A Voyage For Madmen

by Peter Nichols

  Groping in the dark on deck, he found that one of the Admiral’s two vanes was bent over and split on the mizzen rigging wire. He worked his way around the deck, feeling and seeing what he could and found no other obvious damage. As he was doing this another huge wave broke over the boat, throwing it over on its beam again, and Knox-Johnston had to hang on hard to avoid being swept overboard as solid water coursed around him. He felt that Suhaili was wrongly aligned in the wild cross seas, and he altered course slightly, adjusting the remaining wind vane, which was still steering the boat. Then he went below.

  Water was everywhere, sloshing around his feet. Anxiously he began working the bilge pump, expecting at every moment another knockdown wave. The familiarity of pumping water out of the boat began to calm him. When he got the water below the floorboards, he started cleaning up the cabin.

  Everything – books, clothes, fruit, tools, medical supplies – was jumbled together and scattered everywhere. While slowly sorting and restowing what he could, he became aware of water still pouring in around the edge of the cabin with every wave that broke aboard, which was often. Knox-Johnston was alarmed to discover large cracks all around the edge of Suhaili’s cabin, and to find that the interior bulkheads had been shifted by the force of the wave that had broken over the boat and thrown it on its side. Most likely the cabin had been damaged not by the wave that crashed into it on its windward side but by the sea on its lee, or underside, as it was thrown over. Sea water can be compared to liquid concrete, and if one imagines a boat falling sideways on to gluey form-fitting concrete, it is the cabin, bolted to the deck, not the much stronger hull, that is structurally most vulnerable. The force of the water, or concrete, will be upward as the boat slams down on to it, tending to push the cabin upward, trying to shear it off the deck.

  As he was inspecting the damage, another wave broke over the boat and he felt the whole cabin move; another knockdown could result in the entire cabin being torn off, leaving a 6-foot by 12-foot hole in the deck, which would fill with water and sink Suhaili immediately. But there was nothing he could do about it then, in the dark, with the weather preventing any attempt at repair. So Knox-Johnston raised the whisky bottle to his lips, swallowed a mouthful, wrapped himself in canvas, and – somehow – went to sleep.

  When he woke in the morning and looked outside, squalls were racing across the sea, driving hail into the water and turning it milky white. But the storm seemed to be past its peak. He made himself porridge for breakfast, and after a mug of coffee and a cigarette he felt ‘quite happy’. From his generous stores, he gathered a quantity of bolts and screws and spent the entire day reinforcing the cabin top.

  Two days after the knockdown, conditions had moderated enough for him to repair the bent wind vane without it flying away, but the waves were still large enough to roll Suhaili heavily, and Knox-Johnston, working on the tubular outriggers that held the vanes, was repeatedly immersed in cold seas.

  The relative quiet was short-lived. Another gale overtook him, and the daily face of the voyage now changed utterly. In the eighty days before he had reached the Southern Ocean, Knox-Johnston had experienced one true gale. Now they tore past at a rate of one every two days. Usually the wind started to blow from the north, backed suddenly into the west while rising to gale or storm force (wind speed between 34 and 60 knots), then subsided in the southwest and south within a few days. The waves heaped up by these strong and fast-changing winds, colliding into each other from two or more directions, created chaotic and dangerous seas. The normal and safest procedure for a yacht the size of Suhaili encountering such weather would be to heave to – stop and ride out the storm under reduced sail – but this would not get Knox-Johnston far. The wind was predominantly westerly, pushing him in the desired easterly direction of his circumnavigation, and if he wanted to win he had to keep sailing.

  Driving the boat beyond normally safe limits prevented him from getting adequate rest. He slept fully clothed, wrapped up in canvas, grabbing short naps between jolts that threw him across the cabin. Sleep deprivation and continual bruising knocks quickly took their toll on his morale.

  September 9th, 1968

  I finally awoke at 11.00 having had three hours uninterrupted sleep … We were rolling very heavily and it was difficult to stand inside the cabin, but I managed to heat up some soup … I felt very depressed on getting up … I used up a lot of nervous energy last night by leaving the jib up, for what – maybe an extra 20 miles if we’re lucky – and what difference does 20 miles make when I have about 20,000 to go?

