He began writing letters to possible sponsors. He started with Tetley Tea, hoping they liked his name and reminding them of the long association between tea and the clipper ship route of the race. The tea firm declined. He wrote to other tea, tobacco, and drinks companies but the result was the same. He had nothing to offer a sponsor. He was not, like Ridgway and Blyth, a newly famous adventurer. He was certainly a better seaman than either of them, but an unknown if competent yachtsman was not what an advertiser was looking for.
Nor could he get away quickly. Tetley was still on active naval duty ashore in Plymouth, though he believed the navy would release him in September, five months before his official retirement date. This would enable him to leave before the Sunday Times deadline of 31 October, but he would be starting later than the rest of the fleet. His only chance of winning would be sailing faster than any of the other boats, possible in a trimaran.
Late in March, waiting for replies, the Tetleys set out on a short cruise aboard Victress with Nigel’s two sons from his first marriage. While they were trying to berth the boat in windy conditions in Penzance Harbour, a section of the trimaran’s port bow was damaged. All the local shipwrights were busy fitting out boats for Easter. The only person Tetley could find to repair the damage was a coffin maker.
Sailors are naturally a superstitious lot. When they head out upon the deep, the constructs of society soon drop astern and they are surrounded by shooting stars overhead, phosphorescence in their wakes, and heaving shapes all around them in the sea and sky. It is easy, then, sensible even, to become afraid. Sailors are generally careful and conscientious engineers, fussing endlessly with their craft to make them seaworthy, but when they have done all they can do, they move quickly and easily to prayer. They have many of their own, like Psalm 107, surely written by a sailor.
They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters;
These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.
For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof.
They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble.
They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit’s end.
Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses.
He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still.
Then are they glad because of the quiet; so he bringeth them unto their desired haven.
Prayers may comfort. They may even work. But, as backup, in the spirit of assisting the Lord in his aid of those who help themselves, sailors carry with them a seaman’s chest of superstitions, evil eyes, rites, and invocations handed down from Homer’s time. Some are specific: never sail on a Friday; never whistle aboard a boat unless it is for wind when becalmed; always make an offering to Neptune on crossing the equator. One precaution should have appeared obvious, not only to the mariner: never have your ship repaired by a coffin maker. But Tetley wasn’t perturbed, so the coffin maker did the job.
Facing a mounting pile of rejection letters from hoped-for sponsors, Tetley soon decided, like Knox-Johnston, that if he was to go at all, it would be in the boat at hand, Victress, newly repaired. Still, he needed money to refit his boat for the voyage.
It wasn’t until the third week in June, after the first three ‘rash’ young men had departed, that he announced his intention to sail, without sponsorship, to the Sunday Times. A reporter and a photographer came down to Plymouth to interview and photograph the latest entrant. Tetley mentioned to the journalists that he and Eve enjoyed listening to classical music while sailing, and he demonstrated the trimaran’s stereo tape system. The reporter suggested he look for a record company to sponsor him.
The following weekend, on 23 June, the Sunday Times carried an article with the headline, ‘Around the World in 80 Symphonies’, with a photograph of Tetley and his wife Eve, both attractive people, laughing at Victress’s saloon table. The article noted that the Tetleys shared a love of music, and that the commander, hoping for a music company sponsor, ‘wouldn’t even mind being plugged as the ‘Around the World in 80 Symphonies’ mariner’.
Richard Baldwyn, director of Music for Pleasure, a company that marketed cassette tapes, was reading this article while flying back to England from the south of France. Approaching England, the pilot announced that there was a problem with the plane’s landing gear: the wheels might not go down. Baldwyn offered up a prayer to the effect that if he reached the ground intact, he would sponsor the music-loving Tetley. The plane landed safely, and Tetley got his sponsor.
He and Eve worked every spare hour together preparing Victress at Plymouth’s Millbay Docks. This meant afternoons and long into most nights since both were working during the day – Tetley still had naval duties, and would not be released from service until 1 September.
