A Voyage For Madmen

by Peter Nichols

  Meanwhile, Clare Crowhurst filled a carrier bag with buns, ham, and salad from the Royal Hotel, together with some gifts: a book of yoga exercises, a china spoon, a box of cherry nougat, a ventriloquist’s doll – her Christmas present for her husband – and a long letter. She took the carrier bag down to the boat and put it on Crowhurst’s bunk.

  At 3 p.m. – nine hours before the Sunday Times cut-off deadline – Teignmouth Electron was towed out of the harbour by the local pilot boat, accompanied by three launches carrying forty friends, well-wishers, reporters, photographers, and Donald Kerr’s BBC film crew.

  Crowhurst started to raise his sails and immediately had trouble. John Elliot had hanked his jib and staysail on to the wrong stays. Their halyards had been wrapped in the lashings at the top of the mainmast that secured the large, heavy, deflated buoyance bag. Unable to raise sail, Teignmouth Electron was ignominiously towed back to shore, to the vocal and guffawing delight of the harbour sceptics.

  Back at the dock, a Morgan Giles rigger climbed up the mast to free the halyards while Crowhurst hanked on his headsails in their proper postions. (It is striking that he did not go aloft to free the halyards himself to make sure it was done properly; with so much of his boat’s preparation necessarily delegated to others, it’s possible he had never been up his boat’s mast at all.) Rodney Hallworth, ever ready to forge an association or provide a plug for any Teignmouth body, chose this frantic moment to come aboard and hoist the burgee of the Teignmouth Corinthian Yacht Club to the masthead (where it might easily have fouled the buoyancy bag’s lashings).

  Towed out again, now with the early autumnal dusk falling, Crowhurst raised sail and the trimaran crossed a locally designated starting line at 4.52 p.m. The Yacht Club fired a gun. The wind was southerly and strong, forcing him to beat to windward (the trimaran’s worst point of sail) across Lyme Bay to clear Torquay, Brixham, and the long southerly jut of land that stretched away to Start Point, the southernmost tip of Devon. The motorboats, with Clare in the bow of the pilot boat, followed him for only a mile before he disappeared into the murk of rain and the early onset of night.

  Evidence of the disorganised send-off remained ashore. When he returned to the dock, John Elliot was dismayed to see a load of hardware and spare cuts of plywood shaped for emergency repairs lying on the Morgan Giles slipway. He had personally put these things aboard the trimaran. The Morgan Giles men later said these supplies were never put aboard.

  Two days later, Stanley Best appeared at the Crowhursts’ house in Bridgwater with the carrier bag full of presents that Clare had left on her husband’s bunk. It had been found on the slipway with the other supplies.

  15

  SEVEN GOLDEN GLOBE COMPETITORS now lay scattered across half a world of ocean.

  ‘Italy’s Chichester’, Alex Carozzo, also officially ‘sailed’ on 31 October. He was, if possible, even less ready than Donald Crowhurst – or perhaps more deliberate – and simply moved his boat, Gancia Americano, to a mooring off the boatyard at Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, where it had been built. There it would swing in the tide, technically departed, until Carozzo felt he was ready to put to sea. The 66-footer, a cold-moulded wooden monohull, was strong and light, and while it was then almost impossible for Carozzo to catch up with the leaders, he seemed a likely candidate to take the £5,000 prize for fastest time. Certainly, he should have worried Donald Crowhurst.

  As Crowhurst was tacking south and west through the English Channel, 5,000 miles down the Atlantic Nigel Tetley was nearing the Brazilian island of Trindade, where Moitessier had waved to the astounded inhabitants almost a month earlier. The wind had been light all day and fell away to nothing at dusk, leaving him becalmed. Tetley’s radio had been giving him trouble for a week, and he had not been able to broadcast his position. He was worried that Eve would be anxious about him. He tried Cape Town Radio again that evening as Victress lay becalmed, but got no response. ‘It was a disturbing experience trying to communicate with no one answering,’ he wrote in his logbook, ‘as if one were dead.’

  Eighteen hundred miles to the southeast – roughly midway between South America and South Africa – Loïck Fougeron had a lot more wind.

