A Voyage For Madmen

by Peter Nichols

  In a gale, the difference between a boat running downwind at high speed (corkscrewing wildly over the waves) or beating hard to windward (constant bone-jarring pounding) and a boat hove to in the same conditions has to be experienced to be believed. With the speed and violent motion of progress come the fear and anxiety for one’s own safety and the boat’s structure. Hove to, noise and motion are amazingly reduced, and hot drinks and meal-making can be possible where minutes before they were unthinkable.

  A further, almost magical component of heaving to, is the slick, or wake left by a boat’s hull. This is the area of sea immediately to windward, between the boat and the oncoming waves, created by the wind pushing the stalled, resisting boat slowly through the water. The water surface in the boat’s wake appears slightly disturbed, like the water on one side of a moored buoy in a strong tidal stream, and almost glassy, like an oil slick. This has the astonishing effect of interrupting the heaping waves as they reach it. Large breaking seas are suddenly tripped by the slick, lose their height and power, and tumble harmlessly before reaching the drifting boat.

  The wonderful skill of heaving to was once part of the seaman’s standard bag of tricks, learned from older salts or on the decks of ships. It was well-understood and routinely employed. But with modern yachts being purchased as easily as cars and no licence required to sail them, this vital piece of seamanship is often forgotten about, or not learned, or learned improperly. It’s also understandable that few recreational sailors will take the time to head offshore into bad weather for the purpose of trying out the heavy-weather tactics they’ve read about in the books.

  Yachts are marvels of engineering; their three dimensions of compound curves are arranged in beautiful sculptural shapes designed to accommodate the sea in so many of its moods. They generally behave so well that it’s easy for the inexperienced sailor to believe that a good sea boat will fend for herself in large seas. And in conditions where wind has risen past a point where fully reefed storm sails still make a boat feel overcanvased, it can seem reasonable and prudent to remove sail altogether. The boat will then lie beam-on to the seas, and – in most cases – this will result in no more than discomfort. Few recreational sailors will ever experience conditions that will demand a true seaman’s reservoir of knowledge and skill in order to survive. Thus, the easy and usually adequate ‘technique’ of lying ahull becomes the favoured storm tactic of most small-boat sailors.

  Yet in severe conditions, lying ahull can be deadly. The fourth edition of Heavy Weather Sailing, the classic book on storm tactics at sea by the late English author and sailor Adlard Coles, and Peter Bruce, clearly presents the conditions – proven through tank testing – under which lying ahull will result in disaster.

  It is breaking waves that cause capsize. If the yacht is caught beam-on to breaking waves of sufficient size … a full 360-degree roll will be executed. How big do breaking waves need to be to cause this type of behaviour? Unfortunately, the answer is, not very big. During the model tests … when breaking waves were 30% of hull length, from trough to crest, they could capsize some of the yachts, while waves to a height of 60% of the hull length would comfortably overwhelm all of the boats we tested. In real terms this means that for a 10 metre (32 ft 10 ins) boat … [a] breaking wave 3 metres (9 ft 10 ins) high … presents a capsize risk, and when the breaking wave is 6 metres (19 ft 8 ins) high, this appears to be a capsize certainty for any shape of boat.

  The book goes on to report that the same model boat, differently aligned so that it is not beam-on to the breaking wave (but, rather, pointing obliquely into it, for instance, as if hove to) will not capsize.

  Heavy Weather Sailing is filled with stories of boats lying ahull being rolled over, capsized, dismasted, of crews being lost. But it contains only one such incident while a boat was hove to. In the disastrous Fastnet Race of 1979, which was disrupted by a strong gale, 158 boats out of a fleet of 300 adopted storm tactics: eighty-six lay ahull, forty-six ran before the wind either under bare poles (Moitessier’s choice) or towing warps (Knox-Johnston’s tactic), and twenty-six hove to. One hundred of these boats suffered knockdowns, seventy-seven were rolled over at least once. Not one of the boats that hove to were rolled, capsized, or reported any major damage.

