A Ravel of Waters

by Geoffery Jenkins

  He came forward, and without any preliminaries, took my hand.

  'Congratulations, Captain Rainier’ he said. He had the most compelling pair of eyes I had ever seen. He held my hand in a strong grip. There was power in it, power about the man himself. He would draw people to himself like iron filings to a magnet. His scrutiny of me was as keen as a wind off the Drake Passage. He was of medium height only, and looked about forty. The clothes he wore - light blue casual slacks and a kind of matching battle blouse - emphasized his leanness. A Chinese white silk choker was secured at his throat by a yellow diamond pin.

  He seemed to miss, or simply override, my resentment.

  'I was in one of the boats that came to cheer you on completing your magnificent feat. I saw you bring your ship through that tricky entrance. I didn't think it possible to manoeuvre any craft with the mainboom centred without adjustment to the sheets.'

  I hope you're now satisfied that it's possible,' I retorted.

  I think it must be because there are vents from the high pressure to the low pressure sides of the sail at such short intervals that the air flow turns round the back and still gives a high degree of lift even when it's well beyond what would be the stall angle in a normal sail.'

  I realized how near the limit of fatigue I was when I heard myself rasp, 'What are you trying to prove?'

  Thomsen threw me a keen up-and-under glance. His reply was conciliatory. 'Nothing - except one must understand what one is up against. I have a rig which works better.'

  Chapter 2

  Thomsen stood there, rocking on the balls of his feet as if inviting me to hit him verbally. His eyes were searching mine, assessing me. Then he pulled out a gold and black pack of Perilly's Private Blend and offered me one, lighting it and his own with a tiny gold lighter in the shape of a dolphin.

  I answered him, repeating it by rote -1 was too tired to be original - 'The Venetian Rig is the first major advance in sail design for centuries. It was invented by Dr Glauco Corbellini, an Italian engineer...*

  Thomsen made an impatient sweep with his cigarette. 'I know all that. What I want to know is, how does it work?

  'The answer is on the board - twenty-six days, four thousand, two hundred miles.'

  'That doesn't say how.’

  'It handles easily. It's ideal for one man sailing alone. It is simple. It is fast. It is highly efficient - in strong winds.'

  'How fast?'

  Thomsen had a curious empathy which made me continue. Now I explained. 'I'll tell you. Right at the beginning of my run I struck a lucky slant just east of the Horn

  He seemed to draw the story out of me. 'What do you call a lucky slant?

  Sheila, who had been present for the introductions, slipped away when the conversation became technical, Don stood by, drinking it in.

  'A gale sprang up out of nowhere, as it does near the Horn. It hit fifty knots before I realized what was happening. It was the first big test for the Venetian Rig. It turned out to be a winner. Albatros was going like a bomb, surfing up to twenty-five knots on the bigger rollers. I shortened sail, which was easy, even in those conditions, because each sail is a separate strip and there are quick-release expansion buttons to facilitate things - no reefing like ordinary sails. The anenometer touched sixty knots shortly after. That's its maximum calibration. It was, in fact, gusting higher - seventy-five knots, perhaps. So, in order to make the best time, I took Albatros through the Strait of Le Maire. With the wind and tide-rips in her favour, I managed another four knots over the ground. Albatros was really moving. However, I had to get clear of the Strait before the tide changed or else I'd have been in trouble. As it was, I made it by a whisker. I managed with half an hour to spare.'

  Thomsen was still eyeing me. 'The Strait of Le Maire is the most bloody dangerous place in the world. In any craft. Most of all in a small yacht.'

  It may have been the whisky, or perhaps the way Thomsen seemed to relate to Albatros's achievements, but I continued to talk, describing how I'd cut through the Jasons and the prevailing conditions which I admitted were fairly rough. The man was showing so much interest in my account, often interrupting me to put a very knowledgeable question to me, that he began to intrigue me - as did the reason for his presence. I was particularly intrigued as to why he should know so much about the Falklands and about a short cut through a group of remote, gale-lashed islands at the other side of the earth, of interest only to penguin fanciers and environmentalists.

  Thomsen brought his right fist into his left palm with a smack.

