Once Is Enough

by Miles Smeeton

  Now as John looked aft from the shelter of the doghouse, his eyes wandered over what he could see of the ship, he was always in search of something that he might do to improve her. Although she wasn’t his, he made himself part of her, and she always came first with him. Generations of his family had followed the sea, the hard sea of Cornish fishermen and Grimsby trawlermen. Salt water was in his veins, and I sometimes wondered whether he wasn’t sired in it.

  He looked behind him at the clock. ‘What does the log say?’ he asked.

  ‘Fourteen miles.’

  ‘Good lass; seven knots. I streamed it two hours ago. Keep it up.’

  ‘Are you going to turn in?’

  ‘No, it’s nearly tea-time. Those pills are good. I don’t feel a thing.’

  ‘Nor do I, but I’m going to have another tonight for luck.’

  ‘Directly I get a chance, if it isn’t too rough, I might take these doors away and put in washboards. They let too much wind in. What do you think?’

  ‘Too much water too, sometimes. Is Beryl asleep?’

  ‘No, here she comes. My, my!’

  Beryl appeared in the hatch opening. She is inclined to let herself go over useful sea-going dresses, and I saw that she had already decided that it was cold enough for the ‘Southern Ocean Cruising Rig’, a combination woollen suit made up in the McLeod tartan, with a built-in belt, and a sliding hatch behind. It was practical, warm, and bright; bright yellow and black.

  ‘How are we doing?’ she asked now, that many times repeated question. I told her and she went down to make tea, and John went with her. I watched a squall dragging over the sea towards us and wondered whether it would hit us or pass behind. A few shearwaters were swinging low over the waves, but I could see no albatrosses. John stood up again and passed me a mug of tea and a slice of fruit cake. I thought that everything was very good, and best of all the fact that we were really off and laying the miles behind us. I imagined the string of dots, the daily positions, growing across the chart. 6,700 miles to Port Stanley: 67 perhaps, 67 little crosses, before we arrived. We might be there in time to send a cable for Clio’s birthday. Sometimes the crosses would lie close together on the chart, and sometimes they would stretch out across it, reaching for the harbour on the other side, but the time, I knew, would pass quickly as we settled down to our sea-going routine, and cups of tea would follow cups of tea, at about this time, on each succeeding day.

  The cat arrived suddenly on the bridge-deck. When any of us came on deck, we came up slowly and deliberately, taking careful hold of first the edge of the hatch and then the shrouds, but the cat used to arrive with a single spring from the chart table, so that she seemed to fall from nowhere, as light as a windblown leaf, on to the deck. The preliminaries seen from below were not so graceful. She would stand on the chart table swaying to the roll, and craning her neck as if she hoped to see where she might land, and trying to make up her mind to jump. The backstage view of her shaggy little backside, as it disappeared over the step of the hatch, couldn’t compare with the arrival of the ballerina as seen from the stalls in the cockpit. She stayed with me for a moment or two, but it was too cold and rough for cats, and she returned below again.

  John relieved me at six. He had had his supper and I had mine as soon as I got below. We tried to have all our meals by daylight, in order to save kerosene, and when we were keeping watch we were always ready to turn in when we could, so that the day consisted of watch-keeping, eating, and sleeping, with only a little reading before we fell asleep. As soon as washing-up was done, I opened my stretcher cot on the port side of the main cabin, and unrolled my sleeping bag and climbed in. The bunk on the other side was full of twice-baked bread, which we found didn’t go mouldy, as long as it was kept in the open. We had sixty loaves.

  If the bread did go bad, we had a stove in the main cabin for baking, and also for heating: a blue enamel coal- or wood-burning stove, with a good oven, but only under certain conditions could we persuade it to burn at sea without smoking.