  The future does not look particularly bright … sitting here being thrown about for the next 150 days … with constant soakings as I have to take in or let out sail, is not an exciting prospect. After four gales my hands are worn and cut about badly and I am aware of my fingers on account of the pain from skin tears and broken fingernails. I have bruises all over from being thrown about. My skin itches from constant chafing with wet clothes, and I forget when I last had a proper wash … I feel altogether mentally and physically exhausted and I’ve been in the Southern Ocean only a week. It seems years since I gybed to turn east and yet it was only last Tuesday night, not six days, and I have another 150 days of it yet. I shall be a zombie in that time. I feel that I have had enough of sailing for the time being; it’s about time I made a port, had a long hot bath, a steak with eggs, peas, and new potatoes, followed by a lemon meringue pie, coffee, Drambuie, and a cigar and then a nice long uninterrupted sleep …

  A prisoner in Dartmoor doesn’t get hard labour like this; the public wouldn’t stand for it and he has company, however uncongenial. In addition he gets dry clothing and undisturbed sleep. I wonder how the crime rate would be affected if people were sentenced to sail around the world alone, instead of going to prison. It’s ten months’ solitary confinement with hard labour …

  On 10 September the self-steering trim tab broke. Like Chay Blyth, he carried one spare. Replacing it was not easy. The bottom of the tab fitted into a metal shoe, or bar, protruding aft from the boat’s keel, 4 feet beneath the surface. Kneeling on the aft deck, Knox-Johnston could not get the trim tab to drop into the shoe. Finally he stripped off his clothes, fortified himself with a mouthful of brandy, and went overboard. As the boat rose and fell in the waves, submerging him completely in the 50-degree water, Knox-Johnston had to hold on with one hand while trying to slip the trim tab in place – something like threading a giant needle in icy surf.

  The failure of the trim tab worried him, just as it had Blyth. It had broken after 8,000 miles, but only one week into the Southern Ocean leg of his voyage. He had at least twenty more weeks before rounding the Horn and turning north back into the Atlantic.

  A greater concern now revealed itself. To conserve his water supplies, Knox-Johnston had been using the water from his plastic containers in the cabin, refilling them with rainwater he had been able to catch in a bucket hanging from the gooseneck below the mainsail. He had not yet touched his main water supply of 86 gallons in two tanks beneath the cabin sole. Now, to lighten Suhaili’s bow, which he felt would help her sail better running downwind in the stronger conditions of the Southern Ocean, he decided to start using the water from the forward tank. When he hooked this tank up to his galley pump, nothing but a brown stinking liquid came out. The tank had become contaminated with seawater, probably a result of the flooding below after his knockdown. He tried the second and larger tank and found the same.

  Knox-Johnston lit a cigarette and thought things over. A seaman’s dilemma from ancient times: ‘Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.’ There was no immediate concern: he had 10 gallons left in the plastic containers, more than enough to reach Cape Town if necessary. Could he go on? The 10 gallons was forty days’ water at his present rate of consumption; Australia was about fifty days away. Clearly, with the rain and hail from Southern Ocean gales, he could get that far. He had hundreds of tins of fruit juice. He decided to keep going and hoped that his water-catching kept
pace.

  On 13 September, he learned over the radio that Chay Blyth had stopped at East London and pulled out of the race. He had wondered how close he and Blyth were to each other during the first big gale, and now knew that Blyth had still been two days ahead of him. Chay Blyth was far less a beginner by his voyage’s end, and it’s interesting to speculate how these two unusually tough young men would have raced against each other if Blyth had sailed a more suitable boat. Knox-Johnston, who did not know the degree of Blyth’s inexperience, was sorry to lose the pressure of a close competitor. (He would find it again, in spades.)