  Bill King, the navy commander who had cruised the world in submarines and sailed across the Atlantic, chose to lie ahull during his storm, and Galway Blazer was capsized and rolled over, wrecking its rig.

  Loïck Fougeron, who didn’t have the years at sea under his belt that King had, adopted the tactic of heaving to in his smaller, heavier boat, which was knocked on its side, but otherwise suffered no major damage.

  It is just possible that tactics made the difference.

  When the great storm abated, Fougeron steered for Cape Town. But headwinds and cold finally dissuaded him and he turned north, making his first landfall in three months on 27 November at the southern Atlantic island of Saint Helena. There he found much kindness from the local doctor and residents.

  Bill King raised the two struts that had been handily built to lie on Galway Blazer’s deck in case of the loss of his unstayed masts, and headed for Cape Town under jury-rig. He was in daily radio contact with friends in England and Cape Town and sent messages to his family, keeping up a cheerful front. But he was deeply depressed by what had happened and confided this to the log he was writing to his wife, knowing she would only read it long afterwards.

  November 8th, Friday

  My Darling,

  I sent you a message [via radio] about how well I was taking the disappointment. Then I was probably in a state of euphoria, after having my life spared by thirty seconds. I do not think that survival would have been possible had I been out on deck tending the foresail when we turned over.

  As the danger recedes, I get broody. I realise the cold facts. My voyage has been stopped. My little boat lies broken, and I am alone with my bitter disappointment, creeping along at perhaps 50 miles a day. I knew such an adventure must be dicey, but I never gauged how shattering a blow this disaster could deal my spirit.

  He reached Cape Town on 22 November.

  17

  DONALD CROWHURST RECORDED in his logbook that he was seasick all through his first night at sea and most of the following day, as he tacked west down the English Channel towards the Atlantic. He put it down to nerves.

  His first job was to store the jumbled mass of loose gear, equipment, and food that lay in heaps on his bunk, on the cabin sole, on his table, everywhere throughout the boat. One of Crowhurst’s few successes with a sponsor had been the Tupperware company. Now he filled scores of plastic containers at random with whatever came to hand – food, tools, batteries, film, hardware – and stacked them on shelves on either side of the boat’s one single bunk, forward of the saloon. Beneath the bunk and the saloon seats and into every pocket of the main hull he stored more food, life jackets, flares and signal flags, the film camera given to him by the BBC, sailing manuals, instruction manuals, water jugs, his harmonica, sextant, medical supplies, hot water bottle, pilot books, and the few books he had brought with him: technical reads with titles such as Servo-Mechanisms, Mathematics of Engineering Systems and a couple of sea books, Shanties from the Seven Seas and Chichester’s Gypsy Moth IV Circles the World. He had told Clare he didn’t want any novels. Instead, for inspirational reading, he had brought Relativity, the Special and General Theory, by Albert Einstein.

  He had enough Tupperware containers filled with electronic parts to start a small factory: boxes and boxes of transistors, condensers, resisters, switches, valves, circuit boards, wire, plugs, and sockets. These were things over which Crowhurst had mastery; they were the components and currency of his particular brilliance, out of which he could always fashion order no matter what chaos lay scattered elsewhere. The abundance of such supplies must have been a comfort to him.

  Everywhere inside Teignmouth Electron’s cabin ran neat streams of colour-coded wire, fastened to bulkheads, the cab
in top, running between the masts and the hulls, all according to the complicated wiring diagrams Crowhurst had provided Eastwoods for the working of his computer-operated electronic process control systems. All these wires came together in a thick confluence that ran down the port side of the cabin and disappeared under a red seat cushion. Beneath the cushion the wires ended in an unconnected tangle – in the empty space where Crowhurst’s computer was supposed to have been. In the scramble to get his boat built and to depart in time, his computer – his ‘box of tricks’ he called the revolutionary device that would sense the boat’s condition, adjust the sails, set off the buoyancy bag, enable Crowhurst to sail his trimaran at breakneck speeds and make the fortune of Electron Utilisation – had not been produced. It was still just a dream.