  The day before, 30 October, he had passed the island of Tristan da Cunha. Conditions had been light to calm all morning, but in the early afternoon the wind reappeared and within a few hours was blowing at strong gale force. It soon whipped up seas larger than Fougeron had ever seen before. They broke repeatedly over Captain Browne, exploding on deck with such force that he was worried the boat’s revolving Perspex hatches would be smashed, sending water flooding below. By the early hours of 31 October, he estimated the wind at hurricane force. Above the crashing seas, the sky was occasionally clear and a brilliant full moon lit up the wild scene. It was the worst weather he had ever seen, and he was afraid.

  Only a few hundred miles away to the southeast, a little ahead of Fougeron, Bill King and Galway Blazer II lay under bare poles riding out the same storm.

  I had seen storms from the tiny platform of submarines or on sailing boats all over the world; but no mental picture ever occurred to me of the typhoon tumult which now battered Galway Blazer… In the very midst of the hurricane, the sky cleared, and I saw a full moon flaming coldly, detached from the awful scene.

  Yet Galway Blazer rode the seas well through a long night and a day, and towards the evening of 31 October – Hallowe’en night – King felt the worst had passed.

  Sailing Route Across the Indain Ocean

  Two thousand miles to the east – 1,100 miles the other side of Cape Town, well into the Indian Ocean – Bernard Moitessier was sailing through the choppy aftermath of a brief gale that had struck the day before. The wind, which had begun in the southeast, had backed through the northeast to the north during the night, before dropping away to a breeze on the morning of 31 October.

  But the surface of the sea around Joshua was still disturbed by the winds that had swept fast through 180 degrees of conflicting directions. Heaps of foaming water tossed around the boat making a strange noise. It made Moitessier think of the sound of a multitude of termites clicking their mandibles or the scattering of dead leaves. The confusion of heaping waves breaking against other waves in nearly calm conditions astonished him, demonstrating that the sea, no matter how well one knew it, was always capable of showing something new.

  The gale had not been severe enough to trouble him, but a few days earlier, in similarly rough, disturbed seas, Joshua had been knocked flat. An enormous breaking sea had smashed into the side of the boat, so hard that for a moment Moitessier could not believe his portholes had not shattered. Joshua came up quickly and sailed on. The only damage on deck had been the wind vane, smashed when the mizzen boom was pushed across the deck. But the vane was simply constructed and Moitessier quickly shipped a spare.

  An hour later, sitting on his perch beneath the turret hatch, he saw a freak wave, twice as high as those around it, rise up astern. He jumped down, wrapped his arms around the chart table, braced his legs, and felt Joshua take off in a surge of acceleration. Then she went over again, slammed down on her side.

  Once more, the buoyant, boilerplate Joshua rose upright. Her telephone pole wire and rigging suffered no damage. The wind vane held the boat on course, and she ran on downwind without a touch from her captain.

  And still further to the east, more than 4,000 miles ahead of Moitessier, Robin Knox-Johnston was halfway across the Great Australian Bight between Cape Leeuwin and Melbourne. October 31 was a quiet day for him, and unusually warm. He had woken smelling land, and through the day saw a great number of insects and many butterflies in the air. He immediately worried that his navigation might be off and that he was far closer to shore than he suspected. But he traced the land aroma to the weed growing at Suhaili’s waterline that had dried and become smelly in the warmer weather, and he reminded himself that Charles Darwin had found spiders clinging to HMS Beagle’s rigging when the ship was hundreds of mile
s off the South American coast. Darwin concluded that they had been blown out to sea.

  The good weather was a welcome respite from a brutal passage across the Indian Ocean. Suhaili had been knocked down again. The gooseneck on the main boom had broken, as Knox-Johnston had feared it would; his spare trim tab for the wind vane had broken, as the first had, and most of its parts had sunk, precluding a repair. On 13 October, a southerly storm blowing great waves up from the Antarctic Ocean – ‘by far the worst weather I had ever encountered’ – began pounding the boat so hard that Knox-Johnston thought she was going to break up. His mind raced ahead, imagining the coming disaster: Suhaili being smashed by the wave that would finally split her open, the cold inrushing sea, the frantic effort to break out the life raft and abandon ship, the tins of dried fruit he would grab – make sure to grab the can opener … But as he was thinking this, bracing words from a Robert Service poem, The Quitter, filled his mind.

  When you’re lost in the Wild and you’re scared as a child,

  And Death looks you bang in the eye,

  And you’re sore as a boil it’s according to Hoyle

  To cock your revolver … and die.

