Once Is Enough

by Miles Smeeton

  During my short visit to the deck I had felt the bitter wind whipping through my wet jersey, and, remembering the cold that I had suffered before, I fished up an oilskin coat and put it on. I found another for Beryl, and held it out for her, saying to her, in the most incongruous surroundings, ‘Do put a coat on, dear. It’s so cold outside.’ Both of us had bleeding heads, but otherwise seemed all right.

  We pulled the Genoa on to the deck, and with some difficulty, owing to the force of the wind, folded it roughly over the doghouse. We worked on our knees, but at times were buffeted with such a weight of spray that we found it difficult to keep on the deck. After getting the sail in place, we lashed it round and round, and then over and over, from ring-bolt to ring-bolt, so that both the sail and the doghouse were held firmly down. Then we climbed down through the skylight and started to bale in the same way as we had baled before, with a plastic bucket. We had to bale in order to find the hammer and some nails, for all the ship’s stores had again emptied out of their lockers, and lay in wild confusion in the water below. By half-past eight we were able to explore the bilge and found the hammer and some 2-inch copper nails and with these and a jib we climbed once more out of the skylight to deal with the cockpit.

  If anything, the conditions on deck were worse than before, and no sooner had we reached the weather side of the cockpit than we were swept again by a mass of white water. We grabbed for the remaining shrouds, and when the water had cleared, we thought that we’d lost the hammer, but found it again wedged under the broken rail. Another wave swept us, so that we were separated from each other, and the whole ship seemed to be under water, and this time the hammer was gone. Beryl climbed down through the skylight again and brought up the wooden mallet, and while I stretched the sail over the boards we had nailed across the cockpit, she nailed it down. We were continually left gasping and sodden, and felt an unreality about the situation, as if we were acting a tableau of two people clinging to the shrouds of a wave-swept wreck, in an old-fashioned picture. While I stretched the sail and held the battens in place, I kept an eye to weather, ready to shout a warning to Beryl to catch hold of the shrouds.

  Nothing is more exasperating than watching a left-handed woman with numbed fingers trying to hammer 2-inch copper nails into a teak deck. It would be bad under the best of conditions, but now it had all the ingredients of a nightmare. The nails folded over one after the other, and when I could get the opportunity I grabbed the mallet, only to find that I made a worse job of it than she did. Beryl pounced on the mallet again and finished the job. By the time we had nailed some battens along the side of the doghouse, and covered the skylight, it was getting dark, and for the last twenty minutes we had had no great amount of water on the deck. The wind was beginning to ease. As I closed the forehatch, and followed Beryl aft, I had a vivid feeling that there was someone behind me, and turned round to see, but of course there was no one there.

  We pulled the spare primus out of the cupboard in the forepeak and filled it, and we made something hot. Beryl called for Pwe and she answered from aft, and we found her somewhere in John’s berth. She was very disgusted and wet too, but she was not suffering from shock. We sorted out the bunkboards in the forecabin, and were able to find a comparatively dry mattress and we all lay down together for warmth.

  As we lay, cold and unable to sleep, Beryl kept saying, ‘At any rate we have got plenty of time. There is no need to go rushing about and getting exhausted. We’ll just do a little and then we’ll have a rest.’ She was thinking that there was no John, and that we might get over-tired, and perhaps sick. Much later on, after we had slept a little, the full enormity of the situation burst upon me. Here we were, almost a year after the first accident, in very nearly the same place, all our work gone, all our plans brought to nothing again, and Clio still in England and we the wrong side of South America. I gave a quite involuntary and mournful groan which I can still hear with shame. It made Beryl reach for my hand and ask quickly what was the matter.

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said, ‘it’s the thought of going back.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THERE’S A WIND FROM THE SOUTH

  THERE was nothing else that we could do. We would have to go back, and it was time to start thinking how. We had not had a sight for two days, and while we lay on the bunk, I tried to figure out how far we had come, and how far to the east we had been driven during the storm. About 48˚ 30´ S., I thought we were, and perhaps 300 miles offshore. That was the worst of our predicament. We were farther north than the first time that we were disabled, but much closer to the coast. Making allowances for the westerly drift while we rigged our jurymast, I thought that there might be little room to spare by the time we got into the southerly winds and the north-going current which would carry us up the coast to safety.

