A Voyage For Madmen

by Peter Nichols

  Finally, on 27 August, he encountered his first real gale of the voyage. But the wind was not westerly, which he could have expected so close to the Roaring Forties. It blew from the southeast, the direction in which he was trying to go.

  Suhaili made little headway against it. She was not designed to pound to windward, and Knox-Johnston reefed her down to avoid straining her. For a night and a day she bobbed alternately northeast and southwest, either side of the eye of the wind, on whichever tack appeared the best course. The seas built up until they were steep and breaking, but the heavy double-ender was in her element. Perfectly balanced under shortened rig, she rode the waves beautifully.

  But her Indian-carpentered hatches leaked copiously. Such leaks do not bring the disquiet that comes with water seeping in through the hull below the waterline, but they produce a sodden misery for the sailor in his home at sea. With every wave that broke over the deck and cabin, salt water poured in through the companionway hatch and splashed over the chart table, the book rack, and the Marconi radio. Knox-Johnston covered these with towels and rags, but they only ensured continual dampness. The skylight dripped incessantly above his sleeping bag, which he tried to keep from being soaked by placing a piece of canvas over it. There was so much water coming in that during this first gale Knox-Johnston wore his oilskin jacket and trousers below, and these, streaming salt water, added to the thick damp in the cabin.

  A small boat at sea is its crew’s only port in a storm, and if the boat is cold and wet below, its gear beginning to fail, the dismalness of such a situation can’t be exaggerated. It undermines the sailor’s most important illusion: that he is safe. As he lay soaked and battered a thousand miles west of Cape Town, the proximity of safety, warmth, and company ate at Knox-Johnston and he thought again of giving up.

  Only a few hundred miles away – two days ahead of Knox-Johnston and leading the race – Chay Blyth was battling the same gale. The weather system (travelling across the ocean from the west) that had passed over Robin Knox-Johnston on 27 August, reached Blyth and Dytiscus III, a lesser sailor and a lesser boat, in the dark early hours of 28 August. But nobody was the equal of Chay Blyth for his soldierly attack at whatever was thrown at him.

  For two days the gale drove him (as it did Knox-Johnston) northeast, then southwest. When it was over, after a day of respite, gale-force winds rose again from the south. Blyth headed east, pushing Dytiscus III as hard as he knew how – harder than he knew he should, for he was now well aware of his boat’s frailty. The little weekend cruiser was leaking badly, its gear was showing signs of wear, things were breaking. But what he had been able to do with it so far was remarkable. Knox-Johnston was being careful with Suhaili, determined not to strain her during this first gale, but Chay Blyth was actually doing his best to push Dytiscus III to the breaking point. South Africa was his last possible stop if he was to abandon the race before heading east and further south into the truly dangerous seas of the Roaring Forties. To break something important, to lose a mast for example, far out in the empty wastes of the Southern Ocean, could be a fatal exercise. If such a catastrophe was to happen, he wanted it sooner rather than later.

  On 6 September, Chay Blyth sailed into the Roaring Forties.

  The next day, his ninety-second at sea, his voyage became as long as his Atlantic row, and as if on cue, signalling Blyth’s move into new territory, the servo blade (which served as the trim tab) of his wind vane steering gear broke.

  This was the sort of crucial gear failure he had feared, and even expected. But when it came, it threw Blyth into a crisis of indecision. Unlike deeper-keeled boats, Dytiscus III did not track well with her shallow bilge keels without constant attention to her helm, whether from Blyth or the wind vane gear. Without self-steering, he could not go on. He replaced the broken blade with his one spare and now thought hard about putting in to South Africa so a new one could be flown out to him. This would not be allowed by the Sunday Times, but this no longer worried him. According to the rules, he had already disqualified himself.

  Weeks earlier, he had found that his supply of petrol had turned a milky white: it had become contaminated with salt water from one of the boat’s many leaks. This meant he could no longer run his battery charger, which he relied on for his boat’s navigation lights, but more importantly, for his communicating radio. He was immediately concerned that without radio transmissions his wife Maureen would worry about him. He first thought of stopping at South Africa for gas, where of course he would be disqualified. Finally he decided to head for Tristan da Cunha, a small, isolated South Atlantic island group belonging to Britain, where he hoped to pass close enough to shout a message at someone to tell people in England that he was all right.