  But the Code of a Man says: ‘Fight all you can,’

  And self-dissolution is barred.

  In hunger and woe, oh, it’s easy to blow …

  It’s the hell-served-for-breakfast that’s hard.

  The boat wasn’t coming apart yet, but he was. He was ashamed of himself. He went up on deck and watched the seas, and then took action. He streamed a large diameter polypropylene warp astern, sheeted his jib flat amidships, and Suhaili suddenly lay quietly with her pointed stern to the overtaking seas. No longer was she being battered, and Knox-Johnston was amazed at the difference, both in Suhaili’s apparent situation and his own outlook.

  This was exactly the technique Moitessier had employed – and then abandoned – in the South Pacific in favour of his surfing run ahead of the waves. It didn’t work for Joshua, Moitessier had felt, but it worked now for Suhaili, underscoring the truth that there is no one right way of handling storms at sea. There is only what works for different boats and their captains in different storms, an improvised alchemy of conditions and intuition.

  Suhaili rode out that storm. Later, Knox-Johnston ingeniously repaired the original trim tab and once more went overboard into frigid tossing seas to fit it into place behind the rudder. He knew, however, that it was only a matter of time before it broke again, and he would be left without his self-steering gear. Then what? He would worry about that when it happened. Next he repaired the gooseneck, spending a day breaking and nursing drill bits while hand-drilling through metal plates inside the violently lurching boat. But he and Suhaili were both showing the wear of the voyage, and he wondered how long it would be possible to continue. Sails were splitting regularly and he was spending hours sewing with cut and calloused hands. His body was bruised, he was sleep-deprived, and he remained anxious. Australia was nearby and the land and its treats were again pulling strongly at him. He had done well in his small, rough boat, and no one would think poorly of him if he headed for port.

  But he was now halfway around the world – further, in fact, because with prevailing westerly winds from astern, his fastest route home would be to keep going. He had a commanding lead. He decided to continue as long as he could make progress. His sea heroes were watching.

  Knox-Johnston, Moitessier, King, Fougeron, Tetley, Crowhurst, and Carozzo on his mooring. This was the arrangement of the race fleet of seven boats across 15,000 sea miles on 31 October. Blyth and Ridgway were out. By nightfall, two more sailors would join them.

  16

  HOVE TO IN THE STORM during the moonlit early hours of that 31 October, Loïck Fougeron curled up in his bunk, unable to sleep, waiting for what he feared would happen. He felt like a nut about to be crushed beneath an elephant’s foot.

  Suddenly the boat was slammed sideways by a tremendous force. The cabin’s kerosene lamp went out. Everything movable – pots, plates, glasses, food, a crate of wine, books, tools, and Fougeron himself – was hurled across the cabin, which had turned on its side. In that moment, Fougeron believed he was about to die and join the multitudes of seamen who had perished far from their loved ones. He thought of his family and friends, certain he would never see them again.

  But – miraculously, it seemed to him – Captain Browne rolled back upright. Fougeron sat on the cabin floor with blood running down his face. Going up on deck, he found the mast intact, although parts of the rigging hung slack and loose. With a surge of relief, he realised that both he and the boat had survived the knockdown intact. His next decision came to him instantly, with wonderful life-affirming clarity: he was giving up the race and heading for Cape Town.

  For twenty-four hours, Bill King had stood in his (below-decks, protected) cockpit, watching this same eerily moonlit storm through Galway Blazer’s two round Perspex hatches. For a while, the wind vane held the boat on its downwind course, but as the wind and seas rose it was overpowered and King had to steer by hand. As the storm progressed, he had reefed the junk-rigged sails – he was able to do this with lines led belowdecks – until he was finally running downwind under bare poles. It was the most violent weather he had ever experienced. He estimated the waves at 40 feet in height. At the top of one wave he looked down into the trough dropping away before the boat and saw a petrel flying across a patch of moonlight far below him.

  At 9.30 a.m. on 31 October, the storm reached its furious height as the wind backed to the west. With the sudden change of wind direction, the waves lost their regular pattern in a confusion of tumbling cross seas. At that point, King stopped running and allowed the boat to lie ahull – that is, with its beam to the seas, the position most boats will assume when left unattended with no sail up. King felt Galway Blazer rode as well like this as she had when running downwind. By the evening of 31 October, the wind began to die down, and King believed the worst was over.