Eve organised Tetley’s food with great attention to nutrition, variety, and appeal. She augmented the inevitable corned beef and staples of the sailor’s diet with tins of roast duck, roast goose, jugged hare, smoked turkey, venison, roast pheasant, and a huge variety of seafood, including octopus and rainbow trout.
Plymouth is a large natural harbour, the home of the Navy, an ideal place in which to prepare any vessel for sea. Tetley was soon joined by three other Golden Globe racers. The first arrived one day in July. Nigel Tetley looked up as the lock gates at Millbay Docks opened and a rough-looking steel ketch sailed in. It was unlike any yacht he had ever seen. There was a brutal practicality to it: telephone poles for masts, steel pipe for its bowsprit, no wood to varnish, just a plain paint finish – the only hint of warmth was the startling fire-engine red of its hull. A wiry, muscular figure stood at the bow rolling a cigarette as the boat appeared to sail itself slowly towards the dock. Tetley hailed the newcomer, asking the name of the vessel.
‘Joshua,’ came the reply. Bernard Moitessier had arrived.
In the weeks that followed, two more boats, Loïck Fougeron’s steel cutter, Captain Browne, and Bill King’s brand new light-displacement, slippery-smooth, cold-moulded, junk-rigged schooner Galway Blazer II, joined Victress and Joshua at the dock.
Fougeron, a 42-year-old Breton who managed a motorcycle company in Casablanca, was a friend of Bernard Moitessier’s. He had sailed with him aboard Joshua from the Moroccan coast to the Canary Islands and undoubtedly was heavily influenced by the French sailing superstar. Fougeron had an able vessel, a steel-hulled 30-footer that would have met with Moitessier’s approval. Before sailing Captain Browne from Toulon, where he had fitted it out near Moitessier’s Joshua, to Plymouth, Fougeron had had almost no single-handed experience.
The four sailors quickly put aside the concerns of rivalry. They looked over one another’s boats, freely traded information, ate dinners together, and talked about their race. They established the camaraderie of soldiers waiting to ship out for war.
7
IN THE MIDDLE OF JUNE, two weeks out of Inishmore, John Ridgway was closing with Madeira where he had arranged to meet a journalist, Bill Gardner, from his sponsor The People, and hand over letters and photographs. He was making good time, but his mood was all wrong. The loneliness most single-handers quickly adjust to had only intensified. His hand-cranked Lifeline radio, the same model he had used successfully on the transatlantic row, had stopped working; unable to send or receive messages to and from home, his loneliness grew even worse. A compulsive eater ashore, he was losing his appetite and had to force himself to eat his daily ‘rations’ prepared for him by the Horlicks company. And the collisions at the start of his voyage had tapped into a deep wellspring of anxiety. He confided to his log that he was now hearing, above the constant groans of a boat under way, ‘ominous creaking sounds’ from the area at the side of the boat that had been hit by the trawler. Ridgway’s confidence in himself and his boat was ebbing away.
On Sunday 16 June (two days after Robin Kn
ox-Johnston sailed from Falmouth), Madeira’s mountainous profile rose out of the sea ahead. Fishermen in small boats saw Ridgway and waved. The land turned green and terraced with fields as he approached. But in the afternoon as he neared the northwest corner of the island, the spot for his rendezvous with Bill Gardner, a strong local wind, skewed and reinforced by its passage around the high land, rose and blew him offshore, where he reduced sail and hove to for the night.
The next day, a local boat carrying Gardner found Ridgway and English Rose. The men waved and shouted at each other across the water through loud-hailers, and then Gardner’s boat drew close enough for normal talk, even jokes.
‘I’ve been waiting ten days,’ said Gardner.
‘I’ll bet you have. Sunning yourself on the beach.’
For a precious few minutes Ridgway had the companionship he sorely missed.
Using waterproof canisters pulled through the water by line, he sent Gardner a package of diaries, films, and tape recordings on a line. Gardner sent him back letters, newspapers, and local Madeiran bread, cheese, sardines, and beer. They talked about the race, Gardner filling him in on when Chay Blyth and Robin Knox-Johnston had sailed.
