Once Is Enough

by Miles Smeeton

  The next day was a dreary one with sunshine only at times and the wind turning slowly round the clock, but on that day we passed our 2,000-mile mark, and we celebrated with steak and kidney pie and plum pudding. With 2,000 miles gone and over 4,000 yet to go, the larder looked as well stocked as ever, and we had only finished one of our five tanks of water. In the starboard bunk in the main cabin the twice-baked bread was holding out splendidly. It was getting hard, but it was not mouldy, and it was infinitely preferable to biscuit.

  The oranges were still in good condition, and it looked as if they would last for another week or two. We had our own bottled and tinned meat from the farm in Canada, and bottled venison, as well as various other brands of tinned meat and tongue. We still had some salami sausage left, and all kinds of tinned vegetables. We had our own bottled plums, and our own tinned pears and apples. We also had tinned loganberries, strawberries, and apricots. Beryl is the most wonderful provider, and looking back on that trip, we always seemed to have been having new treats and surprises. For drinks we had any amount of grapefruit and orange juice, and the whole run of cocoa, chocolate, and Ovaltine. The eggs were still in good condition, and by great good fortune we had found some maggots in one of the sides of bacon. This had put John permanently off bacon and there was all the more for Beryl and me. We never suffered from shortage of food or drink, or from lack of variety, and our health was excellent.

  The fourth week started with a fresh wind from the north. For the first few days we made good progress, sometimes close-hauled, sometimes with the wind abeam, and sometimes under twins. There was no question in this sea of the leisurely trade wind progress, day after day, with never a sail change for hundreds of miles. We were working all the time to get the best out of her, and sometimes she was hard pressed and close-hauled, under a double-reefed main and storm-jib. The 17th was one of those blustery close-hauled days, with the spray flying, and albatrosses turning into the wind to land, holding themselves for a moment quite motionless above the water, and dispensing with the tobogganing technique.

  Clio went to school on that day. This was the life that she knew so well: the spray spattering on the deck, the glimpse of the log on the wave crest behind us and the gull dipping down to investigate it, and the never-ceasing swing and heave of the ship. She could picture in her mind what we were doing, feel the wind whip her hair as she put her head out of the hatch, imagine the urgency of our movement and the long anticipation of the landfall. We thought of her, who a few months before had been diving along the coral reef with a spear in her hand, now on her way to school in a suburban train.

  The end of the week would have suited her particularly, because we were becalmed again. In the days when she was with us she used to spend hours trying to fish up the lowest forms of sea life. Now we had some strange examples drifting past us, like transparent piggy banks with two small reddish coins inside them. They collapsed into nothing if we tried to pick them out of the water, and some were joined together, end to end, to make long, and slowly writhing, transparent snakes.

  The albatrosses too were particularly interesting, as today they were making their courting play. One sat opposite the other, and one would raise its wings high over its head and close together, and then give a long shrill whistle, at the same time holding its beak vertically upwards. They would then both dip their beaks in the water and offer each other drops of water and little albatrossy kisses. From then on, in reasonable weather, we often heard this wolf-whistle, and looked out to find the same procedure going on. In the evening we played ‘Toto-poly’, a game of racing and training horses. Altogether it was a day that Clio would have enjoyed.

  On the last day of the fourth week, John awoke me to say that the wind was round in the south-east and that we were heading north-west. We dropped the twins and set all sail and then started striding along again—a great relief after making only seventy miles in the past three days. The predatory skua was round again, and attacked an albatross, which squawked and landed in the water. Also a beautiful mothlike little petrel of a light dove-grey and with a black cap. At six in the evening we were becalmed after doing forty-seven miles in exactly six hours, and we were left rolling about in the most confused sea imaginable with the tops falling backwards off the waves, and dark lowering clouds all around. The glass was falling, all order had gone from the sea, and there was an eerie feeling about in this strange, jagged moonscape of a deserted ocean. We brought down the sails, and soon after supper we turned in.