  I lay in my bunk now and tried to sleep. The water was rushing past the planking at my ear, a sweet trickling, talking sound. Soon I heard Beryl getting out the navigation lights. She lit them, waited for them to warm up, and then handed them up to John. Probably we would use them only on this night, as from now we would be off the traffic routes. Last she lit the stern light and John tied it up on the mizzen-boom gallows, a white hurricane light which never seemed to blow out, and which showed up better than the red and the green. We did not shield it from forward for this reason.

  Pwe came into my bunk and sat right up by my face, her whiskers tickling my cheek, and purring loudly. She was really glad to be at sea again. It was a life that she knew and enjoyed. I think that she felt she was mistress of the ship and the people in it. One of us was always petting her or playing with her, and she seemed to think that we were hers to do what she wanted. Beryl thought that John and I teased her too much, but from the scars on my hand and sometimes my nose, I seemed to be the one who suffered. She got John once when he was teasing her, and he cut her dead for a week, and though she gradually won him back, she never used her claws on him again.

  At about a quarter to nine I swung myself out of my berth and lowered my feet on to the seat below it. Then reached across to the brass pipe in the centre of the cabin, which holds the sliding table. When not in use, the table is slid up and fastened close under the deckhead, out of the way, and the pipe is used to grab on to when one is moving in the cabin. Holding on to the edge of my berth and the brass pipe, I stepped down and made my way aft. There was an oil-light burning in the cabin and another oil-light in the forecabin, where Beryl was sleeping. Both were turned down and dim, but they were there in case of some emergency.

  When I looked out of the hatch, I could see John hunched over the wheel. Behind him the stern light flickered and flared, and outlined his broad figure, enlarged by an extra jersey under his oilskins. Tzu Hang seemed to be going at a tremendous pace, and the night looked very dark and wild. ‘How are we doing?’ I shouted up to him.

  ‘Doing well,’ he shouted back, ‘fifty-six miles on the log. Pretty cold. No hurry.’

  ‘Any lights?’

  ‘Yes, you can see Glennie Island light just abeam, and Wilson Promontory ahead, only the loom of Wilson Promontory though.’

  ‘What are the bearings?’

  John checked the bearings by looking over the compass, and I marked our rough position on the chart. We were just beginning to cross the Bass Strait. I pulled on my oilskin jumper and my oilskin trousers, and then my coat and my red sock over my head, and climbed up on deck. I sat down beside John until my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness.

  ‘I think that the wind is down a bit,’ he said.

  ‘Oh. I thought that it was blowing a little harder. All right. I can take her now.’

  John stood up and stretched, then he stepped out of the cockpit and on to the deck, holding on to the shrouds and looking round him. After a time, he stepped carefully across to the hatch and disappeared below. For a time I could see his shadow moving against the lamplit wall of the doghouse, and then it disappeared and after a few minutes, I felt sure, he was asleep.

  The night seemed very dark and although it was midsummer, I began to feel cold. I began to wonder why I could not see Rodonda Island. I peered under the boom but saw only universal blackness. There wasn’t a star to be seen and there was no moon. Only low overcast sky and rain. I walked carefully up the deck, leaning inwards and holding on to the handrail on the doghouse, and then the handrail on the bottom of the dinghy until I could cross over to the shrouds. From there I stepped across to the staysail boom and ran my hand along this to the forestay. Looking behind the jib, I could see Rodonda quite clearly, a dark round rock of an island, and perhaps a mile away. All was well. An hour passed, and I sat in the cockpit and listened to the rush of Tzu Hang and the occasional spatter of spray, and I watched the dark outline of her sail against the sky. I w
ondered when we should see Curtis Island. After that there would be no more land until the morning. The black waves came swinging like walls out of the night and disappeared again, and sometimes they hissed quietly as they came, showing a thin white line in the darkness, or a phosphorescent glow. There was no malice in them.

  I sat in the cockpit and thought of nothing in particular. I thought of Beryl in the forecabin and wondered if she was sleeping and thought that this watch was like all watches and that it was going slowly. Soon there was only an hour to go, and I went below to make myself some tea, but I kept looking aft to watch the occasional flash of a light so that I could check the course, and several times I had to climb up on deck to correct it.