  On his third day at sea, despite the early-in-the-voyage overabundance of stores, he was already worried about his supply of methylated spirits, used to prime the burners of his kerosene stove. He had calculated quantities from figures given for the needs of two people in Eric Hiscock’s vade mecum reference book Voyaging Under Sail, much of which was based on Hiscock’s world-girdling voyages made with his wife, Susan. Crowhurst had systematically halved the amounts suggested, forgetting that one voyager will use a stove as often as two. Still, he calculated, and wrote down, that he had enough to last 243 days. He need not have worried: his voyage would last exactly 243 days.

  As he packed things away and tried to arrange his stores over a period of several days, he also had to navigate and handle sails and keep the boat moving, and he discovered, in quick succession, a cascade of important failures. His Blondie Hasler-designed steering gear was an early and consistent problem: screws and bolts from it began to work loose and disappear. The gear had been quickly and poorly installed – as had been the lifting genoa track on deck, noticed days earlier by the BBC cameraman. Electrical parts he had aplenty, but Crowhurst had brought along virtually no spare screws and bolts, so he was forced to take screws from other places on board to use on the wind vane gear. Those too soon worked loose and disappeared overboard, infuriating him. ‘That’s four [screws] gone now,’ he wrote. ‘Can’t keep cannibalising from other spots for ever! The thing will soon fall to bits!’ Then he cut a finger on his left hand while trying to hoist a metal radar detector. ‘Blood everywhere – first aid kit out. Certainly well stocked in this department!!’

  On Tuesday 5 November, he noticed bubbles blowing out of the hatch on the bow of the port hull. He opened it up to find the bow compartment flooded to deck level with water – a galvanising sight. He quickly bailed the water out with a bucket. The problem, he hoped, was not the hull but the seal of the hatch, and he screwed its wing nuts down again over a new fibreglass gasket.

  Less importantly, but far more demoralising for him, he was having trouble with his radio equipment. He could not pick up signals on his Racal receiver and spent hours taking it apart. Then he couldn’t raise Portishead Radio on his Marconi transmitter.

  He made painfully slow progress out into the Atlantic. From 2 to 6 November he sailed 538 miles according to the readings on his log, which was a fast 134.5 miles per day, suggesting good progress. However, this was mileage covered while tacking south and west, and the true distance made good along his route was 290 miles – an average of 72.5 miles per day.

  Despite the troubles aboard, Crowhurst never forgot that he had embarked on an extraordinary voyage, something well beyond the scope of what most people might ever experience. BBC Bristol had given him £250 and a 16-millimetre camera, film, and a tape recorder to make a film of his voyage, and though he did little filming to begin with, he soon began making tape recordings. Crowhurst took seriously the charge to bring home a record, and he looked well beyond a simple description of his daily routine. Sailing around the world alone in a small boat would, he believed, prove to be a seminal experience, and he wanted to make sure he got it down on film and tape. ‘I feel like somebody who’s been given a tremendous opportunity to impart a message,’ he recorded soon after leaving England, ‘some profound observation that will save the world.’

  On 13 November, Crowhurst found that the ‘waterproof’ hatch on the cockpit floor, which had leaked on the maiden voyage but had supposedly been repaired by the Eastwoods crew at Teignmouth, was again leaking badly. He had been pushing south against strong head winds and water had streamed aboard, repeatedly filling the cockpit, which although fitted with drains, drained slowly. Seawater had flooded the engine compartment immediately below the hatch, soaking his generator and the bulk of his working electrics. For Crowhurst, this was a disaster graver than a leaking hull. The possibility of being unable to produce electricity completely undermined him.