  We got up and made breakfast, and after the miserable night that we had spent, we felt better as we thought of what we had to do. First of all, again, we had to make the ship secure, and directly we had finished breakfast, we went on deck to plan the repairs.

  The broken spars were still attached to their rigging and floating to weather, and now that the wind was down and Tzu Hang no longer drifting away as fast as before, they came riding up on the swell looking as if they were going to smash into her side. The danger was much reduced as each mast was broken in three pieces, but we released some rigging-screws and the wreckage rode further away. The lee rigging-screws of the main and middle shroud, each calculated to take a seven-ton breaking strain, had sheared; the lee rigging-screws were the ones to weather when Tzu Hang was upside down, or the upper ones as she rolled upright again. The masts had to go anyway, and I felt glad that the screws had broken, as long as the hull was undamaged. Something had to go under those stresses, and anything was preferable to the hull. The rest of the damage on deck could be easily seen. The pulpit was smashed down in the centre, the weather rail stanchions were bent all over the place, and the capping broken. The unused dinghy was gone, and the ring-bolts in the deck to which it had been lashed by terylene rope were bent as if the rope had been wire cable. The sea-anchor and its hawser were gone, and 18 feet of rail and the patent log had been torn away on the lee side. Both boom gallows were gone, but the mizzen boom with its sail attached drooped wearily on to the deck, where we had lashed it by its sheet the day before.

  The rest of the damage could be seen better from below. There was little left of the port side, the lee side of the doghouse. Splintered pieces of the side, with the torn and twisted copper framing of the windows attached, had been pushed inwards into the house, and all the perspex had been shattered. The top of the doghouse had been broken off, the hatch was gone, and the starboard windows cracked in several places. The engine had emptied its oil out of the filler cap, and filled up again with sea water, and the dip-stick had fallen out and through the hatch, or so we suppose, because it was nowhere on the ship, and was never found again. One of the deck-beams aft, near the mizzenmast, was broken, although we didn’t find it out until some time later, and the fore-and-aft beams at the bottom of the cockpit to which its fibre-glassed sides had been screwed were broken outwards, towards the sides of the ship, so that there were gaps between the sides and the floor.

  In the main cabin most of the damage had been done by the big five-burner, cast-iron enamelled stove. The bolts which secured it must have been rusted, because it cut loose, and now lay broken in several pieces on the cabin floor. It had left some horrible scars on the deckhead, and I had a black eye which I supposed was something to do with it. It had also smashed the cabin table, which slid up on a brass pole to the deckhead; it had bent the pole and torn it from its fastenings. Though I had been taking part in this merry-go-round, I had come out of it with very little hurt.

  Although everything was out of the drawers in the forecabin, it is on a higher level than the main, and we were spared the awful invasion of water. Apart from the bilges and the floor it was comparatively dry. A minor but annoying disaster in th
e after part of the ship was that a can of paint had lost its lid and emptied its contents into the bilge, where it mixed with some broken bottles of Pisco. There was a winy smell about the bilge, like the wine-shop in the corner on Pedro Valdivia, where we used to wait for the buses to take us up the road.

  The radio set, the barometer, and the chronometer were all completely out of action, and the two coastal charts which I had had on the chart table had vanished, so that in respect of aids to navigation, we were much worse off than before, but Beryl had been trying to rate her wristwatch before the accident, so that we could expect to be reasonably close to the time. The rating had been upset by a convulsive change which occurred in the watch just before Christmas, but we decided to ignore that spasm.

  So much for the tale of the damage. It took us three days to get the ship more or less to rights, and on the third day we hoisted our first sail. But the first job that we had to do after pumping out the ship was to fix the doghouse and cockpit properly. We pumped out quite a lot of water, and it began to look as if there was a leak somewhere. Tzu Hang had never leaked before.

