Knox-Johnston was emphatic that he didn’t want help – it would disqualify him – he would get himself off when the tide came back in. He asked about Bruce Maxwell and the man on the cliff said he’d try to find him.

  A few minutes later a small motorboat and a crayfishing boat came by. The men aboard all knew who Knox-Johnston was and told him that Bruce Maxwell had been rushing up and down the coast looking for him. He lit a cigarette and sat on the cabin roof talking to them, enjoying the novelty of their company and the first stillness he had felt in 159 days. The Kiwi boats had radio-telephones and soon they heard that Bruce had been found and was on his way. While they talked, Knox-Johnston hauled himself up his mainmast and freed the jammed halyard. It grew dark. The tide turned and began to flood. At 2300 the keel began to bump on the bottom; he winched in the anchor line and Suhaili was soon floating free. There was no more water in the bilge than usual; she appeared unharmed by the grounding. The crayfishermen motored off to try to find Maxwell, and Knox-Johnston went below to make a quick supper. Soon there was a shout.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ said Bruce Maxwell.

  The first thing he had to tell Knox-Johnston was that one of the Sunday Times’ rules – no material assistance of any kind – had been taken to mean no mail. Where it had stretched its rules to allow the involvement of any sailor, known or unknown, in its race, and allowed them to proceed to sea without any inspection of their boats or equipment, the Sunday Times had finally found something to be stringent about. Knox-Johnston was outraged. Sailors have always hungered for news from home, and he would have happily disqualified himself on the spot if Maxwell had any mail to give him. The reporter, knowing this, had brought none.

  Instead, he told him that his family was well, that Bill King was out of the race, that there were three new competitors: Carozzo, Tetley, and Crowhurst. None of them posed much threat, but Maxwell told him that Moitessier was fast closing the gap between them, and if they both maintained their present average speeds the race would end in a photo finish.

  Maxwell left to find a phone and call London, intending to come right back, but the wind rose and Knox-Johnston, tenuously anchored, with rocks to leeward, decided not to wait for him. He raised his sails, tacked out over his anchor, hauling it aboard when he felt he was clear of the rocks. He shouted good-bye to the crayfishermen and headed for the open sea.

  He wanted to get a move on. The Frenchman was coming.

  19

  WITH FRESH NEWS of Robin Knox-Johnston, the Sunday Times’ navigation experts predicted a ‘neck-and-neck’ finish between him and Bernard Moitessier.

  The Frenchman, they calculated, had by then covered 14,000 miles at an average of 128.4 miles a day, against the Englishman’s 17,400 miles at 98.3 miles per day. The experts gave the edge to Moitessier, who, they thought, could reach England on 24 April, with Knox-Johnston arriving six days later, on 30 April. With shiploads of uncertainties, anything could change these dates. The race was either man’s to win or lose.

  For the first time, the newspaper described the young Englishman in heroic terms: the ‘courageous … ruggedly handsome’ sailor was proving himself to be in the same class as Chichester. Warm praise indeed.

  The Sunday Times was positioning itself to recognise a possible victor, but it was
still hedging its bets. Moitessier was ‘a cunning navigator’ who had come daringly close to the Cape of Good Hope to save sea miles and was planning to sail far south of Australia for the same reason.

  Italy’s Chichester, Alex Carozzo, was already out of the race. He had spent almost a week at his mooring in Cowes preparing Gancia Americano for sea before casting off, and had sailed as far as the Bay of Biscay, off the coast of France, when he began to vomit blood. He spoke with a doctor by radio, who diagnosed ulcer trouble, which Carozzo had suffered before. The doctor prescribed a bland diet and advised Carozzo to give up if the bleeding continued as there was a risk of haemorrhage. Carozzo sailed on, hoping for an improvement. His giant yacht was sailing fast and he was eager to keep going. But the bleeding didn’t stop. Off the Portuguese coast he radioed the Sunday Times that he was making for Lisbon and emergency hospital treatment. A Portuguese air force search-and-rescue plane spotted him, and a pilot boat towed him into Oporto. From his hospital bed in Oporto, Carozzo told a reporter that he thought his ulcer had been aggravated by the strain of his intensive preparations for the race. He had read that Bill King was planning to try again the following year, and he was thinking of doing the same. He hoped the Sunday Times might be interested in a second race.