  Early in the morning we woke to hear a sail flogging the deck wildly. We scrambled out and found a bitter wind blowing freshly from the north-east. We made the sail fast.

  ‘Variable Westerlies.’

  ‘No, the Variables are between the Westerlies and the Trades,’ said John.

  ‘Anyway, these aren’t variables, they’re constants, and they’re Easterlies.’

  We grumbled our way back into our bunks again.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE WAY OF A SHIP

  THE wind was still in the east in the morning, and we decided to change our tactics and to search for more favourable winds in slightly lower latitudes. Under double-reefed main and storm-jib, with low rain clouds driving across her bow, and the bottom of her sails wet with spray, Tzu Hang strained to the north. For the next three days the wind was blowing from the east, and it was blowing hard. For a part of the time it was blowing force 8 and we were reduced to a storm headsail only, but at other times we made good progress. At any rate we kept going, and we felt proud of the way in which she was buffeting through a stiff uncomfortable sea. She seemed to relish the struggle, and we had immense confidence in her. For over three weeks now we had been south of latitude 50° south, which was, as far as we knew, a lot further south than the track of any other yacht that had crossed the South Pacific before us.

  There were not many that we knew of, which had been bound direct for the Straits of Magellan or the Horn. Only Saoirse, Pandora, and Waltzing Matilda. All of them had sailed from Auckland and so their tracks, for most of the way, had been a long way north of ours. Saoirse, when she finally made her run down for the Horn, had rounded it in perfect weather, and went on to complete her passage to England. Pandora rounded the Horn, and was nearly lost in a gale south of the Falkland Islands, and was picked up by a steamer, after being rolled completely over. Waltzing Matilda, on her wonderful passage to England, entered the Patagonian Channels, in the Golfo de Peñas, in latitude 47° and thereafter was in comparatively sheltered water. Vito Dumas, of the Argentine, who sailed round the world during the war, in the forties, went from New Zealand to Valparaiso and then round the Horn and up to Buenos Aires; an astounding single-handed trip.

  There are not many yachts of comparable size that have been down in Patagonian waters at all. Captain Slocum, the first single-handed circumnavigator, who has inspired all single-handers ever since, sailed from east to west through the Straits of Magellan, and then was driven south. He escaped back into the Channels through Cockburn Passage, known as the Milky Way, because of the breaking white water all along on its many dangers. Then there was Al Hansen who sailed through the Straits and up through the Channels in 1934, but was lost on the coast of Chiloe, on his way north. Since the war Bardiaux sailed his Les Quatre Vents through the Straits of Le Maire, where he was rolled clean over twice, without being dismasted, and then round the Horn and back into the Beagle Channel, and while we were still in the Southern Ocean, a mountaineer and sailor, H. W. Tilman, was bringing his yacht, Mischief, through the Straits and up the Channels. There are of course others, which I don’t know about, but I believe that Tzu Hang was the first small yacht to sail the old sailing ship route south of New Zealand, bound towards the Horn.

  On Sunday, January 27, we were up to latitude 46° 55´, further north than we had intended to go, but it brought a change in the weather. The wind was moderating and backing. On Monday night we were becalmed; by four in the morning we were sailing again with the wind in the west
, and from then on the wind stayed in the westerly quarters. In fact it did as we had expected it to do. As depression followed depression across the Southern Ocean, the wind veered to the north with a falling glass, and then backed slowly round to the south-west. To begin with we would be under fore-and-aft rig, and as the wind backed we went under twins again, and remained under them for most of the time.

  The westerly winds came gently at first, with dull grey skies and a rising glass, and we marked their arrival by catching a blue codlike fish. It had large, black deep-set eyes, triangular gill-covers, and spikes on its dorsal fin.

