Quest for Adventure

by Chris Bonington

  That night, when the tide came in, he was able to haul himself off the sandbank by pulling on the warp attached to the anchor. All he needed to do now was wait for Bruce Maxwell to find him. He arrived the following day, with plenty of news but, to Knox-Johnston’s immense disappointment, no mail. Maxwell told him that since Knox-Johnston had set out, the Race Committee had got round to making some rules, one of which was that none of the competitors should be allowed to take anything on board throughout the voyage. Maxwell had read this to include mail. It seemed an extraordinarily petty restriction to Knox-Johnston and, in some ways highlights the artificial nature of the voyage. A mountaineer, in climbing a mountain, has no easy alternative. He must keep going until he reaches the top and, having decided to climb, doing it on foot is probably the easiest, probably the only feasible way. An Italian expedition raised a certain level of controversy by using a helicopter to help ferry supplies on Everest but, in the event, its payload at altitude was so poor that it was no more effective than muscle power and, in the end, it crashed near the head of the Everest Icefall. A sailor, on the other hand, is choosing to make life difficult for himself, firstly by selecting a sailing vessel rather than an ocean liner to make his journey, and then by denying himself the right to call in at ports on the way or, in this instance, the solace of mail from family and friends.

  Even so, Knox-Johnston did get news of his fellow competitors and learned, for the first time, that three more had started – though one of them, Alex Carozzo, was already out of the race and the other two, Lieutenant Commander Nigel Tetley and Donald Crowhurst, were still in the Atlantic a long way behind.

  Nigel Tetley first heard of the Golden Globe race in March 1968. He was a lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy, based on Plymouth, and was using his trimaran, Victress, as a floating home for himself and his wife, Evelyn, to whom he had been married for eighteen months. Tetley was forty-five, with two sons, aged sixteen and fourteen, from his first marriage. He was approaching a critical stage of his life; he had had an enjoyable Naval career which had given him command of a frigate, a great deal of exciting and interesting travel and also the leisure to pursue his own hobby of sailing. Having entered Victress for the Round Britain race, he had come in a very respectable fifth place. But only a certain number of officers gain promotion to commander and Tetley had not made it; as a result he was automatically due for retirement at the age of forty-five – a fairly traumatic period in the lives of most service officers.

  One Sunday morning Eve slipped out, a coat over her nightdress, to buy the Sunday papers. When she got back Tetley picked up the Sunday Times, leafed through it and then was rivetted by the announcement of the Golden Globe race.

  ‘Round the world non-stop. To solve the problem of perpetual motion. Why had the idea always fascinated me? To sail on and on like the flying Dutchman. An apt simile even two years back; but the lost soul had since found its mate. A challenge from the past? It was now or never, like one’s bluff being called in poker.’

  He started to make plans immediately. Ideally, he would like a new boat designed for the rigours of the voyage; he wrote around to all the likely sponsors but, like Knox-Johnston, was turned down. He therefore resigned himself to using his own boat, even though it was an ordinary production model, designed more for family cruising than for solitary circumnavigation. In a trimaran the centre hull holds the living quarters, while the two outer hulls are little more than balancing floats which can be used for storage. Whereas the monohull has a heavy keel which, combined with the boat’s ballast, will always bring the boat back upright even in the event of a complete capsize, the trimaran is much more lightly built and has no keel. The boat is a platform resting on three floats. This design gives it great stability and almost limitless speed, for before the wind it literally surfs on the crest of the waves, achieving speeds of anything up to twenty-two knots – much faster than the speed a monohull could ever achieve. There are snags, however, for should the boat be capsized it will not right itself. The risk was highlighted by the fact that two leading multihull exponents and designers, Hedley Nichol and Arthur Piver, had recently been lost at sea.

  Tetley was not deterred by the risk; he was fully committed to multihull sailing and showed an almost evangelistic zeal in his desire to prove the capabilities of his trimaran. Eve, his wife, gave him her total support, devising for him by far the most palatable and, I suspect, nutritious menu of all the sailors. Ridgway had taken, for simplicity’s sake, a uniform diet of army rations; Knox-Johnston’s was fairly limited, but Tetley’s was a gourmet’s delight, with braised kidneys, roast goose and duck, jugged hare, oysters, octopus and Yarmouth bloaters. He also had a good hi-fi system in his cabin and set out with a magnificent tape library. It was very appropriate that he obtained the sponsorship of a record company, Music For Pleasure. The only thing he neglected was books, and he complained on the way round of how limited was his reading matter.

  He refitted the boat himself, experienced all the usual crises, but was ready to sail in good order on 16 September. Good-looking in a clean-cut, rather Naval way, he was excellent company, fitting easily into a group, and yet there was a definite reserve in his character, moulded in part, no doubt, by public school and his Naval career. This reserve is certainly perceptible in his book Trimaran Solo, for it reveals very little of his innermost feelings or reservations. The log of his voyage is equally inhibited, tending to cling to the surface of day-to-day sailing problems, accounts of the menu and the daily programme of music.