  He reached Tristan on 15 August, approaching the high, forbidding island in circumstances that would frighten any sailor. The wind was behind him, a shore of cliffs rose ahead of him, and he had no chart of the sea bottom beneath him – a recipe for disaster. Getting closer, he saw a ship anchored ahead, and he fired off a flare, a distress signal. This is not a seamanlike practice when there is no emergency, but Blyth got the reaction he wanted: a small boat put out from the anchored ship and approached him. The vessel, the men in the boat told him, was the Tolkienesque-sounding Gillian Gaggins, and she had arrived from Cape Town only that morning on one of her three annual visits to pump petrol ashore to the island. The men from the Gaggins told him there was nowhere safe to anchor nearby and that he could lie to the ship’s stern on a line. Blyth sailed Dytiscus III up to the ship and was hailed by its captain, Neil MacAlister, another Scotsman, who invited Blyth aboard for a drink and offered to give him petrol and whatever assistance he needed. This was too much for Chay Blyth. It bore all the signs of holy intervention.

  It was all entirely unbelievable … My arrival had coincided with [MacAlister’s], in the face of odds of about a hundred and twenty to one against, and here he was with a ship which could give me the very stuff I was looking for … This was more than luck. Coincidence alone could not take the credit. God had been a reality to me throughout the trip, and now, yet again, He had manifested His presence.

  He wasn’t going to question God. God had spared him the decision of whether or not to take on petrol by placing a tanker in his path.

  For the first time in nine weeks he stepped off Dytiscus III and boarded the Gillian Gaggins. He drank good Scotch whisky with the captain while the ship’s engineer fixed his saltwater-impaired generator. He learned for the first time, from Captain MacAlister, that John Ridgway had dropped out of the race. Blyth was stunned. Ridgway, his superior officer who had called the shots through many adventures, had always appeared to him the expert, the real seaman of the two, the better planner, the better-equipped – the better man. Until now he had assumed that his old partner was somewhere ahead of him, that in much the same way they had crossed the Atlantic together, they were still sharing this experience. It had been a comfort. With Ridgway out, Blyth felt suddenly vulnerable. He was in the lead now, on his own, heading towards the Southern Ocean with no one in front of him.

  He accepted Captain MacAlister’s help and hospitality. He had a hot shower and spent the day aboard the ship sending telegrams to Maureen and others who had helped him with the boat, asking their advice on various problems. He ate dinner and did not resist the invitation to spend the night aboard the Gillian Gaggins.

  Blyth was torn about what the conditions of the race meant to him. In the telegrams he sent to England from aboard the ship, he said that he was taking aboard fuel – which he knew by then was not allowed under the rules – but that he had not stepped ashore. His focus and interest had shifted from the broader view of the Sunday Times’ race to his own personal reasons for attempting a nonstop circumnavigation. He had begun asking himself the question they all asked sooner or later, in the face of unrelenting hardship and loneliness: What am I doing here? What’s the point? In time, each sailor came up with a different answer and acted accordingly. ‘We’
re going to win!’ he had said to Ridgway at the low point in their canoe race, that goal overriding any other consideration. But Blyth now decided he was far more interested in his own ability to go the distance than in winning the race.

  The next morning, while he was eating breakfast aboard the Gillian Gaggins, the ship’s bosun announced that Dytiscus III, which had been lying astern of the ship all night, had broken free and was drifting towards the rocky shore. The wind and sea had risen during the night, forcing the ship to interrupt its pumping operations, and it had steamed further offshore. The mooring line holding Dytiscus III had parted. Blyth was frantic. But MacAlister steamed around the drifting yacht; a grappling hook was thrown, and the boat was taken in tow again. Blyth was carried out to it in the ship’s lifeboat, together with cans of petrol. He raised sail and sped away towards the rough, empty ocean, alone again, but now on his own terms.