Soon it was time to part. Ridgway asked him to send his love to Marie Christine and his baby daughter, Rebecca, and the men agreed they would see each other again off the town of Bluff, New Zealand, in October, three and a half months away. Then Gardner’s boat motored away.
Ridgway headed for the open sea, enveloped once more in absolute isolation.
Later, reading a copy of the Sunday Times that Gardner had passed to him, Ridgway discovered that the race rules governing ‘taking on supplies’ extended to the mail and the fresh lunch he’d just received. How ridiculous! he thought, enraged by the pettiness of it. Obviously Gardner, who had now technically disqualified Ridgway, had thought so too.
Ridgway plugged on, but he remained desperately lonely and unhappy. After a struggle getting a sail down in windy conditions one morning, he came below into the cabin and burst into tears. He realised that he had cried at some point on each of the last twenty-seven days.
He wondered why he was attempting this voyage, and what had driven the other competitors to attempt it. Years before, when he had thought of giving up the canoe race after capsizing, it had been his partner Chay Blyth who had been fierce about not giving up, who had pushed them on and made them win. On their transatlantic row, it was Blyth who kept up their spirits, once repeating over and over during a five-day storm, ‘It’s almost over, soon it’ll be a memory.’
Ridgway later wrote:
Whenever we were really miserable Chay would strike up with the old Scottish songs of his childhood. ‘The Road and the Miles to Dundee’ never failed to rally my spirits; he was tremendous when things seemed really grim.
When they were closing with the coast of Ireland and worried that a storm might throw them against the cliffs, Ridgway had offered to make a call for help on their radio. ‘We’ll go on,’ said Blyth unhesitatingly.
Now Ridgway suspected that on his own he wasn’t hungry enough to win.
A seaman is not made by simply going to sea. He must also find in himself a love for it. Ridgway was not engaged by the sea. He had no feeling for it, no love of its literature, no sea heroes to emulate. As with his transatlantic row, the sea was simply a hostile environment to be survived, the voyage an ordeal to be endured. Ridgway kept his mind ashore. He thought of home. He thought of the adventure school in Scotland that he hoped to start with Marie Christine. He listened to broadcasts of cricket test matches on the BBC World Service and vividly remembered his own visits to Lord’s cricket ground, and ‘the great bags of cherries eaten very slowly in the stands, while white figures dashed about the green grass, far below. The pigeons, muted applause, the scoreboard – I could see it all.’
He pushed English Rose south, but his heart was no longer in the voyage.
A few hundred miles astern of Ridgway, Chay Blyth was in much the same frame of mind. He was also having trouble getting his radio to transmit, his boat was worrying him, and he was lonely. He had a further problem: he was still uncertain of his position. His early efforts at celestial navigation had him on dry land smack in the middle of an island among the mountainous Cape Verde group (6,000 feet high), yet he could see nothing but empty ocean all around him.
He wondered how Ridgway was doing, enviously supposing that his former shipmate was untroubled by the same worries and loneliness. But Blyth had only seen Ridgway in the company of Blyth, and he did not imagine that his superior officer might be going to pieces without him, without the obdurate driving force of Blyth’s personality.
Yet the image of Ridgway doing so much better was a boon to him – as were all his difficulties. Adversity was like an electric cattle prod to Chay Blyth. It spurred him on. His reaction to difficult or desperate conditions had always been the opposite of Ridgway’s.
Ridgway, a deeply introspective man, was acutely aware of his tendencies towards weakness and softness. He had fought this by boxing at school and in the army and by driving himself to become as hard and tough as he could be. He believed it was his own strength or weakness that would bring him success or failure. He counted only on himself. Chay Blyth had a far simpler view. His efforts would count for only so much; after that it was up to God. And God was on his side, he had no doubt of that. When he prayed during bad weather and the weather subsequently got better, he knew why: ‘It has died down a bit now,’ he wrote in his logbook, ‘after I had prayed for it to go down. Nobody on this earth could convince me that there is no Lord.’
