Once Is Enough

by Miles Smeeton

  While I was struggling with the cockpit, the sail suddenly began to flutter violently and Tzu Hang wore round on to the wrong tack. For the rest of the afternoon, John and I struggled with oars and sheets, in cold squalls of rain and hail, to try and get her back again. The raffee swooped at us, the sheets caught us, like a blow with a cane, across the face; it was still blowing half a gale and there was no hope of doing anything with the big sea that was running, but I was obstinate. Feelings began to rise and we each felt that the other was to blame every time that Tzu Hang fell away on to the wrong tack. As we slithered about on our seats, we both tore our oilskin trousers on a broken screw, where the staysail horse had been pulled away. Although we had been wet through for six days now, this tear in the seats of our trousers seemed absurdly important, the crowning hardship of a very poor day. Beryl began to sense tension on deck and put her head out of the hatch. It was the first time that she had appeared, and it was a sign that she was beginning to feel better.

  ‘Come on now, you two,’ she said. ‘It’s tea-time, and don’t you think that it would be much better if you stopped struggling and made a steering-oar. Do just leave it now. Leave everything until tomorrow.’

  How right she was! We had been living under very strange conditions for a week, with very little sleep, and as far as I was concerned, a lot of anxiety. After all, a day or two wouldn’t make much difference. We went below, and Beryl had some special treat for us for tea. Burnt toast, I suppose. The cat was beginning to look dry and wanted to play. We shed off our troubles for the time being, and I think from then on we began to enjoy the trip again. There was, of course, Clio at the back of our minds always, but we had given her a very wide margin for the time when she might expect to hear from us. ‘I wonder what on earth she’d think if she could see us now.’

  ‘I think she’d be thrilled to bits,’ said John.

  ‘Just think of all the treasures she’d have found in the bilge,’ said Beryl.

  It was Thursday, February 21, and the wind was dropping. John spent the day making the steering-oar from the corner posts of the doorways leading into the main- and forecabin. Before he started work, he clamped his saw on to a board, and in the dark, heaving cabin, he began to sharpen his saw. It made me think what a bad workman I was, who so rarely sharpened anything, even in the best conditions. After sharpening his saw, he cut scarves and joined them all together to make a 16-foot length, and when the shaft was finished he fastened a locker door on the end to act as a blade.

  In the evening we sat by the smoky fire and mended the torn seats of our oilskins with old material and rubber solution.

  Our breakfast on that morning had consisted of beans and a boiled egg, three of the twenty-three that we had recovered unbroken, and lunch of soup, biscuits, and jam. For dinner we had a hot beef stew and tinned loganberries. We had drunk for breakfast and tea, a large mug of tea, and at elevenses a tin of orange juice between the three of us. We weren’t doing too badly, and that was how we celebrated the end of the first week after the crash.

  Next morning John and I went on deck to try out the steering-oar. There was a different feel to the sea, and it looked as if we were in for a pleasanter day. After we had put the sail up, I told John to handle the oar. He had made it, and I wasn’t going to risk breaking it. We were still on the starboard tack. He went aft and lashed the oar with a loose lashing to the after chainplate on the port quarter. Then he slipped the oar through the lashing, which he was going to use as a rowlock, until he could bring the blade into the sea. Standing straddled behind the cockpit, his back against the mizzen gallows, the early sun on his fair and now rather long hair, he looked like Eric the Red, conning his Viking ship, and they had other things in common too.

  Slowly Tzu Hang brought the wind behind her, and slowly, without faltering, she swung on to the other tack. John brought the oar inboard, lashed it to the deck, and came forward looking very pleased with himself.

  ‘Good show, John,’ I said. ‘It really worked well. That’s your oar and I’m damned if I’m going to use it. I might break it.’

  ‘No, I don’t think you would,’ he said. ‘You just have to watch it. It bends a bit. I wish that I’d put a stainless steel wire down the centre so that we wouldn’t lose the end if we did. We haven’t got that much spare wood.’