  'Hell's teeth! You were as close to Port Stanley in the Falklands as the Jasons! And I didn't know it!'

  He strode across to one of the big windows overlooking the anchorage. The lagoon, in the last light of the midsummer's day, was incomparably soft and lovely, pearl-grey and other-world against a back-drop of blue peaks and green forested slopes of the soaring Outeniqua mountains.

  Catching the mood, Don said, 'At this time of day a flock of wild ostriches comes down from the Belvedere side and feeds on the prawns in the shallows. They stay until the tide rises up to their bellies.'

  Thomsen, however, had eyes only for Albatros at anchor.

  'She looks very small.'

  'Big enough, when you're only one. Bigger than a house when she pitchpoled and fell on top of me.'

  He took another drink from Don. 'Arse over tip! What happened?'

  'Listen, I'm tired . . .' I began, when a thought struck me. 'I appreciate your enthusiasm and interest in Albatros. I don't know anything about you beyond your -name. What's it all about?'

  Don looked uncomfortable. 'Mr Thomsen is from the Aaland Isles.' As if that explained everything.

  Thomsen laughed. 'You can't expect him to know anything as civilized as the Aalands.' He grinned at me. 'The Aalands are a group in the Baltic between Finland and Sweden. I am a Finn. I was born in Mariehamn, the Aalands capital. So was Gustav Erickson, the last great windjammer ship-owner before World War II. He had some magnificent ships - like the Herzogin Cecile, for one. Even today people remember her.'

  Thomsen's amused glance at me was the sort that professionals swap in the company of amateurs. 'Finished up on the rocks in Cornwall.

  'Erickson was a relation of mine, on my mother's side. Seamanship goes back centuries in the Aalanders' blood. Erickson drew his splendid crews mainly from the Aaland Isles. Even the advent of steam hasn't quite killed their love for sail. There are still crews to be had there who would rather man a windjammer than a steamer.'

  Thomsen did not look like a dreamer to me. Yet today windjammers are the stuff that dreams are made of.

  Don interrupted. 'Aaland is the home of the International Association of Cape Horners - men and women who have rounded the Horn in sail.'

  'Don't forget to join the fraternity. Rainier’ Thomsen added, a little ironically. He resumed in a different tone. 'It is true, the Aaland Isles are the last resort of what few windjammers remain in the nuclear age. We Aalanders still hanker after sail for sail's sake, although our reason and our pockets tell us it is dead.'

  'There are still people who love dinosaurs,' I remarked.

  He downed his drink - he drank it on the rocks - in a gulp. 'It is a good comparison, that. The dinosaur was a complex creature. Complex and cumbersome. He lacked mobility, which means speed. Nowadays, speed is equated with evolution. The windjammer died because it was complex and cumbersome.'

  'Sail has a place, even if a limited place, today still...' I began.

  'Albatros has proved what I am trying to say,' he broke in. 'The Venetian Rig is simple; it has speed. Corbellini had a touch of genius.'

  No,' I said. 'You are trying to equate two things which cannot be compared - the yacht and the commercial sailing vessel. Let's face it, the cargo-carrying windjammer is dead. Dead as the dinosaur. What works for a small yacht doesn't necessarily work in a scaled-up version in a big ship.

  Thomsen paused a long while before replying. Then he said decisively, as i
f he had made up his mind about something - or someone, 'The Venetian Rig is not the only modern development in sail. There is another, which technically functions in exactly the opposite way in almost every respect. Nor is the windjammer dead. I have taken a twenty million dollar gamble to prove it is not.'

  Chapter 3

  All the circuits in my brain meshed, like a switch-board in which suddenly the right connections have been made. I knew now who Thomsen was. I knew why he was interested in sail. If I had not been so punch-drunk with fatigue I should have been wise to his identity earlier.

  'Jetwind’ I said. 'You're the man who built Jetwind.’

  'Right. That's me.'

  Now that the wraps were off his mystery guest, Don became vocal. 'Mr Thomsen was visiting Cape Town. He was dead keen to meet you. A mutual yachting friend put us in touch.'

  Thomsen brushed aside Don's courtesies. Sail was what mattered in his scheme of things, not social niceties. The latent power I had noticed about the man was more in evidence now.