Now, in the middle of the Atlantic, lost, lonely, and bruised inside his lurching weekender’s cruiser, Chay Blyth was unavoidably becoming aware of his boat’s shortcomings, its inherent unsuitability for the Southern Ocean. He was beginning to realise that at some point ahead, probably around the time he entered the Southern Ocean, he would face a choice between persisting with the voyage despite being both fundamentally unprepared and in the wrong boat or giving up. Yet for the time being he pushed on with savage determination. He embraced almost exuberantly everything that was thrown at him with all the toughness his years of army training had bred in him.
Blyth was getting a feel for the sea. He was becoming a seaman.
In contrast, Robin Knox-Johnston’s contentment at sea was striking. He had already spent two years living aboard Suhaili, in port and at sea, and he felt completely at home in her. He quickly and comfortably fell into a seagoing routine adapted from his 10,000-mile voyage from India.
Unlike most sailors, solo or sailing with others, Knox-Johnston enjoyed jumping overboard for a swim if the day was warm. The perimeter of one’s vessel at sea is the very clear boundary of safety; beyond it lie peril and possibly death, and their nearness is keenly felt. It helps keep one aboard. The visceral, unreasoning fears of abandonment, the abyssal depths and all its creatures, make it very difficult for most people to jump overboard once the shore has receded beyond a short distance away, even with trusted companions aboard a boat. On one occasion when Ridgway and Blyth were rowing across the Atlantic, one of them had to go in to see if the boat’s rudder had been damaged. The weather was hot, the sea was calm, yet they argued all day to see who would go overboard. Eventually Ridgway dived in, inspected the rudder, and got out fast. ‘Go on, Chay, it’s lovely,’ he said, grinning. Blyth went in and was quickly back on board. Neither of them went in again.
Knox-Johnston was untroubled. Trailing a line astern, he would jump from the bowsprit and swim alongside Suhaili until she overtook him, then grab the line and pull himself aboard. This, he felt, kept him fit and clean.
He might have been on holiday.
A sedate lunch followed my swim, usually consisting of biscuits and cheese or the like, with a pickled onion on special occasions as a treat. The afternoons would be spent just like the morning, working or reading, until 5 p.m. when, if I felt like it, I dropped everything for a beer or a whisky.<
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And from his logbook:
I repaired the Gilbert and Sullivan tape cassette … and had a wonderful evening. I joined in sitting at the table in the homely light of the cabin light. It is not cold enough yet for clothes, just pleasant … I think I’ll have a nip of Grant’s. I can think of no one with whom I’d trade my lot at present.
He was by now a seasoned navigator, with a seaman’s knowledge of the ocean’s wind and current systems, and he made steady if unremarkable progress south, gaining on the two army sailors.
Like all solo sailors, he had to determine how long he could sleep before waking to check that he was not about to be run down by a ship. Figuring the likelihood of encountering a ship at sea is impossible. Until the middle of the twentieth century, most ships kept to well-defined shipping lanes, routes across oceans that offered the most favourable combination of weather and ocean conditions, and economical distance run. The British Admiralty publication Ocean Passages of the World, which the Golden Globe racers carried aboard their boats, is a pilot book detailing these preferred routes for high-and low-powered vessels, as well as for sailing vessels. It comes with charts showing these shipping lanes.
Early single-handers – and the sleepy shorthanded crews of other small sailboats – could avoid these highways in the sea or, if they had to cross or approach shipping lanes, knew what to expect and could remain awake or catnap for a few days. Afterwards, out of harm’s way, they could, and usually did, turn in for hours at a time. But about the time of the Golden Globe race, ships began to stray out of their lanes. They became more powerful, able to head more directly for their destinations against prevailing winds and currents. They began to get daily radio reports from shore stations giving them optimum courses around local weather systems.
A Voyage For Madmen Page 7