  Although they were far behind Moitessier and Knox-Johnston, the Sunday Times did not discount the potential of the two trimaran skippers, Nigel Tetley and Donald Crowhurst, who ‘could surprise us all’.

  Crowhurst in particular. After averaging 60 miles per day during his first month at sea, a slower speed than any other competitor for the same stretch of ocean, the Sunday Times reported a sudden surge in his performance. During his fifth week he had covered 1,020 miles, at an average of 150 miles per day. This was the sort of dazzling speed he had promised with his revolutionary boat.

  Nigel Tetley was not having as much luck. A week of light winds around the island of Trindade got him 473 miles – 67 miles per day. He was still not able to transmit over his radio, though he could pick up stations as far away as Holland quite clearly. He worried about Eve and his family, who were doubtless concerned about him. Yet life aboard Victress was comfortable and civilised to a degree unimagined aboard his competitors’ boats. He dined on cockles, prawns, asparagus, lobster, Polish sausage, smoked salmon, mushrooms, Pacific Coast oysters, roast pheasant, while listening to Respighi, Boccherini, Delius, Sibelius, Kodály, Dohnányi, and Saint-Saëns. After seven weeks at sea, he came to the end of his Music for Pleasure repertoire and wrote conscientiously in his logbook, ‘I can say here with all honesty that the majority have given me great pleasure and contributed in no small way to my peace of mind.’

  So far his voyage was slow and steady, unspectacular, and seamanlike. No great terrors of weather had been met. There were no apparent problems, other than the nagging frustration of not being able to raise anyone on the radio. It was almost dull.

  Victress was performing well, though she was not proving as fast as he had hoped. Small problems were showing themselves: the moulding strips covering the hull-to-deck joints had been breaking off, cabin windows were leaking. But these were ordinary signs of wear. Even during a long summer’s sailing season, when most boats will actually spend more time at a dock or at anchor, such problems will develop. Victress’s constant exposure to wind and sea was having the effect of steady, but so far not alarming, attrition.

  But a routine check below the floorboards of Victress’s outer hulls revealed them to be awash with seawater: 10 gallons in the port hull, 70 gallons in the starboard; he had been carrying 800 pounds of extra weight. This had not been apparent before because to check below the floorboards he had to remove all the gear piled on top of them, not a job he could do often, and then only in fine weather. This showed steady leakage that he would have to keep an eye on.

  On 19 November he at last made patchy contact with Cape Town Radio, and over the next few days transmissions became clearer. He learned that Bill King had dropped out, and he heard that Robin Knox-Johnston was apparently in some trouble off New Zealand. These reports was unnerving to hear, but his weather, in approximately the same area where Galway Blazer had been rolled over and Suhaili had suffered her first knockdown, remained almost too benign, resulting in frustratingly slow speeds.

  Early in December he passed south of Cape Town and sailed into the Indian Ocean. He still didn’t quite venture into the Roaring Forties, but sailed east, keeping several degrees north of the fortieth parallel, the northerly limit of the Southern Ocean. Nevertheless, he got a taste of Roaring Forties weather. He experienced the strongest gale of his voyage so far on 11 December, when he estimated the wind at force 9 (41 to 47 knots). He steered downwind, reducing sail until Victress carried only a storm jib sheeted flat.

  After a long night sitting in the wheelhouse spinning the wheel from side to side to keep the stern before the waves, Tetley was cold and miserable and wondering what exactly he was doing there. He had every reason to believe Moitessier when the Horn-tempered Frenchman had advised him to run before the wind under storm conditions; but now, cold, hungry, fed up, and unable to leave the wheel if he did keep running, he decided to drop all sail and lie ahull. But this seemed to suit the trimaran; its shallow purchase on the water gave it little resistance to the wind and waves, and it rode easily, like an albatross, Tetley wrote in his log, beam-on and skidding away sideways before the waves. Below the motion was easier, and he was glad to make himself a breakfast of coffee and Irish stew.