  We pulled away the splintered side of the doghouse and screwed three boards on to the corner posts to make a new side. Beryl had taken over the job of ship’s carpenter from John, and I could see that she was determined to do a job that her instructor would be proud of, if ever he came to hear of it. ‘Just bash it on here,’ I said, but no, it had to be drilled and screwed. We replaced the No. 1 jib with the Genoa, carefully folded, and lashed it all down again, and we took the boards which had once been the sides of our jurymast, and fastened them over the sail along the deck at the sides of the doghouse. We covered the deck well with caulking compound before doing this and the result was a reasonably leakproof cover. In order to nail the copper nails with the wooden mallet, we drilled holes in the deck, and used the old screw holes in the boards. After the doghouse was finished, we fixed up the cockpit properly, and also the skylight. Then we were reasonably satisfied that we could stand another gale.

  In the evening Beryl showed me a rash that was coming out on her hands and wrists.

  ‘What on earth’s causing that?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps it’s something to do with salt water.’

  ‘It looks to me like some sort of allergy.’

  ‘An allergy to being turned over,’ she said. ‘I’ve had too much of it anyway.’

  She couldn’t sleep owing to the irritation, and next day was covered with it. We thought that it must be something to do with the drugs that she had taken for her dysentery, and it made her very miserable for a day or two.

  For the first day or two also, we both felt very tired. I suppose that it was a reaction to the violent strife of the storm. We took many rests in our bunks in the forecabin, which was reasonably comfortable, judged by the standards which might be expected in yachts which had been turned over in a South Pacific gale. One person who approved most heartily of these rests was Pwe. Although she had recovered very quickly, she objected most strongly to being below while we worked on deck, and always sat up in the forepeak, as close to the forehatch as she could scramble. By the end of the third day the ship was beginning to get into shape again. Our spirits rose and we began to feel some exhilaration in the adventure. We thought that it would be a good show if the two ancient mariners pulled it off by themselves and brought the ship back to port again. For the first day or two I had a strong feeling that a third person was present, a feeling that there was someone still on deck with me when Beryl was below, and sometimes that there were two people below.

  ‘I expect it’s just that the last time we were like this we had John with us,’ Beryl said, when I told her about it. This was a very reasonable explanation. But it is a feeling, a vivid sensation of someone else being present, that has been experienced and written about by mountaineers and sailors, under similar conditions of stress.

  With the pumps working again, we found that it only took a few minutes to get the ship dry, provided that we pumped three or four times a day, and we were able to trace the leak to one of the few butts in Tzu Hang’s planking, but as far as we could see the fastenings there were still intact. We found out long afterwards that the caulking had come out from between these two butts. As soon as we had located the cause and extent of the leak it gave us no more anxiety.

  The first sail that we hoisted was a mizzen-staysail and we hoisted it by throwing a wire halliard over the remaining mizzen cross-tree. The stump of the mizzenmast was a forlorn looking sight, with jagged splinters showing above the cross-tree fitting. Only half the cross-tree remained, and about 10 feet of mast-track, torn from the upper part of the mast, still whipping about as the ship rolled. Next morning both it and the wooden half of the cross-tree were gone. Using the bronze base of the cross-tree arms, which were angled slightly upwards, as a sheave, we hoisted the staysail upside down, the tack at the mast-head, a sheet to the clew, and the head lashed to the weather rail in front of the mainmast stump. I can’t say that Tzu Hang really began sailing. She was hove to, making some headway, and drifting slowly to leeward, but it steadied her movement and was an advance in the right direction, and I started to think about the new sail-plan.

  We still had the red storm-jib, that had done us so well on our previous trip under jury, and we had the little raffee, the gallant little warhorse, which we had never used before the first accident, and which had then towed us up to the north, so impatient of control and so violent in its tantrums. We also had the two staysails which we had taken off on Christmas Day and stowed below, the mizzen which had been on the boom and wasn’t lost in the accident, and one of the headsails which we had not used for covering the damage.