  He had intended to sail west following the fortieth parallel as closely as possible to avoid some, if not all, of the worst of the Southern Ocean weather. He had been pushed south of this latitude, and now he sailed northeast for a few days. The weather accordingly became better, and he started repairing the split spinnaker in hopes of finding conditions light enough to use it. He tied the sail’s boltrope at opposite ends of the cabin to hold it up and taut and began sewing his way along the rope.

  Coming to the end of a length of twine, I used my teeth to help tie a knot, and then tried to stand up. I had not moved more than three inches when I felt a painful wrench … my moustache was firmly tied to the spinnaker … I tried to stretch to the nearest point where the rope was made fast, but I was a good foot short. I rolled my eyes round looking for the knife but it was tantalisingly out of reach … I could not undo or cut the knot that held me and it was getting on towards beer time. There was only one way out of it. I closed my eyes, gritted my teeth and jerked my head sharply back, tearing myself free. It hurt like hell and tears filled my eyes, but it soon passed off and at least, as I rushed to the mirror to reassure myself, the symmetry of the moustache was not badly upset.

  A few days later he had a more serious accident. While he was crouched over the batteries in the cramped ‘engine room’, checking them with a hydrometer, Suhaili broached before a large wave. Knox-Johnston fell and battery acid splashed into his left eye. He got to the deck as fast as possible and threw seawater into his eye for five minutes. Then he went below and washed the eye with some precious freshwater. He added eye drops, but the eye was now stinging painfully.

  That night he wondered gloomily whether he would lose the sight in his left eye. He thought about turning around and heading for Durban and medical attention. But then he thought about the two formidable competitors, Bill King and Bernard Moitessier, far behind him but no doubt gaining fast. He was leading the race now, and he decided that winning would be worth an eye.

  But he hurt!

  September 22nd, 1968 – Day 100

  Last Day of Southern Winter.

  Awoke to find us heading north so got up and gybed. I banged my elbow badly during the night and what with that, numerous other bruises, and an eye that throbbed, I felt as if I had just gone through ten rounds with Cassius Clay.

  12

  RODNEY HALLWORTH WAS THE OWNER of the Devon News Agency. He was an independent gatherer of local news for West Country newspapers, a stringer for the national papers, and a publicist. He had been a crime reporter for the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, and when he moved to the rather less sensational coastal town of Teignmouth in Devon, and became its public relations officer, he brought his gift for melodramatic spin with him. Far more than is common among journalists – supposedly impartial fly-on-the-wall observers – Hallworth gave the whole of his passionate and emotional nature to his stories and clients.

  He first heard of Donald Crowhurst when the Sunday Times commissioned him to photograph the mystery entrant in the Golden Globe race. Hallworth sent a photographer to Crowhurst’s hometown of Bridgwater, some distance away in Somerset. On his return, the photographer told Hallworth about the electronics wizard who was going to sail his computer-operated trimaran around the world, and mentioned that he didn’t have a publicist. Hallworth immediately got in touch with Crowhurst and they met in a hotel in Taunton, a town not far from Bridgwater.

  Hallworth, a large, flamboyantly dressed man who exuded an inescapable bonhomie, found Crowhurst reserved at first. But after a meal together he believed they were great friends. His worldliness, he felt, appealed to Donald Crowhurst, whom he recognised as a man, like himself, who could not be contained by a small provincial town.

  Rodney Hallworth seemed heaven-sent to Crowhurst. Stanley Best had agreed to underwrite the basic cost of his boat, on the understanding that Crowhurst would continue to seek and find other sponsors to pay for the additional expenses incurred by the whole enterprise – food for the voyage, navigational gear, Crowhurst’s ‘revolutionary’ systems for his boat, and the support of his wife Clare and their four children while he was away. But he had found almost nothing. His many letters sent to companies around Britain publicising his voyage, his prospects, his own company and its innovative designs, had resulted in little more than ten cases of Heinz tinned food and some Whitbread’s barley wine.* To safeguard his investment in the boat and to see that Crowhurst actually got as far as the starting line, Stanley Best found himself forced to dig deeper and pay for many of these expenses. To cover himself, Best gave Crowhurst a second mortgage loan on his house, a situation ensuring that unless he won, and won big, Crowhurst would be ruined.