  As we went below and aft to breakfast, I looked at the small tell-tale compass in the saloon, the only compass that we had now. We were heading west. The wind had backed to the south-east during the night and we had never noticed it. I went forward again and let the sail down. Later, when we came on deck, the sun was shining warmly, the wind had dropped, and the glass was well up. We decided to do no more sailing for that day and to work on the deck. Beryl was able to come up for the first time; the sun and the change gave her a great lift.

  The two skylight covers were taken off and the skylights caulked and recovered. Beryl painted them blue, and from then on we were really watertight again. We could not get the ship dry inside as there was so much condensation and so many soaking clothes and cushions, but on this first real chance, the whole deck was littered with clothes, blankets and mattresses.

  In the evening we set the raffee again and Tzu Hang was sailing along on the right course, once more as if she knew the way. We were off at last. We were in much better condition and even Pwe ventured up during the day. She was horrified at the change in the ship, and, like our cows in Canada when we ploughed up a grass field, she voiced her indignant disapproval; but she stayed on deck while the sun shone.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE TREK NORTH

  WHILE Tzu Hang sailed away by herself that evening, she seemed gallant and debonair once more, in spite of her tattered appearance. We started to plan the new rig.

  John thought that he could make a square, 20-foot hollow mast, using some floorboards and bunkboards, the ceiling, or inner planking, of the main cabin, and the wood from the hanging cupboard that he was dismantling. He set about drawing a plan. As the boards were only about 5 feet long, there would have to be several butts on each side of the mast. For greater strength these butts would have to be staggered, and opposite each butt there had to be a solid centre to screw them down to. We needed some wood for all these solid centres and also for a spar for the sail. We decided to use the bottom of the old mainmast, which still stood below the deck in the forecabin, 7 feet of solid wood, 6 by 8 inches.

  For a new sail we could use the almost unused terylene mainsail, which had been stowed below. If we divided it by unpicking the seam, the bottom half could be used as a lug-sail, and when the time came to re-rig Tzu Hang, we could put it together again without doing it any permanent damage. With a 19-foot hoist we would have about 280 square feet of sail, and the mast would have to be properly stayed to stand up to it. Before John started on this he put another perspex light in the other skylight, so that he would have enough light to work below.

  The next two days were sunny and dry, with a cold fresh wind blowing, and we were as busy as beavers. We took out the mainmast stump, and I patched the hole in the deck, while John started to saw it up into four lengths. How he did it I don’t know. I find ripping a desperate job at the best of times, but he sawed three longitudinal cuts, and then divided each of the four planks, so that he must have sawed 49 feet of wood, in that dark and heaving cabin. As usual the cuts came out straight and true. John would not have dreamed of letting me have a go to help him, and I should have made a mess of it if I had, but it made me tired to watch him. Beryl was up on deck again and at last succeeded, with the dogged pertinacity that makes her such an incalculable force to deal with, in clearing the cockpit drains. That evening she started drying some packets of drinking chocolate on the stove top. We had to taste a spoonful, and it was so good that we ate the whole packet, dipping into it in turn. We turned the night into a bonzo party by drinking a tin of grapefruit juice to finish up with.

  While we feasted, we tried to put our impressions together and to find ou
t what had happened to Tzu Hang.

  John said, ‘I think that we were swept by a big wave, and that then we broached to and were rolled over to port, because I know that I was thrown forward and to port first of all. I don’t know what happened after that, except struggling under water.’

  ‘I’m certain we didn’t broach to, and I’m certain we weren’t pooped,’ said Beryl. ‘I think that I was thrown out, not washed out. I can remember the tremendous steep wave behind us, and I can remember pitching forward out of the cockpit, sort of falling head first, and then being in the water without knowing how I got there.’

  ‘But if we broached to,’ I said to John, ‘and we swung to starboard, and tripped over our keel, and were rolled over to port, which you are suggesting, how in hell was your tool-box thrown forward, after bursting its lashings, so that it smashed that starboard doorpost there, and landed in the sink?’