  I woke up Beryl and she was awake at once, and when I was back in the cockpit, I could see her shadow moving as I had seen John’s below. She came and sat beside me and I felt a warm flood of companionship between us. ‘The wind is up, isn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘No, I think it’s down now.’

  I checked the log, leaning aft and flashing a torch on it. There were seventy-eight miles on the log in eleven hours, and the wind looked like holding. Beryl settled down with her hand on the wheel. She wouldn’t move until she woke John at three, sitting patiently and alert at the wheel, and quite untroubled by any need for the various devices that John and I would employ to pass the time.

  I turned in but could not sleep until we had seen Curtis Island. After a time, I came to the hatch again. Beryl was just as I had left her an hour before.

  ‘Want anything?’

  ‘No thank you.’

  ‘Seen anything?’

  ‘No. Sometimes I think that I see something to port, but I couldn’t be sure. Now I can’t see anything. Can’t you sleep?’

  ‘No, I just want to see Curtis Island. There’s a creak. Have you heard it?’

  ‘Yes, isn’t it annoying? I heard a creak. I thought that it must be the mast.’

  Tzu Hang never creaks in a sea, and this new noise, together with the possibility that we were being set further towards the west than I had allowed for, and consequently nearer to Curtis Island, had kept me awake. Once the noise had been noticed, it seemed to grow louder and more persistent, like a rat gnawing at a wall board. I began to imagine that Tzu Hang had been strained during the bashing we had given her, on our way up to Melbourne. I moved about, listening anxiously, as if I was a new and nervous father trying to discover in the middle of the night whether his offspring was really only sleeping.

  Under the doghouse the noise sounded louder, and I noticed a new mug swinging on its cup-hook. I steadied it and the noise stopped immediately. It was only a rough bit of pottery in the handle, grating on the hook. I suppose it went on, but we never noticed it again. The noises of a ship blend into a tune so well known that it is never heard. Anything new strikes a discordant note which seems to vibrate through the ship as horribly as reveille to the soldier. We are often asked how we know, if we are all asleep below, if anything goes wrong, but any little change in the ship’s rhythm, any slight sound, and least flap of a sail or the lift of a boom, and whoever is nominally on duty awakes immediately.

  I heard Beryl call. ‘Now I can see something,’ she said.

  I looked out of the hatch. The sky had cleared slightly, and dark against a dark sky, but clearly visible, was Curtis Island. Perhaps it was a good three miles away, but it looked much closer. I went below and fell asleep immediately and stayed asleep until I felt someone shaking me by the leg. It was John and it was also daylight. I felt as if I had dropped off for a few minutes only and quite indignant at having to get up so soon.

  When I went aft to put on my oilskins, I looked out of the hatch. It was a grey morning and there were plenty of whitecaps still showing. Tzu Hang seemed to be going as well as ever. John was leaning over the after end of the cockpit, cleaning the face of the log.

  ‘What have we done?’

  ‘117. Pretty good. I think that the wind has dropped slightly, but she’s still going well.’

  As soon as I was ready, I climbed up the ladder and then made that familiar movement to the cockpit, one hand to the mast, one hand to the shroud, as I stepped aft. It is as well that these movements should become automatic, because they have to be carried out on black nights, with a wildly moving deck, and spray flying; when there is no room for mistakes. A great mountaineer once said that only fools and children jump on mountains, and he might have added Gurkhas, going down hill. The same applies to small ships.

  For once John was content to go below without fiddling with the sails. If he was quick he would get an hour and a half before breakfast. His eyes looked slightly red on the rims, and I knew that he would be asleep in a moment. But no trump of doom, no clarion call to heaven, would bring him out of his box-like berth quicker than Beryl’s call to breakfast.