  He decided to go out on deck to try to find out why the wind vane had been locking. Conditions had moderated sufficiently for him to leave both plastic cockpit hatches open. He went aft, but could see nothing wrong. However, he noticed that the foresail needed lashing, so he went below again to get a length of rope.

  I was sitting jambed [sic] into place under the open hatches, coiling down the rope, when … over she went to 90 degrees. The boat was now lying right over on her side. Hurled by the elemental forces of the breaking peak of a rogue sea mountain, she was using her side as a surfer would his board. The masts must still have been in the air, in their proper element, and I had time to think, ‘She will come back again; that great lead keel will swing her upright.’

  Even as the thought crossed my mind, a vast new force started to act upon us. In those confused seas there was no proper pattern. Some cross-riding protuberance of foam-lashed water rode across the trough in which we might have recovered. Into this obstacle our mast tops now buried themselves, driven by the frightful impetus of our sideways rush. The lever-age of a new element, imposed on our mastheads, now started the action of the mariner’s most dreaded catastrophe: a complete rollover, upside down.

  I had a rapid change of mind. ‘She will come back again’ became ‘No, she won’t’; and, indeed, she did not.

  I was on my shoulders pressed against the deck head, which was normally above me, my head pointing to the sea bottom, 15,000 feet below, looking at green water pouring up through both hatches.

  Poised upside down, with eternity beckoning, time elongated like a rubber band – and then snapped right back again: the 2-ton keel wrenched Galway Blazer back upright.

  Water was calf-deep inside the boat. King pulled the hatches closed and began pumping out the water. When the pump sucked air in the bilges, he went on deck again, and saw the extent of his disaster. The foremast had broken off about 12 feet above the deck. The mainmast was still intact, though fractured, and pulled over to starboard at an angle. The wind vane
was smashed.

  Bill King’s voyage was equally shipwrecked. Galway Blazer could never sail through the Southern Ocean as she was. The best he could do now was to limp towards Cape Town. It was a crushing end to a dream.

  But King knew he’d been lucky: if the capsize had occurred sixty seconds earlier or later, he would have been on deck, washed overboard, or smashed in the wreckage of his foremast.

  It is unfair to compare the outcome of two very different boats handled by two skippers in the same storm. Every moment at every geographic spot at sea is a unique combination of forces; add two boats several hundred miles apart and the varying factors become infinite.

  Nevertheless, the management of small boats in heavy weather is of paramount importance to sailors, and it is irresistible to review the results of the different tactics employed by Fougeron and King in their dissimilar boats in the same weather event.

  It seems clear that even at the height of the storm, Fougeron’s boat, Captain Browne, still carried reduced storm sails. ‘How long can the sails hold out in this fury?’ he wrote in his logbook. The wind vane was disconnected, and Fougeron was below in his bunk, not steering, not trying to make progress, but riding out the storm with the sails arranged so that Captain Browne was hove to.

  In similar conditions, King allowed Galway Blazer to lie ahull, that is, with no sail up, beam-on to the seas.

  Heaving to is a time-honoured method of stopping a sailing vessel in the water when wind would otherwise push it on. Pilot vessels once hove to on station while waiting for ships outside ports and harbours. Small yachts overtaken by gales can heave to with remarkable comfort until conditions improve. This is simply done by arranging sails and helm in such a combination that the boat stalls comfortably and sustainably, with its bow pointing about 50 degrees from the eye of the wind, making perhaps half a knot of drift at right angles to the wind. In this position a boat does not present its entire broadside, its most vulnerable aspect, to the oncoming waves, but points obliquely into them, parting them – even large breaking waves – and riding over them. Small sailboats are easily hove to by setting a reefed portion of the mainsail, or a storm trysail (a small ruggedly made sail dedicated to storm use set in place of the mainsail), together with a small headsail backed to windward: the small main or trysail tries to drive the boat forward and into the wind; the backed headsail opposes this drive, preventing the boat heading to windward and effectively stalling its motion. The helm (tiller or wheel) is used to fine-tune the boat’s balance, augmenting the force of either the main or trysail or the headsail. This may sound complicated, but it’s not – though it requires practice. It is often said that modern sailboats with their fin keels cannot heave to properly, but this is not so. Every boat behaves slightly differently, and its captain or crew must learn its qualities and experiment with its heaving to rig by tweaking sails and helm.