  His achievement, though, was remarkable. Sailing down towards the Southern Ocean he must have been acutely aware of the risk he was taking. His boat was an ordinary production model; the comfortable cabin and raised wheelhouse undoubtedly made her the most comfortable boat going round the world, but they represented potential weaknesses in the structure which could prove fatal. Every solitary sailor has his moments of doubt and Tetley was no exception. The solitude and stress bore heavily upon him. This was reflected in his entry on October 2nd, seventeen days out:

  ‘Thoughts of packing it in came into my mind for the first time today, brought on I think by too much of my own company. It would be so easy to put into port and say that the boat was not strong enough for the voyage or unsuitable. What was really upsetting me was the psychological effect – of possibly twelve months – this might have. Would I be the same person on return: This aspect I knew worried Eve too. I nearly put through a radio call to talk over the question in guarded terms. Then I realised that though she would straightaway accept the reason and agree to my stopping, say at Cape Town, we would feel that we had let ourselves down both in our own eyes and those of our friends, backers and well-wishers. It was only a touch of the blues due to the yacht’s slow progress.’

  Like Knox-Johnston, he overcame depression by some practical work; in this instance having a hair cut. There is never a shortage of things to do on a long-distance voyage; quite apart from sailing the boat, there is a constant round of preventive maintenance on rigging and equipment and, however thorough the sailor may be, wear and tear is relentless. Tetley had an elaborate workshop with an electric drill; a practical man, again like Knox-Johnston, he kept on top of maintenance problems as he nursed his boat down the South Atlantic and into the Southern Ocean where she was to meet her greatest test.

  After failing to charter Gipsy Moth IV, Donald Crowhurst also decided to go for a trimaran, even though he had never actually sailed one. Since it was obvious that he would not be ready to start before the end of October, the last possible date for entering the race, it was also unlikely he would catch up with the sailors who had started earlier. He would, therefore, have to go for the fastest time if he wanted to achieve distinction, and for that he needed a really fast boat. He decided to have a trimaran built to the same basic design as Victress, Tetley’s boat, but with a streamlined, strengthened superstructure and a host of electronic aids to increase the boat’s safety. All this needed money, though, and it was
here that he effected his greatest coup. The most important creditor of his failing business was Stanley Best, a down-to-earth businessman, not easily impressed by romantic ideas. Crowhurst nevertheless succeeded in persuading Best that his surest chance of recovering his investment was to increase this still further and foot the bill for the new boat.

  Now he could get started, but it was mid-May – all too little time to build a boat, especially one which was to include all the revolutionary ideas thought up by Crowhurst. It was to have a buoyancy bag hanging from the top of the mast; the electronic sensors in the hull would automatically inflate the bag from a compressed air bottle if the boat was blown over. Hopefully this would stop it capsizing. There were many other electronic aids, all to be controlled by a ‘computer’ installed in the cabin. Crowhurst’s ideas were certainly original and might have worked; unfortunately, however, he lacked both the time and also the temperament to put them into effect. He was rushing about constantly, between boat-builders, his own home in Bridgwater and around the country chasing all the loose ends, drumming up further sponsorship and talking to the press. He had all too many bright ideas, but seemed unable to carry them through to the end and often ignored the less exciting, but essential, minor details. As a result of this and the inevitable teething troubles suffered during any form of boat construction, everything slid behind schedule. October 30th came all too quickly and Crowhurst was barely ready. The interior of the cabin was a mess of unconnected wires; there was no compressed air bottle to feed the unsightly flotation bag which hung from the masthead. More serious still, several short cuts had been taken in the construction of the boat which undoubtedly affected her seaworthiness. A team of friends helped him to get everything ready in time to beat the deadline, but it was chaotic. Crowhurst did not seem able to co-ordinate their efforts, was prey to too many conflicting demands – not least those of his energetic press agent, Rodney Hallworth, a big man with a powerful personality who handled Teignmouth’s public relations.

  At two o’clock on the morning of 31 October the decks and cabin were still piled high with stores, many of which had been bought at the last minute. Exhausted, Donald Crowhurst and his wife, Clare, returned to the hotel where they were to spend what was to be their last night together. Most adventurers have moments of agonising doubt, particularly on the brink of departure, but those of Crowhurst were particularly painful. He admitted to Clare that the boat was just not up to the voyage and asked whether she would go out of her mind with worry. With hindsight she realised that he was asking her to stop him going, but she did not see it at the time and did her best to reassure him. He cried through the rest of the night.

  It was three o’clock in the afternoon of the 31st, just a few hours before deadline, that he set sail. It was a messy departure; almost immediately Crowhurst discovered that the buoyancy bag, which had been hurriedly lashed to the mast the previous day, had been tied round two halyards as well, so that neither the jib nor the staysail could be raised. He screamed invective at his accompanying escort and asked to be towed back into harbour so that the rigging could be cleared. He then managed to get away, tacking into Lyme Bay against a strong south wind, until he vanished into the misty drizzle.