  Hallworth’s enthusiasm, his expansive confidence, his promise of press coverage, and his belief that he could attract sponsors, were convincing – he was, like Donald Crowhurst, a man with a gift for convincing others of what he wanted to believe. He proposed that if Crowhurst would start his voyage at Teignmouth and use the name of the town in the boat’s name, he would start a campaign to find sponsors. Crowhurst, eager to comply, suggested Electron of Teignmouth to publicise his company. Rodney Hallworth, his main client’s most grandiloquent advocate, insisted on Teignmouth Electron.

  The boat’s launch date, 31 August, came and went with the trimaran unfinished. A revised deadline of 12 September passed. Eastwoods was bogged down with the extra work specified by Crowhurst: strengthening of the basic Piver design to stand up to the long passage through the Southern Ocean and modifications made for his self-righting apparatus and other equipment. Because of the heavy weight of the inflatable buoyancy bag that was to be lashed to the top of the mainmast, the mast had to be shorter, and this meant a redesign of the entire rigging plan, which Crowhurst had promised – and failed – to supply to the builders. Eastwood and his partner, John Elliot, frequently needed Crowhurst’s presence at the yard to help them determine the arrangement of these and many other changes, but the boatyard in Norfolk was on the far side of southern England, then a long day’s drive from Bridgwater, and they didn’t see enough of him. He was busy taking radio-telegraphy courses in Bristol, working out financial arrangements with Stanley Best and with Clare for his coming absence, arranging for a friend to take over the sale of his Navicators, looking for sponsors, and, perhaps, still tinkering with his ‘computer’ and its much-vaunted systems.

  On 21 September – two days before the next ‘without fail’ launch date of 23 September – Crowhurst and the builders had an angry argument over the phone. Eastwoods told him they were not intending to cover the boat’s plywood decks with fibreglass, as the plywood hulls (built by Cox Marine) had been. This fibreglass sheathing of the boat was part of the design’s specifications, and essential for preserving the watertightness and structural integrity of the deck. Eastwoods claimed that the delay in determining the rigging plan (John Eastwood had finally drawn up the new plan himself) had left them no time to glass the decks. They were planning simply to paint the bare plywood now, arguing that since the fibreglass was so thin, good polyurethane paint would do just as well (an incorrect claim and an unprofessional suggestion). Crowhurst was furious, but there was nothing he could do about it now. It was too late in the day.

  Over the years, Crowhurst’s intelligence, and the force of his personality, had convinced Clare Crowhurst that he could pull off anything he set his mind to – he always had.
The idea for his circumnavigation seemed to be going true to form: Donald had decided he was going to do it, and here it was happening, just as he had planned. But that night, after his phone call with Eastwoods, Crowhurst was so upset that Clare pleaded with him to refuse delivery of the boat, to abandon the project. To her surprise, he listened to her seriously. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ he said, ‘but the whole thing has become too important to me. I’ve got to go through with it, even if I have to build the boat myself on the way round.’

  It was the only time Clare asked him to give up. Taking her husband at his word, she supported him and did all she could to help him. She did not try to dissuade him again.

  On 15 September, the Sunday Times reported that Chay Blyth had put in to East London and was now out of the race. The article went on to say that the most recent competitor to start out, Commander Bill King, England’s submarine ace sailing his race-designed yacht, was the first sailor to overtake one of his rivals, Loïck Fougeron. On the previous Wednesday, King had radioed that he was between the Cape Verde Islands and the west coast of Africa. On the same day, Fougeron had been sighted by a ship 350 miles southwest of the Canary Islands, or 500 miles astern of King. This seemed like an impressive overhaul by the Englishman in his purpose-built schooner after only three weeks at sea. But Fougeron’s pace was sedate. King’s average of 110 miles per day was still slower than Francis Chichester’s 128 miles per day at the beginning of his voyage, the standard against which the Golden Globe racers were continually measured. Moitessier had not been seen since the beginning of September, and his 143 mile per day average was not yet known.