  ‘No, that’s what beats me absolutely; that’s why I don’t really think that we broached. But what on earth else could we have done? If we had rolled over after we broached it would account for those marks on the deckhead, and the wet ashes, and all those lockers and drawers being emptied.’

  ‘All the broken masts and spars were to leeward, weren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, but I suppose that’s another argument in favour of having broached.’

  ‘I don’t know. Don’t you think that we would have rolled over them, in which case they would all be to weather; and if we had rolled over and not passed over our spars, the shrouds would have been leading underneath the keel, and not across the deck as they were doing. And if we didn’t get rolled over how did that tool-box get into the sink.’

  ‘I think that we turned a somersault,’ said Beryl.

  ‘If we did turn a somersault, we would be rolling as we came up, and the masts would be canted over one way or the other as we hit the water, and the keel would right her again, rolling her away from her masts. In a matter of a second or two she’d be up and facing the opposite way. Then she’d swing off and there’s at least a fifty-fifty chance that her masts would lie to leeward.’

  A: Smashed doorpost

  B: Tool-box lashed to lockers

  B: Tool-box stuck here after breaking loose

  C: Water level after smash

  RUNNING AND TOWING A HAWSER

  THE BOW GOES IN

  TRIPPING

  OVER: FALLING ON TO BEAM ENDS

  ROLLING AWAY AND FACING OPPOSITE WAY

  FALLING AWAY BROADSIDE TO SEA, SPARS TO LEEWARD

  A: Original position of powder-tin

  B: Powder-tin caught between bulkhead and deck

  C: Broken deck-beam

  ‘That’s an idea,’ said John. ‘If she did do that, as she righted she’d be rolling up, half submerged I suppose, and probably the same wave which turned her up would still be breaking over her, and that’s the only way the ports could have been smashed back into the galley and my cabin.’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s the darnedest thing, but I’m too addled with smoke to think clearly, and I’m really beginning to believe that a somersault is the only reasonable explanation.’

  We argued it out on many evenings, but we didn’t discover the proof of the somersault theory until weeks afterwards.

  The fine weather didn’t last long, and for two days we were stopped with a north-east wind, wet mizzling weather, and a falling glass. John had finished sawing up the stump of the mainmast and now the pieces to make the spar were glued and clamped together, and we had to keep the stove going full blast in order to get sufficient heat for the glue to set. While the glue was setting, John was working on the new mast, Beryl on the sail, and I was splicing up the new shrouds. The main cabin was the carpenter’s shop, and the spar projected into the forecabin, dividing it into a sailmaker’s and a rigger’s loft.

  I had made an L-shaped chimney out of food tins with their tops cut off and joined together with adhesive tape. The short arm of the ‘L’ fitted over the fitting for the stovepipe on deck, and the long arm was pointed away from the wind. It was extended as we ate our way through the tins. Later, when it grew longer, it was quite efficient, but at this time it was smoking almost as badly as if we had no chimney at all. Eventually it became so unbearable that I went on deck to alter it. No smoke was coming out of the chimney, but the ventilator, right in the stern, was smoking gaily. I fiddled about with the chimney until a puff of smoke came out again.

  ‘How’s that?’ I called, cheerful in the clear air. There was a muffled sound of coughing below, and when I got down again, I found the other two with streaming eyes, complaining that it was worse than before. When all work was finished in the evening, we let the stove go out, and found that the chimney in the bathroom had become detached from the deckhead fitting, and the stove was smoking directly into the ship. The stove never stopped smoking, but it improved, and by the time we had no longer the need of a fire, the chimney projected beyond the side of the ship and the smoke problem was nearly solved.