  As he sailed down the Channel he sorted out the shambles on deck and in the cabin, but in the next few days the hopelessness of his voyage became increasingly evident. The Hasler self-steering gear, ideal for a monohull but not really suitable for a trimaran, was giving trouble; then, even more serious, he discovered that the port bow float was shipping water. The hatches to the floats were not fully watertight. This probably brought on a further realisation. He had a very powerful pump for bailing but in the last-minute rush they had failed to get the length of Heliflex hosing needed to bail out all the different compartments. The only way he could do it was by hand, a slow and exhausting process which would be impractical in a really heavy sea because almost as much water would pour back in through the opened hatch as he would be able to bail out. (Tetley had anticipated this problem by putting permanent piping into the forward compartments of Victress.) Also, he discovered that a pile of spare parts and plywood patches that he would need for repairs en route had somehow been taken off the boat, even though he knew he had put them on board.

  The winds across the Bay of Biscay and down the coast of Portugal were mainly against him but, even so, his progress was slow, even erratic. It was as if he were shying from commitment, trying to make up his mind what to do. The BBC had given him a tape recorder and a huge pile of tapes on which to record his impressions during the voyage. Whatever his doubts or secret thoughts, he was obviously very aware, whenever he made a recording, that this was eventually going to a wide audience and there was often a tone of bravado in his monologue which, somehow, struck a false note, when the reality was so different. For a start the boat was very bad at sailing into the wind but, much more serious, there were hosts of potentially disastrous structural faults. At last, on 15 November, he summed up the problem in his log, stating, ‘Racked by the growing awareness that I must soon decide whether or not I can go on in the face of the actual situation. What a bloody awful decision!’

  He went on to write a very clear, carefully thought-out assessment of his situation, listing the many faults and omissions, all of which pointed to the seeming inevitability of failure in the Southern Ocean, failure which, in all probability, would be accompanied by his own death. He then questioned whether he should abandon the voyage immediately or try to salvage something from it by going on to Cape Town, or even Australia, so that he could withdraw with greater honour and at the same time give his backer, Stanley Best, a little mileage for his investment.

  Yet on 18 November, when he managed to make a radio link-up with both Clare and Stanley Best, he did not mention the possibility of abandoning the voyage. He asked Best to double-check whether or not the Heliflex hosing had been put on board and complained of his slow progress, giving his position as ‘some hundred miles north of Madeira’. Talking to Best again a few days later, he still did not mention the possibility of pulling out of the race, but he did warn that he might be forced to go off the air because of problems with the charging motor. It was as if he could not bring himself to admit failure and return to the enormous problems which he knew faced him at home.

  Crowhurst’s fellow late entrant, Alex Carozzo, had no such inhibitions or, for that matter, very much choice. A thirty-six-year-old, flamboyant Italian, he was a very experienced sailor. Like Knox-Johnston he had a Merchant Navy background and had built a thirty-three-foot boat in the hold of his cargo ship on the way to Japan. There he had launched the boat and had sailed single-handed to San Francisco, surviving a dismasting on the way. His entry to the Golden Globe race was equally bizarre. Having already entered the Observer single-handed race, he set out from Plymouth and in the vast emptiness of the Atlantic, by an incredible coincidence, met up with John Ridgway, who had just set sail on his voyage. They exchanged greetings and it was this, perhaps, that influenced Carozzo in turning back to England so that he could build a boat specially for the circumnavigation. There was little time left and he had the boat built in a mere seven weeks. It was a revolutionary design, with two steel rudders and, in front of the main keel, a three-foot centre plate which could be used to adjust the boat’s trim. She was by far the biggest boat to start out on the long, single-handed voyage. Provided he could manage her alone, she should have been the fastest of all the contenders. Unfortunately, however, he was overtaken by severe stomach pains whilst in the Bay of Biscay; these were diagnosed as stomach ulcers and, in the end, he had to be taken in tow to the Portuguese coast at Oporto. No doubt the nervous stress of putting together the enterprise so very quickly had been too much for him.

  This was the news that Bruce Maxwell passed on to Knox-Johnston. The only serious threat seemed to be that of Moitessier, who had been making good progress as far as the Cape of Good Hope where he had last been seen on 26 October. The pundits had calculated
that at his present rate of progress he could challenge Knox-Johnston to a neck-and-neck finish and would undoubtedly win on the elapsed time basis. Knox-Johnston commented, ‘that was just the sort of news I needed to spur me on’.

  He raised sail once again, his next sight of land to be Cape Horn. Even though he had worked out a series of sail patterns to cope with the loss of his self-steering, he still had to take the helm while sailing before the wind. This meant long hours, sixteen and seventeen at a time, sitting exposed to the elements in his tiny cockpit. Suhaili did not have a wheelhouse or even a canvas dodger to protect the helmsman; Knox-Johnston did not believe in them, feeling that he had to be completely exposed to the winds and to have a real feel of what they were doing to his sails and boat. He spent the long hours clutching the helm, meditating about the world and his own future, or learning and reciting some of the poetry he had on board. He never relaxed his efforts to nurse Suhaili along, to get the very best he could out of her and yet to avoid straining her to the point of irreparable damage. By now his radio transmitter was out of action, so he had no chance of calling for help nor of reporting his position, though he could pick up the coastal radio stations back in New Zealand and then, as he crept across the South Pacific, on the South American coast.