  Before we left Talcahuano we had dismantled the jurymast, the hollow 20-foot mast, and now we had used most of the pieces that we had saved in nailing down the sail coverings to the deck. We had also kept the spar which John had cut and glued with so much labour, and so much smoke, from the butt of the mainmast, and we had not been able to bring ourselves to throw away the original jurymast that he had made by splicing the two spinnaker poles together. It was a question of sentiment. The spar had been lashed along the rail on the foredeck and was still intact. The spliced spinnaker poles had been smashed in two, but by one of those freakish tricks that the sea seems to play in these turmoils, half had remained on deck. Of the two spinnaker poles in use, which were clipped on to the main shrouds, and along the top of the life-line to a stanchion on each side of the ship, only half of one remained, still clipped on to a shroud, which trailed over the side into the water. With the mizzen boom as a mast and the old jury spar as a topmast, we would be able to make a 16-foot mast, and we could use the broken spinnaker pole as a mizzen boom.

  I saw that only the centre part of the mainmast now remained in the sea to weather. The other parts and the mizzen had broken away. Beryl was below resting and recovering from her allergy, and the sea was going down. I thought that at least I might be able to save some of the rigging that was still attached to this part of the mast. I hauled the broken piece in; it was heavy, and as it came near it swooped on Tzu Hang’s side, giving her a wicked bang, which brought poor Beryl flying to the hatch in great distress at the idea of Tzu Hang suffering further injury. We decided to let it go, and it floated away under the solemn inspection of two albatrosses.

  Next day Beryl was nearly recovered, and we set up the new mainmast. We cut the mizzen boom from the gooseneck with a hacksaw, leaving about half an inch of the bronze shaft of the fitting to stand in a wooden step, which we nailed to the deck. Using two jib bridles to make four stays, with stainless steel wire portions and terylene rope purchases, we set it up without any difficulty, with spare shrouds as forestay and backstay, and lengths of chain and rigging-screws to adjust the length. When we had finished, the boom was as secure a little foremast as we could wish. Next we hoisted John’s spar as a topmast, and as the band on the spar was not in the centre, we could hoist it short end or l
ong end up, according to the amount of sail that we wished to carry, and on several occasions we set it in the reefed position. On January 30, four days after being disabled, we were sailing again, and the wind was in the west.

  Tzu Hang sailed splendidly up to the north-east, sometimes with her mizzen, mizzen-staysail, main and raffee, showing quite an imposing display of canvas, and sometimes with only the raffee straining like a little demon at its sheets, but usually with the raffee and a staysail hoisted upside down as the main. Her runs climbed into the seventies, but we couldn’t pretend that we could get to weather, and hoped for southerly winds before we got to the coast. Our course, as we plotted it with the help of Beryl’s wristwatch, looked as if we would make the coast in the region of Chiloe, unless we found the south wind. If we were forced into the Channels we would be in dire need of the engine. As soon as we were sailing, I set to work to try and make it go. I suppose that a real mechanic would have coaxed that engine somehow so that it would have started before the feeble life in the battery died. One battery had lost all its acid, and the other had fallen out of its box and broken one of its leads, but it still had a slight kick in it. I pumped the salt water out of the engine and filled it up again with oil, and cleaned and dried the distributor and points. We heated the sparking plugs on the stove, cleaned out the carburettor, and did everything that we could think of. While Beryl pressed the starter button, I knelt down and wound the left-handed starting handle, the lowest reach being somewhere down in the bilge. This position of kneeling, with my head almost level with the cabin floor, in fact prostrating myself before the engine, gives me a feeling of defeat before I’ve started, and I know that inevitably I’m going to bark my knuckles or hit my head with the end of the starting handle in a gesture of abasement. Fortunately it only happens when the battery is dead. Now the salt-water-soaked leads gave too many outlets for the feeble current, and under these conditions it was impossible to get a spark under compression. After a long struggle we gave it up. We would have to trust to our jury sails to bring us in.