  By the 27th the north-east wind had swung round to the north-west and we were able to make sail again. This time we set a mainsail as well as the jib. When Tzu Hang had broken away from her masts on the day of the crash, John had transferred the hawser from the stern to the bow, and before coming down to bale, he had attached the working jib to the end, hoping that it might help to hold her bow up to the wind, or at least make a slick to weather. It had had no effect, but the jib had been torn in two up to the bronze luff-rope by the waves. When we brought it in next day we cut the luff-rope and used the upper half to patch the skylights, and now used the lower half as a mainsail, setting it upside down. The sun was struggling fitfully through the cloud layer and the glass was falling. By four o’clock in the morning, it was blowing a gale again, and we took down the little mainsail which had been doing great work pressed flat against the shrouds. We set the raffee and, though it was so small, it towed us strongly to the north. By midday we were into the forties. The mast was going well, and we put a stainless steel radio aerial into the centre.

  John was working all day with the mast, fitting his boards together, drilling and countersinking his screw holes, and screwing it all up. He was quite oblivious of his surroundings, oblivious of the weather outside, and of the motion within. With the materials at his disposal he was doing the best that could be done. Time meant nothing to him, perfection everything.

  ‘There is a river, a river of no return,’ he sang mournfully as he worked. It was the end of the third week after the crash, and Beryl celebrated it by brushing her hair and washing her face.

  ‘Good heavens, look, who have we got here?’ John asked when she came back into the main cabin.

  ‘Little sunshine,’ I said. ‘Thank goodness she’s washed her face.’ I looked at the wound on the top of her head and saw that it had healed in a thin white line.

  ‘I thought that it was much worse, and I didn’t want it fiddled with, or I’d have washed it sooner. It’s probably been healed for days.’

  ‘What about giving us a treat now, and changing out of the McLeod tartan.’

  ‘No, I’m not changing until we make our landfall.’ She was quite firm about that, but she gave us fudge for our weekly celebration, and there were treats on the next day too, in celebration of Clio’s birthday.

  On this day the wind strengthened continuously with dark squalls sweeping up from the south-west, and Tzu Hang fled to the north. In the evening for a time she was doing four knots, with the big swells all wrinkled with squalls, and white crests everywhere, leaving their fading tracks across the sea. There was light, and colour and shade, and it was impossible to believe Tzu Hang was the wreck that she was. By noon next day we had done sixty miles on the log and seventy-two by observation, and we were in a north-going current. She relished the sea and the day, and she had a quick corkscrew motion, as if she wanted to buck us off the deck in her good spirits. ‘I’m the same ship, the same ship,’ she seemed to say to us, ‘and I know th
e way. I’ll take you to port.’ After a particularly bad squall in the evening, which fell upon us with a hissing rush of almost horizontal rain, we took the mainsail down. During the night the raffee kept flopping aback and banging its sheets on the deck, but each time Tzu Hang came back to her course without our interference.

  All the week the work went on below. The sailmaker stitched away at her tabling and her grommets, and the rigger twisted and poked, and pricked himself, and cursed as amateur riggers and exsoldiers do. John had set us such a high standard of craftsmanship that everything had to be ship-shape and Bristol fashion. The mast was finished on March 4, and John spent a happy day putting in a sheave on a stainless steel pinion in the mast-head, lining the slot in the mast-head with copper sheeting, and putting a wind indicator at the truck on a mahogany cap, and fitting tangs of copper sheeting, bolted through the mast, for the shrouds. He must have felt very proud of it. I do not remember the exact measurements now, but it was approximately 4 by 4 inches at the base, 20 feet long, and tapered to the top. The planks at the sides were ¾ inch, and fore and aft ½ inch. He oiled it with linseed oil, but before we could take it out on deck we had to dismantle it to get it through the hatch.

  ‘How awful,’ I said, ‘I hate undoing anything once it’s done up.’

  ‘Nothing to it, man,’ he said. ‘You just undo a few screws and it comes apart.’ He undid them but the mast didn’t come apart.

  ‘Must’ve missed a screw,’ he said, turning the mast round. ‘Now, you give a pull, will you?’ But the mast still refused to come apart.

  Beryl was watching, and after a time she said, ‘Isn’t there a radio aerial or something holding it together?’

  Of course there was, and John had to take off a piece of one side of the mast and cut it.