  He said, almost declaiming the facts, 'Jetwind is a seventeen thousand tonnes, six-masted sailing ship of the most revolutionary design that has ever appeared on the high seas. She bears no resemblance to the old-time clipper or windjammer. The only thing she has in common with them is being powered by sail. Even her sails are not sails in the accepted sense. They are aerodynamically perfect aerofoils. There is no rigging, no old-time spider's web of ropes. The masts are special alloy, unstayed and stream-lined, actuated by hydraulic servo-mechanisms or locked in trim by a push-button on her bridge. A single operator only is needed. There is roller-type automatic sail furling and reefing. It works by means of stainless steel runners along the yards. Every operation aboard Jetwind is automated. Computers determine her optimum sailing angle and yard trim. The design has been evolved over years and tested by the

  Institut fur Schiffbau in Hamburg. Thousands of wind-tunnel tests went into the final design.'

  'They call her the nuclear-age marvel’ interjected Don.

  'She is that’ Thomsen agreed. 'Everything - and more. On passage she is weather routed to utilize the most favourable winds on her ongoing course. Data is fed by satellite twice a day into her computers. Conventional navigation went overboard with all the rest of the old-fashioned junk surrounding windjammers. Push-button prints from computers do it all. At any moment of the day or night she can establish her position - to within half a mile - on any ocean. All the captain has to do is to press a button and read a dial.'

  'The sea isn't licked by push-buttons and computers’ I observed. 'The same goes for Jetwind's unsupported masts and yards. Fifty-two metres high! I'll withhold judgement until I've seen how Jetwind performs in a Southern Ocean blow.'

  Thomsen met my scepticism with obvious self-control. 'Jetwind is as radical in construction as in conception. We brought in aircraft manufacturers for the long, lightweight masts. Their experience in assembling wing structures and understanding the stresses involved was what we needed, not old-fashioned ship-building methods. We reduced overhead costs by using off-the-shelf aircraft mountings for the masts and yards as well’

  'It sounds like science fiction to me. But seeing is believing!'

  Thomsen did not raise his voice, but the power which had brought Jetwind to reality in the face of the sceptics and scoffers and put sail back on the high seas pulsed through his reply,

  'I am not a dreamer, get that clear. I am a business-man, a ship-owner. Nor is Jetwind my brain child. First and foremost, my stake in Jetwind is money. The dream part belonged to a German engineer named Wilhelm Prolss. That dream began a long time ago, before World War II. Prolss was attending a dry-as-dust business conference in Hamburg. The board room overlooked the harbour. Prolss was trying to keep awake through a dull discussion. Then, under the window, a tug went by towing an old four-masted barque to the scrap yard. It was a sight to make a sailor sad, but Prolss wasn't a sailor. Yet it triggered something deep inside his brain. Ten thousand years of man's skill and endeavour to conquer the sea lay behind that pathetic old ship going to the knackers, he told himself. Was the sailing ship really so inefficient? Did man's use of the wind have to end tragically like that?'

  Don refilled our glasses. The twilight over the serene sweep of waters below us was as softly melancholy as the sight of Prolss's doomed windjammer must have been.

  Thomsen enmeshed us in his narrative. 'From that day, for twenty-one long years, the idea of wind-power incubated in Prolss's mind. Finally, he took his ideas to the Institut fur Schiffbau in Hamburg. The experts became sold on the idea. For ten years scientists wind-tunnel tested, examined, redesigned, perfected. They made models - radical, space-age-looking structures - of masts, yards, sails, hulls, hydraulic machinery for furling the sails and trimming the masts and yards. Finally they came up with the design that became Jetwind - a space-age sailing ship of seventeen thousand tonnes, one hundred and fifty metres long, masts fifty-two metres high, and a gigantic sail area of nine thousand, four hundred and thirty square metres. There had never been a ship like it before.'

  'So you've rescued an endangered species,' I said. 'The new-age windjammer arises, phoenix-like, from the Aaland Isles.'