  Because of his latitudinal fence-sitting, staying just north of the Southern Ocean, Tetley was frustrated by a mix of light and heavy winds. On 15 December, after a fast, bumpy night during which he carried full sail, he recorded his best run of the voyage so far, an impressive 202 miles for the last twenty-four hours. The next morning he was becalmed, and the wind, when it returned, remained light for several days. He carried as much sail as possible, hoping to make up for the slow days, but this was clearly not the latitude at which to maintain speed, and he knew it.

  Tetley carried the same pilot charts and sailing directions from the British Admiralty publication Ocean Passages for the World that all the other sailors had aboard their yachts, which show the routes and pathways in the sea where the most advantageous winds, currents, and conditions would be found. Admittedly, these directions were not intended for small yachts; they were written for and based on the observations of large sailing ships – the tea clippers, the four-and five-masted grain ships – which had always sought out the strongest weather in order to make the fastest voyages. Yachtsmen following in their wakes using these big-ship guidelines faced the task of plotting a course somewhere between prudence and the prescribed fastest routes which lay to the far south in the high Roaring Forties and the Furious Fifties, where Antarctic fogs hide drifting icebergs. This was a highly individual choice. Knox-Johnston tried to keep to the fortieth parallel and found it appreciably windier than just a few hundred miles to the north, where Tetley was staying. Moitessier had plunged deep into the Southern Ocean. In addition to Ocean Passages and the usual charts, Moitessier had with him fifteen letters from old ‘Cape Horners’, men in their eighties, dim of vision but still sharp of memory, to whom he had written asking about Southern Ocean conditions. From their accounts, and his own earlier voyage around the Horn, he believed 1968 was proving to be an exceptionally warm and benign year in the Southern Hemisphere, and he made good use of the winds in the far south.

  Holding to his more northerly latitude, probably out of concern for Victress’s light construction, Tetley was plagued by light winds and poor progress. Now that he had regained radio communication, Cape Town Radio was able to patch him through to contacts at the Sunday Times. They were disappointed by the lack of drama in his voyage. Had he fallen overboard, perhaps, or had anything else exciting happened to him, they wanted to know.

  The dullness and monotony of his voyage was bothering him too. With winds more often too light than too strong, he spent hours staring at t
he flat sea, frustrated by his poor progress. Windless calm at sea is the sailor’s true bane, worse than any storm, which at least provides him with steady physical and mental activity. Becalmed, he can do nothing to bring wind but wait for it. He can read or write or listen to the radio, but he will also idle away hours staring at the pretty sea in every direction, trying to stave off the creeping, irrational fear that the wind may never return again. He is repeatedly forced to acknowledge its stretching absence as he records conditions every few hours in his logbook, writing ‘becalmed’ again and again, while the handwriting betrays the mounting tension as the pencil pushes deeper into the paper, the word scrawled off with anger. Time and geography grow perversely elastic. The quiet that comes with a true calm at sea is, like the reverse picture of a photographic negative, pronounced and conspicuous for its inversion of the normal. No wind or water noise, no breath of air across the ear. The boat nearly still, heaving slightly on the ghost of a swell, will provide the only real sounds: the rolling pencil on the chart table. The aural void then fills with the rhythmic rushing of one’s own blood, reminding the listener of his mayfly speck of mortality. He goes below to flip on the radio again. To be becalmed during an ocean crossing that may take a total of three or four weeks from shore to shore is one thing; but in a race around the world, the enormity of which can boggle the mind at the happiest of times, lying utterly still on the perversely flat sea while being certain that one’s fellow competitors are being blown along at speed elsewhere, is hard to bear. It can be unhingeing.

  Not a chatty logbook writer like Knox-Johnston or a soulbarer like Moitessier, Tetley nevertheless had admitted in his log on 27 November to a growing depression. ‘The further I go, the madder this race seems. An almost overwhelming temptation to retire and head for Cape Town is growing inside me – the cold finger of reason points constantly in that direction.’