  Now, three weeks later, riding out another gale, 400 miles from South Africa and 4,400 from Australia, Chay Blyth decided that if he was to go on, he must stop and get spare servo blades. He radioed telegrams to England, with the help of a relaying ship somewhere not far away, asking for spare blades, bolts, and drills to be sent to him at Port Elizabeth. Then he headed for land.

  What it amounted to was that the thing I was still curious about was me. The boat, simply because I had taken it where it had never been intended to go, had failed … But I still did not know if I myself could stand up to the circumnavigation – and if I could find out, then I wanted to do so.

  This business of making myself thoroughly unpleasant to the body which God gave me is something that has fascinated me for almost as long as I can remember … I cannot say that I enjoyed my Arctic and desert survival courses or the rough parts of the trans-Atlantic crossing any more than I can say I was enjoying having the stuffing knocked out of me in Dytiscus III– and yet there is an enjoyment … And I did not want, if I could possibly help it, to miss finding out all I could about this round-the-world exercise simply because my boat was not able to do the thing in one go. Survival, after all, was the object with which I began my preparations, long before a newspaper came along and turned it into a race. Provided I could go on without being foolhardy, I wanted to see the thing through. It was my voyage of discovery, and what I wanted to discover was me.

  With the last sentence Blyth stumbles across the credo of all adventurers, be they sailors, mountaineers, or explorers. The where and how is simply the means to burrow as deeply as posssible into oneself. It’s the answer to the relentless question that floods the mind when the exercise becomes painful and severe: What am I doing here? What’s the point?

  Another gale blew him east past Port Elizabeth. In the early hours of Friday 13 September, Blyth found himself off East London. He called the port radio station and asked for a tow to come out to pull him in. At 8.30 a.m. the East London pilot launch appeared, threw him a line, and towed him into the harbour. A tow is almost always an ignominious surrender of the sort of self-sufficiency sailors go to sea to find, but tied up at the dock, Blyth would not get off his boat. He still intended to go on; he planned to wait aboard his boat at the dock for his spares to be forwarded to him from Port Elizabeth, and then set off. But his concept of ‘alone’ and ‘nonstop’ had strayed so far from the idea of staying out at sea, that his ratio nalisations for continuing his voyage, and yet staying aboard his boat while docked, grew strained.

  Chick Gough, a former paratrooper friend who had moved to South Africa, appeared on the dock with a bottle of whisky. He came aboard and they drank the whisky and Gough went off and came back with some beer. The men drank into the night. After four days at the dock, during which Blyth drank and caroused with Gough and spoke with people ashore, yet never got off his boat, the spare parts arrived. Blyth took them aboard and sailed.

  Two days later, in a strong gale – Blyth estimated the wind gusting at around 60 knots and described the seas as ‘colossal’, the biggest he had ever seen – he gave up and turned the boat back to Port Elizabeth. It was the wrong boat, he accepted finally, and he had no business being where he was in it. He telegrammed Maureen what he was doing and asked her to fly out and sail the boat home with him, and she did.

  For a neophyte – or for any kind of sailor – he had put up a remarkable performance. In three months of racing, Robin Knox-Johnston, the ingenious and consummate seaman, who had set out six days after him, in a larger boat, had gained only four days on Blyth in his weekend cruiser.

  The race was over for Chay Blyth. But he had discovered for himself the awful and compelling laboratory of the sea. He would go back to it to continue his experiment.

  11

  THE WATERS OFF CAPE HORN have long held the reputation of being the most fearsome a ship or sailor can pass through. However, South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope, at latitude 34 degrees south, receives solid doses of Southern Ocean weather and poses its own peculiar hazards for mariners attempting to round Africa between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

  Their problem is the Agulhas current, an immensely strong confluence of water that funnels south out of the Indian Ocean through the Mozambique Channel until it is a concentrated arterial torrent quite separate from the cold ocean around it, pumping south and west off the cape coast directly against the prevailing westerly wind systems of the Southern Ocean. When these westerly gales, or the cape’s sudden ‘southerly busters,’ blow across the Agulhas, wind and water collide, creating heaping turbulence on a scale seen nowhere else on Earth. Extraordinary freak seas and holes develop. Ships hundreds of feet long have literally fallen off giant waves, plunged through the deep hole-like troughs, and kept on going down. The Agulhas phenomenon occurs mainly along the 100-fathom line paralleling the coast, but gyres of warm Agulhas water spin off from the main stream and curl like beckoning fingers far out into the cold Southern Ocean. It’s the chaotic changeability of South African waters, the suddenness of their disruption, that is unlike the more consistent conditions off Cape Horn. Many knowledgeable sailors are more afraid of rounding South Africa than the Horn. Here catastrophe can occur with devastating suddenness.