  We are often asked if we catch many fish on Tzu Hang and we have to admit that the number of fish that we have caught, in 30,000 miles, can be counted on the fingers of my two hands. I feel very unsporting when I have to tell of my fishing exploits, because there are virtually none. We usually trail a spoon behind, hoping that some fish, not too big, will attach itself to the lure, for the sake of the cat. Sometimes the spoon is removed, and sometimes we find the fishing line inextricably tangled with the log-line, and a half-drowned fish on the end. Our small catch has been varied. Bonito, albacore, barracuda, dolphin, and a fish called in South America a sierra. Most of them weighed between 16 and 20 lb., and by the time they were cut up and cooked, the whole boat, including us and the cat, stank of fish. Beryl hates wasting anything, and by the time the fish is finished everyone except the cat has had a surfeit of fish-steaks and fish-cakes, and no one is very enthusiastic about further fishing. We find also that we only catch fish on the continental shelves, or within soundings, and this blue fish was the first exception. Very good he was too, but Pwe is the only member of the crew who really thinks that fishing is worth while.

  On February 1 we had been thirty-six days at sea and we had only done 3,523 miles on the chart, but we knew that we would soon catch up on our estimate of 100 miles a day, if only the winds stayed favourable. We were soon down to 48° south again, with glorious westerly weather, cold and sunny, and John was busy about the ship with his camera. He did a lot of filming from the cross-trees. Beryl and John said that they preferred the dull grey days that we had had further south, with the low driven cloud and the big swinging grey seas. A monotone, cold, powerful, and impersonal. That was what they had expected down here.

  ‘Not the cruel sea,’ Beryl said. ‘The sea is impersonal. I don’t see how you can call it cruel. It’s the people on it who are apt to be cruel. I don’t think that you would call mountains or the sea cruel. It’s only that we are so small and ineffective against them, and when things go wrong we start blaming them and calling them cruel.’

  ‘Got to blame something,’ said John. ‘You never get anywhere blaming yourself.’

  ‘No, I think that it’s jolly hard luck on them. I think that they are kind, both the mountains and the sea, and it’s only that they are so big that they don’t notice us, or seem to forget about us.’

  ‘I thought that you said that they were impersonal.’

  ‘Well, impersonal in that they don’t feel spite against us. We are just so small that they don’t notice us.’

  ‘Didn’t Hillary say, after he had climbed Everest, that he felt as if the mountain had sort of noticed them, and given them permission? Same sort of thing in reverse.’

  ‘Yes, I don’t think that anyone should ever mention victory or conquest with regard to the sea or the mountains. I think that you can talk about a fight or a struggle, in the same way as an ant could talk about struggling up your trousers, but I don’t think that it could talk of victory, when it got to the top.’

  ‘You wouldn’t like the sea if there wasn’t an almost continual struggle,’ I said, and then to John: ‘Life with Beryl has been one long struggle for survival. The army ought to hire her to run a battle course for the next war.’

  ‘No wonder you look your age.’

  ‘I once had a confidential report which said, “This Officer shows great skill in getting out of situations he should never have got into.” It should have been “getting out of situations his wife has got him into”.’

  Beryl and John might prefer the grey smoking seas, but I liked this sun and movement, this sparkle on the water, the blues and the greens, the dazzle and flash of the spray at the bow, and the small white clouds.

  For three days the wind stayed fresh in the west, and never had we had such sailing. The stove was kept on all day and it was warm and snug in the cabin, and on deck Tzu Hang seemed to be singing a wild saga of high adventure. The big swells built up, showing a greenish blue at their tops against the sky and as they rolled up from behind, Tzu Hang leaped forward in a flurry of foam, weaving, swaying, and surging, in an ecstasy of movement and sun and spray.

  She seemed such a valiant little ship to us; so strong, so competent, so undismayed; so entirely ready to deal with anything that the wind might bring. As we walked around her, feeling the shrouds, checking the shackles, and tallowing the sheets, we felt that there was nothing there now that could let us down. We seemed to know every part of her: her weaknesses and her strengths.