  'You mock, like the others have,' retorted Thomsen vehemently. 'You think I am a sentimentalist, with sail in my genes. I repeat, I am a business-man. True, the sight of an old windjammer has the power to touch something deep inside me as it did Prolss. But he - like me - sublimated the thought into a concept as new as rocket travel. I'm telling you that the great golden age of sail is dead. Dead. The sailing ship was killed by four factors: it needed large, skilled crews - and crews cost money; it had limited manoeuvrability, especially in congested ports where tugs were necessary - and tugs cost money; the sailer's speed was low; the windjammer had small hatches, which were difficult and costly to load, especially with the clutter and tangle of rigging. Jetwind’s design disposes of each of these problems.'

  'Even a good business-man has been known to buy a pup,’ I remarked.

  Thomsen kept his cool at my lack of acceptance, as he must have done a thousand times before, trying to convince critical audiences.

  'Before the 1973 world fuel crisis the sailing ship as a commercial proposition was a non-starter. It was that crisis which put it back in business. For half a century cheap fuel - coal and oil - put paid to the windjammer. It simply could not compete. It was slow, expensive, and passage times were anyone's guess. Since 1973 each successive fuel crisis has made the sailing ship more commercially viable. The actual break-even point arrived when bunker fuel touched fifteen dollars a barrel.'

  'Today that price sounds like happy times.'

  'Would you believe it?' Thomsen said. 'The fate of the windjammer hinges on a fluctuation of a mere two dollars a barrel.'

  'You're over-simplifying,' I replied. 'As fuel prices rise, so do your overhead construction costs. The same applies to the windjammer as to motor ships - maybe even more for a sailing ship which is a one-off piece of construction.’

  'That is a good point,' Thomsen conceded. 'I found it in practice during the eighteen months of Jetwind's building. Everything cost more than the original tenders. Nevertheless, the major factor in putting sailing ships back on the high seas is the cost of fuel. Wind is for free. No matter how long or how short the voyage, wind costs not one cent.'

  Don said, 'The papers say Jetwind can do twenty-five knots in a full gale.' Thomsen threw away his half-smoked Perilly impatiently. 'You don't want to believe everything the media say,' he put in. 'They always get it wrong, dress up the facts for sensation. Jetwind won't - can't - attain twenty-five knots. But she is capable of twenty-two.

  'No sailing ship has a speed,' I interrupted. 'A speed potential, yes, but a speed, no.'

  Thomsen eyed me penetratingly. 'You must have thought a lot about these questions before you undertook the record attempt in Albatros.’

  'At that stage the record also was only a potential,' I grinned.


  He laughed with me. 'Touche. Unpredictable schedules killed the old-time windjammer. In this day and age things are different. Now you can keep your sailer moving because you know in advance where the wind is, and where next it's likely to blow best. One no longer has to rely on the old sixth sense the clipper skippers were said to have. The weather, the wind, is forecast for anywhere in the world, any time. The sailer can be directed literally hour by hour by satellite and other met. data to where the best winds are, what areas of calm to avoid, and so on. Weather routing is now a science. You look sceptical, Rainier.'

  'You don't want to go overboard about it,' I answered. 'Weather routing has a place - within limits. It's not the be-all and end-all, I assure you. The final decision remains the captain's.'

  'True,' Thomsen answered. 'Yachts - racing yachts in -particular - are comparable to the famous pace-making clippers - Cutty Sark, Thermopylae, and the rest. What interests me as a ship-owner is not a vessel which is capable - your speed potential, Rainier - of limited bursts of speed like the Cutty Sark. It is average service speed.'

  Don said, 'You make it all sound very down to earth.'

  'That is the name of the game,' Thomsen replied. 'That is why I built Jetwind. I have put every voyage time of the Cutty Sark during her prime twenty years through the computer. Today she would be a non-starter in competition with powered ships, even with the price of bunker fuel being what it is. At her best in the Australian trade’

  Cutty Sark averaged only six point five knots. What interests me far more than the lovely clippers are the great iron square-riggers which went out from Germany to Chile for nitrates at the turn of the century. That was when the day of the windjammer was, in fact, done. There was a famous Captain Hilgendorf who averaged seven and a half knots in regular voyages for twenty years between Hamburg and Chile. That is the sort of consistent speed which interests me as a ship-owner.'