  Robin Knox-Johnston sailed into the Roaring Forties on 3 September, about 500 miles west-southwest of the Cape of Good Hope. It was near the end of the austral winter. A northerly wind pushed him southeast, deeper into the Southern Ocean. That night, portentously, a vagabond gust tore across Suhaili and split the small spinnaker flying in the bow.

  Crossing the parallel of 40 degrees south did not automatically mean the weather should suddenly become worse, but Knox-Johnston found himself waiting nervously for it, and wishing that what he knew must come eventually would come soon. For two days the weather was fine, but then his shipboard barometer began a steep fall, auguring stormy conditions. Despite this, 5 September dawned nearly calm, and he set more sail. During the afternoon the wind rose, and at 1700 his first Southern Ocean cold front overtook him. It was sudden and violent. Within minutes, the wind backed from the north into the southwest and began to blow at gale force. Brutal waves of hail bounced off Suhaili’s deck and drove into Knox-Johnston’s hands and face as he put deep reefs in his mainsail and mizzen and replaced the jib with the tiny, heavily reinforced storm jib. Escaping below, wet, cold, and stung, he took a heavy slug of brandy.

  Suhaili ran east before the rising wind. A confused cross sea soon developed, as new waves driven by the southwestly wind toppled against the old swells from the north. However, Knox-Johnston felt that ‘the Admiral’, as he called his wind vane, was working well in the stronger wind, and Suhaili seemed to be handling the conditions.

  He was apprehensive and spent the evening in his foul-weather clothing, lying on the piece of canvas he kept over his sleeping bag, ready for whatever might happen. Suhaili’s cabin – a tight 8-foot by 12-foot box, crammed with books, gear, jugs of food, and fuel – swooped up and down and lurched sickeningly from side to side with the violence of a roller coaster ride. The noise of the gale – waves cra
shing over the boat, seas rushing along the other side of the planking inches from his head, the wind battering the reefed sails and shaking the rigging, causing the whole boat to shudder violently when it wasn’t being slammed by water – kept Knox-Johnston awake. The singular noise of high wind in a boat’s rigging during a gale at sea has no counterpart in the landbound world, where overhead electrical, cable, and telephone wires are long and run without great tension. Wind howling through these is low in tone and without multiple atonal chords. Suhaili was cobwebbed with thirty or more separate lengths of wire and rope running up its masts, tightened or winched to considerable tension. This malevolent eldritch shrieking was hard to endure. It ate at Knox-Johnston’s nerves. It was undeniably the sound of imminent disaster, which grew to seem more likely, and finally inevitable, the longer it continued.

  That evening, to ease his nerves the way one might by phoning a friend, Knox-Johnston talked into his tape recorder, attempting to describe the conditions and his feelings. But as the night wore on and nothing happened, he drifted off to sleep.

  He was woken by the awful roaring that accompanied the cascade of heavy objects falling on top of him. The kerosene lantern hanging from the cabin roof swung violently and went out. As he tried to get out from under the weight heaped on top of him, he realised in the blackness that his small world had shifted 90 degrees on its axis and he was pinned to the side of the boat, which now lay beneath him.

  As he struggled free, Suhaili lurched violently back upright and he was thrown across the cabin, together with tools, tins of food, a mass of flying objects. The boat had been slammed over on its side and then righted itself, and as he fought through the dark towards the companionway, all he could see was the vision of what he was certain awaited him on deck: stumps of broken masts, a tangle of wire and torn sails, a long night’s fight to stay afloat and alive. He was so certain of this that it was several moments before he would believe that the masts he saw standing were real.