  Her mainmast was new. John had made it for us in the Hawaiian Islands out of clear Oregon pine. It was fibre-glassed all over, and you could see the grain through the fibre-glass, without a knot or a glue-line showing. The mizzenmast we had overhauled and fibre-glassed in Sydney. It was as good as new, and we had made a new main boom in Auckland. Her rigging was all of stainless steel, and it was new, and her sheets and halliards all of terylene. Below decks she was the same as ever, a dry boat, and I don’t think that I had pumped her out more than once a week since we started, and then a few strokes only. As we sat below, we could hear no complaint from her. Only the noises that we knew so well: the happy noises of a good ship sailing well. However wild it was outside, there was an impression of home and comfort down below. Now that we had the fire going all the time, everything was dry and warm. The kettle on the fire, the cat, the knitting, the rows of books, and the made-up bunks, gave a feeling of well-being and security not altogether in keeping with the conditions outside. The jersey was growing, and Beryl had got to the stage of measuring it against John’s large, and apparently expanding, front. John was engaged in making a pair of parallel rules out of copper and perspex.

  We had two radio sets on board, as John had brought his with him from Trekka. I had a Hallicraft and John had a Zenith Trans-Oceanic, both dry battery sets. We had fixed John’s close up under the deck and above the stove. Some dampness had got inside, and it was inclined to be temperamental. Now that it was in a warm dry place it began to function perfectly again, so that with two radio sets working, we could afford to listen to the B.B.C. programmes, and we got very good reception on the South American service. We relied on the B.B.C. for our time signal, for we could not get the WWV American station, our usual stand-by. Radio Moscow was also inevitably on the air, and we began to pick up ‘The Voice of the Andes’, the first sign, other than the row of crosses on the chart, that we were approaching our destination.

  The South Pacific is covered by two Admiralty charts, from Port Phillip Bay to Cape Buen Suceso, in the Straits of Le Maire, the final tip of Tierra del Fuego. We folded the charts in two, so that they would fit better on the chart-table, and the daily positions, as we plotted them, stretched slowly across successive halves. We were now well across the first half of the second chart. On this half there was only one small piece of land, Easter Island, which squeezed into the margin, in the top corner. When we turned the chart over, the Patagonian coast would be in sight on the chart, if not in fact, and we would be able to plot our course down to the Diego Ramirez Islands, which we hoped to make our landfall for the Horn.

  On February 5 the wind went round to the north-west, and the glass began to fall. Next day it was down to 29·25, and blowing a gale force from the west. The twins were fluttering at their peaks, making a purring sound, and sometimes snapping loudly. They only do this at about force 8, and it is really time to take them down then. We took them in
in the afternoon and went on under a storm-jib only. We had to keep watch and steer under this rig, and we rigged a canvas windbreak round the stem to give the helmsman some shelter. It was a great improvement.

  Conditions were so bad on deck that we cut the watches down to two-hour shifts, and found them about one hour and forty-five minutes too long. At four in the morning we hauled the jib in taut and let Tzu Hang go by herself, with the helm lashed amidships, and at seven we set the twins again.

  The first day of the seventh week, with the wind strong in the south-west, we made great progress, although a little too much to the north, and the second day the same, so that in the afternoon we changed to fore-and-aft sails to correct our course, and sailed like this all through the night, and in the morning we set the twins again. We had a great struggle to get them up as it was blowing force 7 at least. The next two days were splendid sailing with the wind fresh in the west, and on one of them we listened to the England v. Ireland Rugby match on the B.B.C.

  On the 11th, forty-seven days out, we had 4,749 miles on the log, and from now on we hoped to improve on the average of 100 miles a day. We thought that we had had all the calm weather and contrary winds for this passage. But it was a dull day, with little wind, and John persuaded us to launch the dinghy again, on the end of the sixty fathoms of manilla rope that we had in the stern. We put it over, with John and his camera inside, and it looked horribly perilous. The dinghy kept riding up on the swell, so that it seemed as if it was going to overtake us, and when we brought it up to the yacht again, it looked for a moment as if it was going to come on board by itself. John filmed away, quite oblivious of any danger.