  I always disliked the nine to twelve watch in the evening. Between washing up after supper and the beginning of the watch, I was too wide awake to sleep, but half way through the watch I became involved in a desperate struggle to avoid it. The morning watch was far better. I was usually well rested after six comparatively undisturbed hours in my bunk, and the wonderful prospect of breakfast in an hour and a half made pleasant the worst of mornings. From seven onwards Beryl would be about and I would be able to talk to her as she appeared from time to time in the hatchway.

  Until then there were many things to see and think about. First the weather portents, the barometer, the wind, the sky and the clouds, and the sea. Then the set of the sails and a quick look round for any loose ends of rope, or signs of chafe. Then a check on our position, and a search for land if we happened to be near it. Then a check on the birds that might be visible about the ship. I was always trying to recognise a companion of the day before, and often found one.

  By the time all this was done Beryl appeared at the hatch. I showed her Pyramid Rock, a jagged tooth sticking abruptly out of the sea on the port quarter.

  ‘Can you see Flinders?’

  ‘No, not yet; I’m not sure, maybe there is something … still poor visibility.’

  She had plaited her hair and tied it over her head. It didn’t look very elegant, but at sea we had to put up with it. She passed me the cat’s earth, in the blue plastic basin, to empty over the side. As I handed it back, I heard the primus hissing.

  A moment later Pwe arrived on the deck herself, put her paws on the cockpit coaming, just aft of the doghouse, and looked at the weather. She decided that it was too wet to keep to the deck and went below again. Here she did all that was possible to interfere with the cooking, protesting her hunger in a loud voice, and jumping on to Beryl’s back, if she got the chance, in order to explain her need more lucidly.

  I heard Beryl call that breakfast was ready and, without any delay, John appeared and handed me a bowl of porridge with milk and brown sugar. If Tzu Hang had been sailing herself he would have stayed in bed, and I would have handed him his food into his berth. Now he sat down on the step at the foot of the ladder and Beryl, who almost always does two things at once, sat in the cook’s chair and read, and at the same time fried bacon and eggs. From time to time she gave the cat a piece of fried bacon rind from the pan, and Pwe would pat it about the deck with her paw, till it was cool enough for eating. If we were having cooked bacon, Pwe would not dream of eating the rind unless it was cooked also. After bacon and eggs came burnt toast and home-made marmalade. Burnt toast is the hallmark of Beryl’s wonderful breakfasts, as inseparable from them as her book is from her, when she is cooking.

  These typical breakfasts were provided for us day after day for fifty days all across that great Southern Ocean. Perhaps never before had such good breakfasts been eaten so regularly for so long in those particular waters.

  After breakfast we could see Flinders Island indistinctly, and soon we began to try to pick out the entrance to the Banks Strait. After a time we could make out a small mark on the horizon ahead which took form gradually. A lighthouse, a b
lack lighthouse instead of a white one, as described in the pilot book, but a lighthouse all the same, on a low flat island. It was Goose Island, and as we rounded it we entered the Banks Strait.

  Then came another marvellous day of sailing. Forsyth Island to port and the green Tasmanian Coast away to starboard, and the boom as wide as could be in order to let us get round Swan Island. There was white water showing everywhere as we squeezed past. By noon, when we reset the log, we had done 163 miles. By four o’clock in the afternoon, we had to haul down the mizzen and shortly afterwards we handed the main, running under the two headsails, whereupon the wind began to ease, as it so often does in the evening, and we set the main again.

  The Sydney-Hobart race had started on the same day as we did, and we had wondered at one time whether we would have to pass through them. We heard in the evening, on the radio, that the leaders were not yet into the Bass Strait, and were meeting with light winds only. We were lucky to be on the top side of a depression which would, with any luck, carry us most of the way across the Tasman Sea.

  By midnight when Beryl relieved me, the wind was right aft with an awkward sea running. It was necessary to steer all the time, and we had rigged preventer guys so that the boom would not smash over if Tzu Hang gybed. As she rolled in the steep following sea, the boom would try to lift against the preventer guy, and sometimes the leach of the sail would give a flap, which set the helmsman to spinning the wheel frantically. There was no need to worry with either Beryl or John at the wheel.