  The growing reality of his adventure, which he had so forcefully, cleverly brought on himself, risking everything – bankruptcy, the well-being of his family, his self-respect, and his life – crept upon him in the cold, wet cabin where he now found himself alone, somewhere at sea off the wintry coast of northern Europe, with devastating starkness. His boat had begun to fall apart even before he left port and had been breaking down ever since in reasonable, if unpleasant weather. The prospect of Cape Horn and the Roaring Forties was now a grim one.

  Crowhurst’s reaction was commendably sane. He considered, perhaps for the first time, giving up.

  Friday 15 (November)

  Racked by the growing awareness that I must soon decide whether or not I can go on in the face of the actual situation. What a bloody awful decision – to chuck it in at this stage – what a bloody awful decision! But if I go on I am doing [two] things:

  1. I am breaking my promise to Clare that I would only continue if I was happy that everything was as it should be to ensure the safe conclusion of the project. Unless I can get the electrics sorted out, I cannot honestly say the conditon is met. Furthermore I am placing Clare in the horrible position of having no news of me for seven to nine months, as the radio would not be functioning.

  2. As the boat stands, I cannot drive her much above 4 knots in the 40s. The Hasler performs wild broaches that would be fatal in big – really big – seas, when running … I cannot reasonably see a fast passage in the 40s in safety without self-righting gear, the buoyancy bag device, in operation. Particularly bearing in mind that I started late … as it means arriving at the Horn far later than I anticipated, in six or seven months’ time – April/May [nearing the southern winter]. With the boat in its present state my chances of survival would not, I think, be better than 50–50, which I would not regard as acceptable. ‘The boat in its present state’ – what does that mean?

  He listed the problems. First was the possibility of not being able to generate electricity. If he had no electricity he would have no radio communication, no masthead buoyancy, no time signals, no light.

  Leaky hatches had let in 120 gallons in five days. The cockpit hatch had leaked 75 gallons overnight. The only proper solution – screwing it down permanently – would seal off the generator and shut down the boat’s electrical system.

  Far worse than this, he had no way of pumping out the leaking hulls. Getting water out of the inside of a boat, where, it will inevitably find its way sooner or later, is a fundamental principle of seaworthiness. But Eastwoods had not installed the hose for his bilge pump, which rendered it useless. The only way Crowhurst could get rid of the large quantity of water leaking into the boat’s three hulls was to bail it out with a bucket. This could hardly be done in bad weather, when water would be most likely to come in.

  It was a thorough, rational list, chilling in its presentation of the situation. Inside his logbook, he wrote pages of arguments for and against several options: he could return to England and try again the next year, at least for a faster time – except that Stanley Best had already paid out far more than he’d ever expected to and would be unlikely to support the project through another year. Losing Best’s support meant more than just an end to funding: Crowhurst’s business and house were now virtually owned by S
tanley Best, who, Crowhurst feared, had every reason to call in the debt. Another idea was to save face, and perhaps boost the value and notoriety of Teignmouth Electron, by sailing it as far as Cape Town or Australia and selling it there. But this seemed a slim possible benefit at the end of a long, hard voyage.

  Crowhurst argued back and forth with himself on paper, but all ideas, all possible alternatives, resulted in the same unacceptable conundrum: returning home would result in shame and bankruptcy, yet to sail on appeared profitless and dangerous. He could not bring himself to make a decision.

  I will continue south and try to get the generator working so that I can talk to Mr Best before committing myself to any particular course or retiring from the race. I suppose I’m just putting off the decision? No. It’s far better that he should know before I commit the project to withdrawal, and that I should have his views. If he doesn’t want anything further to do with the nonstop project (as distinct from the S. T. race) things would be really black – but at least I’d know where he stood. In the final analysis, if the whole thing goes quite sour: Electron Utilisation bankrupt and Woodlands sold, ten years of work and worry down the drain, I would have Clare and the children still and: