A Voyage For Madmen

by Peter Nichols

  If you can make a heap of all your worries

  And risk it on one turn of pitch and toss

  And lose, and start again at your beginnings

  And never breathe a word about your loss

  18

  ON 3 NOVEMBER, 300 MILES southwest of Melbourne, Australia, Suhaili’s self-steering trim tab broke again; the metal shaft sheared off and the bottom of it sank into the ocean. This was the original trim tab, which Robin Knox-Johnston had repaired and shipped back into place when his spare had similarly broken and sunk. This meant the end of his self-steering gear.

  Suhaili had received a terrible battering in the Indian Ocean. The constant flood of seawater into the boat from the hatches and around the cabin edges had taken its corrosive toll below, knocking out his Marconi transmitter six weeks before. Rust stains from the rigging streaked the hull. Important parts of the boat were now held together literally with string. The tiller had snapped off, and the rudder was loose on its pintles (the hingelike bearings on which the rudder hung), so Knox-Johnston had lashed the spare tiller to the rudder head and wound more line between the rudder and the metal pushpit tubing around the stern to hold it in place in case the pintles broke. Had she been in the English Channel, any sailor coming upon Suhaili looking as she did now would have presumed her to be a vessel in distress and offered to tow her into the nearest port. Knox-Johnston’s round-the-world effort gave every indication of being pulverised into submission, and with the long Pacific leg of the Southern Ocean ahead and Cape Horn at the end of it, heading for Melbourne made compelling sense.

  But he was in the lead. Despite her appearance, Suhaili’s ‘icebreaker’ hull was intact, her masts and rigging stood fine, and Knox-Johnston was bruised but healthy. He decided to see if he could press on and get as far as New Zealand.

  It was the lack of self-steering, the idea that he might have to sit in the cockpit and steer for at least sixteen hours a day, that most daunted him. By then, including the voyage from India, he had sailed about 32,000 miles aboard Suhaili, and it was all the sailing he had done. Knox-Johnston was not a yachtsman, but a seaman, a master mariner, who had chosen, for pragmatic rather than recreational reasons, to go voyaging in a small wooden boat. In this he was no different from Joshua Slocum, who had returned to the sea in his Spray in 1895, and had sailed that fat, unhandy craft around the world with no self-steering gear. Slocum had discovered, by experimenting with his sails and helm, that Spray could be balanced to hold a course on any point of sail in most conditions – or so he had claimed, to the amazement and frequent scepticism of yachting pundits ever since. Knox-Johnston remembered this and took heart. Suhaili, like many long-keeled boats, balanced nicely when sailing to windward and would hold such a course for hours without a hand on her helm. It is with the wind on the beam and from astern that boats show a tendency to slew off course and come around into the wind.

  When the trim tab broke, the wind was northerly, and Knox-Johnston wanted to head east. He lashed the helm amidships, neutralising it, and then began to play with the sails. Suhaili, a ketch with two masts, had a basic wardrobe of four sails: main, mizzen, and two headsails, the staysail and jib. In addition, Knox-Johnston carried six more headsails of varying sizes, from light-air spinnaker to tiny storm jib, which he could add, substitute, or subtract as conditions warranted. With the long bowsprit, this meant that the boat’s propulsive force was spread out across and beyond its entire length, giving Knox-Johnston a wide patchwork field of canvas to tweak and play with in his search for a balanced trim.

  But for the next few days the wind offered no challenge. It remained northerly and northeasterly and Suhaili easily held her course to windward, giving Knox-Johnston plenty of time below for sleep. Not until 6 November did the wind finally come from astern, southwest, and by then he was approaching land. He was closing with Bass Strait, the 50-mile gap between King Island and Cape Otway on the southeast coast of Australia.

  Or he hoped he was. It had been four months since he had last glimpsed land when passing the Cape Verde Islands in the North Atlantic – four months in a vast isolation tank of wind and water devoid of all hint of the world beyond the constant encircling horizon. Since then his sense of where he was on the face of the globe had been entirely derived from his navigation – a mathematical supposition clung to in the absence of any empirical proof. His sextant had been soaked by sea spray and its mirrors had become tarnished, and he wondered now about its accuracy. As he sailed into the strait, he looked for land birds and the types of clouds generated by the heat of land masses, or any sign of the land he wanted to believe lay just over the horizon to the north and south, but he saw nothing. An absurd idea pestered him: what if he was nowhere near Australia? What if his navigation was wrong, or distorted by some cumulative error?

  But then he remembered the radio stations he’d been listening to for the last few weeks: first Perth, on the west coast; then Albany, a coastal outback town serving vast sheep stations of the interior, with its news of wool sales; and now he was picking up Melbourne. He had to be where he thought he was.

  At 2230, he saw a flicker of light to the east. Just before midnight he identified it as Cape Otway light. He sat in the dark and steered through the rough waters stirred up around the cape, feeling intensely pleased. He had come as far as Chichester without stopping, and in a much smaller boat. He thought of that half-forgotten world ashore, where people washed regularly, ate and slept well, and kept company with each other. But now pulling in offered no real temptation as long as he could keep going.

  Once clear of Cape Otway, he got Suhaili sailing herself before the wind (the most difficult point on which to balance a boat), with her booms sheeted wide like wings, and turned in for three hours’ sleep.

  In the morning, the weather was fine and Australia stood clear above the sea to the northwest. By early afternoon, Knox-Johnston was closing with Port Phillip Heads, the entrance to Port Phillip Bay and Melbourne Harbour. He was hoping to find a boat that would forward his mail on to London and let his family, friends, and sponsor know that after almost two months of radio silence, he was well. Soon enough he spotted a pilot vessel approaching an inbound ship. He was able to get close enough to the pilot to shout that he was sailing nonstop from England and tossed over a waterproof box full of letters, charts, film, and articles written for the Sunday Mirror. Also in the box was a message to the Mirror suggesting the small port of Bluff, on New Zealand’s South Island, as a possible rendezvous for the next mail exchange.

  By the next morning, he was off the north coast of Tasmania, heading for Banks Strait, a 7-mile-wide shortcut through the islands at the eastern end of Bass Strait that allowed him to head more directly to New Zealand. It was a clear sunny day. The great green heart-shaped bulk of Tasmania now lay between him and the ever-present southwesterly swell of the Southern Ocean, and for the first time in two months the sea was reasonably smooth. Knox-Johnston took this opportunity to pull himself up to the top of the mainmast in his bosun’s chair to collect the slides that had come off the mainsail and remained jammed at the top of the track. While he was doing this, a small plane appeared out of the blue sky. It swooped down and circled him for half an hour. He hoped this meant that his mail and messages had been passed on, and that maybe the plane had been chartered by the Sunday Mirror. Slides retrieved, he sailed slowly on.

  Later, while he was sunbathing nude in the unaccustomed sunny weather, the aircraft returned, circling Suhaili again, and during the afternoon, another aeroplane and a helicopter appeared, circling and taking a close look at him. He was news, he realised. Sure enough, after his long silence, the position and photographs of the race leader appeared in London’s Sunday newspapers on 10 November.

  Thirty-six hours later, a little after midnight, Knox-Johnston passed the winking light of Swan Island at the eastern end of Banks Strait. He put Suhaili on a course across the Tasman Sea towards Bluff, on Foveaux Strait, South Island, New Zealand.

  F
or the first two days in the Tasman Sea the wind was easterly, and Suhaili happily steered herself close-hauled. But then the wind moved into the west again, its prevailing quarter, and Knox-Johnston set about learning in earnest how to sail his boat without self-steering gear. Over the next few days, experimenting with every combination of sail, reefed and unreefed, he discovered as much again about Suhaili’s sailing abilities as he had learned in all the years and tens of thousands of miles in which he had previously sailed her. He found that she could run and reach off the wind – as Slocum’s Spray had been able to do – for long periods under reduced and balanced canvas, long enough for him to get sufficient sleep before she gybed and threw him out of his bunk below. The boat had always possessed these abilities, but it had required necessity and the abandonment of other methods to discover them. This is what sailors have always done as long as they have gone to sea in boats, and it is only the recent invention of efficient self-steering systems that has brought about the widespread atrophy of this skill in modern sailors.

  Suhaili’s daily runs across the Tasman Sea were, in fact, as good as they had been before the self-steering gear had broken. Knox-Johnston was getting enough sleep – twelve hours straight one night – and now his hopes rose as he began to realise the voyage could go on. The Pacific and the Horn no longer looked so impossible.

  On Sunday evening 17 November, Knox-Johnston was listening to the weather forecast from a New Zealand radio station. New Zealand’s weather comes to it across the Tasman Sea, and great attention is paid to it on radio broadcasts, giving Knox-Johnston the most accurate and up-to-date weather information he had had on the voyage so far. The report that night noted a deep depression forming south of Tasmania. Its inevitable direction would be across the Tasman Sea, resulting in a gale within the next few days or sooner. Knox-Johnston hoped it would pass well to the south, taking the path of a previous forecast low. The thought of closing with land during a gale worried him.

  Usually, he switched the radio off as soon as the weather report was finished, but that evening, busy with something in the cabin, he left the radio on for a few minutes, and was startled to hear the following words: ‘Master, Suhaili… Imperative we rendezvous outside Bluff Harbour in daylight. Signature: Bruce Maxwell.’

  Knox-Johnston was thrilled. His messages had got through. Bruce Maxwell was the Sunday Mirror reporter who had sailed with him aboard Suhaili from London to Falmouth, a founding member of the Suhaili Supporters Club, and he was excited at the thought of seeing him soon and getting mail from home.

  The weather was the only problem. Bluff was then about 100 miles away. With luck, he could get there before dark the next day – otherwise he would have the unhappy choice of waiting through the next night, risking being caught by the onset of heavy weather, or abandoning the chance to see Bruce and receive mail from home and scudding off to the safety of the open sea. But he believed he could beat the weather, so he held his course.

  His alarm clock woke him at five the next morning. Land the rugged outline of New Zealand’s mountainous South Island – was visible far off to the north, and Solander Island, a high, uninhabited rock, stood up out of the sea about 15 miles to the the east. Solander was 72 miles from Bluff, so Knox-Johnston was immediately able to pinpoint his position.

  He soon realised he wouldn’t make Bluff before dark, so he hove to for most of the morning near Solander Island, getting under way again at noon. This, he thought, would get him to Bluff in daylight early the next morning, and still ahead of the approaching depression.

  He was fully aware that he was heading into a dangerous bottleneck. Bluff lay at the north side of Foveaux Strait, a narrowing body of water separating South Island and Stewart Island, full of dangers for a boat. The eastern end of the strait was awash with small islands and shallows, which could throw up steep breaking seas in rough weather. To the north, near the western entrance, were more islands. It was also the fastest way past the bottom of New Zealand, avoiding a long detour around Stewart Island, and Knox-Johnston thought he could slip through Foveaux Strait, grab his mail, and be out into the Pacific Ocean in daylight, before the weather turned. This was his last chance to turn away for the open sea, leaving Stewart Island to port, and he decided to gamble. He committed himself to this course – a commitment because Suhaili was not a weatherly boat: she could not point close to the wind or make much headway against it when strong. She needed sea-room when the wind blew against her, so once into Foveaux Strait, she could not easily sail out the way she had come in. She would have to keep going.

  As he entered the strait, the barometer began to plunge. That morning, as he neared Solander Island, it read 996 millibars. By late afternoon it was at 980 millibars, and Knox-Johnston realised then that the depression had moved much faster than he had thought it would. The steep barometric fall told him that the system’s isobars were close together, the depression was very deep, and the wind, when it came, would be violent. It would start to blow from the north, veer to the west, and then blow hardest from the southwest. This would make Bluff, and South Island, and the many small unlit islands at the narrow eastern end of Foveaux Strait, through which he was now committed to pass, all a lee shore – the shore a seaman dreads the most, because if he cannot find his way through some gap in it, he must hope to claw off it.

  Routes Around New Zealand

  At dusk, which came early as dark clouds obscured the sun in the west, Knox-Johnston began to do what he could to prepare for the weather. He got out his sea anchor and heavy warps, ready to stream astern if he needed to slow down. He worried that the two now useless plywood wind vanes could cause damage in heavy seas, so he threw them overboard. He lowered the mainsail and lashed it tightly to its boom. The wind was still light, the sea quiet, and Suhaili sailed slowly and comfortably on into the strait under reefed mizzen and storm jib.

  It was time again for the radio weather report. The announcer – no doubt in a warm studio with a cup of coffee or tea at hand – calmly read out the details of the coming storm. The system’s cold front was 80 miles away, moving east at 40 knots: its leading edge would reach him in two hours. Winds of 40 to 50 knots were forecast, increasing to storm force of 55 knots and higher the next day. Heavy rain and poor visibility would come with the storm. Again, he heard the announcer read out the message from Bruce Maxwell, and he wished he’d never heard it because then he would have been through Foveaux Strait and into the open sea by the time the storm hit.

  He thought of Maxwell at this moment probably drinking a beer in a hotel bar ashore, and Knox-Johnston wondered if he’d be drinking with him in twenty-four hours’ time. He even began hoping he might, and then he felt ashamed of his thoughts. He went to work.

  He made himself a cup of coffee, put some brandy in it, and pored over his charts, and the Admiralty pilot book and light list for the area, fixing in his mind what would soon lie around him in the dark, and what lights to look for to keep track of his position through the night – if he was lucky enough to see them in the coming storm. He had to keep two dead-reckoning plots going in his head, allowing for the greatest and least possible set of the tides in the strait.

  Then he stood in the companionway hatch, half in and half out, smoking a cigarette as Suhaili sailed through the dropping dark. As the weather bulked and packed in astern, he saw at last a flicker of light ahead, which he identified as the light on Centre Island, 25 miles northwest of Bluff. Then the light disappeared as rain began to pelt down, and the dark closed in around him.

  With the rain came a shift of wind, into the west, astern, and it began to strengthen. Knox-Johnston wanted to go as slowly as possible so he streamed his sea anchor and big blue polypropylene warp. This also helped steer the boat, keeping its stern to the waves and rising wind, while the storm jib sheeted flat on the bowsprit kept the bow pointed downwind. The rain quickly obscured everything beyond the dim outline of the boat. He couldn’t see anything beyond the bow, but he remained standing in the companio
nway, partly sheltered, ready for anything.

  By 0230 the wind had risen to gale force. The shrieking howl in the rigging was augmented by the surflike noise of waves that rose and broke astern, a tumbling froth sweeping the decks. But after the first edge of the front had passed, the rain had lightened and there were holes in the clouds through which Knox-Johnston could now see stars. He went on deck and stood on the self-steering gear’s tubing, holding tight to the rigging as the boat rolled heavily from side to side, and peered into the dark. He knew, as sailors come to, not to stare hard but to let the faintest suggestion of form and light in at the periphery of his gaze. He was hoping to spot Centre Island light again. He didn’t know if he had passed it or was bearing down it. The island was surrounded by rocks. The wind was driving rain and spray from astern over the boat, drumming into his back hard enough to make it feel like hail, so he could see nothing behind him. He looked forward and to port and starboard and hoped.

  After half an hour he noticed a periodic whitening in the clouds to the north. It matched the pattern of Centre Island light. It seemed close, so he relashed the tiller a little to port to point the bow far enough away, he hoped, to clear the rocks southeast of the lighthouse. He stayed hanging in the rigging for another hour, hands growing numb, watching for the breakers, knowing that if he saw them at all it would probably be too late. Finally he decided he must be past the rocks and went below to make himself Irish coffee and smoke a cigarette.