Solitaire Spirit: Three Times Around the World Single-Handed

by Les Powles

  So we turned away and I distinctly heard her give a sigh of relief. We entered harbour at dawn on June 19th, our log showing 755 miles. As Bastille Day was not far off, the harbour was packed with some 90 boats waiting for the festivities to start. The Bastille was a French prison demolished in the times of the Revolution but, so far as I am aware, the British were never blamed for this.

  Solitaire circled the harbour a couple of times, nodding to many of the craft she had met before, the boats anchored stern to shore. I saw a space next to a bright yellow Ericson 36 with an American in his early thirties sitting on the foredeck.

  ‘Is there room for one more?’ I asked.

  ‘Are you single-handed?’ he replied and, on my reply, waved me in.

  In fact I had told a lie because at that stage I was anything but single-handed. We had about six dinghies tied to us. How and where Solitaire berthed had been taken out of my hands. I heard the anchor go down, two lines were taken to the shore and she was slowly eased back to lie 20ft off. Remembering our arrival in Fatu Hiva, I could almost hear her saying ‘Now, this is more like a welcome.’

  Many of our visitors I had met in Panama and they had been concerned by my slow passage to Hiva Oa. After any voyage I enjoyed making physical contact with friends, shaking hands with both of mine, and hugging the ladies. You can say a great deal with the strength of a hand or hug.

  As this was a Saturday morning Customs would not re-open until Monday. Solitaire spent the rest of the day receiving visitors, which kept me busy making endless cups of tea for her guests. That evening I managed to sneak away to a party on another yacht, after which I found Dontcho and Juli’s lifeboat and left a message on its closed hatch.

  The following morning my American neighbour came over and introduced himself as Webb Chiles. I have never met a more determined person. Twice he left his home port of San Diego for a single-handed voyage around the world via Cape Horn. On the first attempt he had been forced to turn back before reaching the Cape, leaking badly and with broken rigging. He called in at Tahiti, made repairs and tried again, only to be turned back once more to San Diego. Finally he made the voyage on what was virtually a sinking yacht. He had visited New Zealand and had recently arrived in Papeete where, at the time of our meeting, he was writing his book, Storm Passage.

  I learned much from Webb, the first true single-hander I had ever met and remember talking to him on the sidewalk when a woman reporter asked if she could visit our boats and interview us. She wondered if we had a death wish, a daft question, particularly when put to someone who had just sailed around Cape Horn fighting for his life. I would have advised anyone with such an outlook not to step into a dinghy, let alone a seagoing yacht, and Webb said much the same thing only more trenchantly.

  Although not yet halfway round on my first voyage, I had already committed myself to a second and these chats with Webb dictated the route for my next attempt – around Cape Horn. Always ready to joke about my early navigational mistakes and the Brazilian hospital, I was finding it increasingly difficult to live with my errors. My confidante would forget about it the next day; I would carry it in my mind for the rest of my life and wanted to square the account which made me believe a second voyage around Cape Horn might help.

  Later the woman reporter visited Solitaire, by which time Webb had sailed for home – just as well, I thought, after reading the story she wrote. Under the headline ‘Yachtsman Lucky Les earns his nickname’ (I’ve never been called Lucky Les in my life), it started: ‘Les, while sailing here from England, was lost at sea, shipwrecked, hospitalised and suffered from hunger.’ As I said at the time, ‘I hope my luck never runs out or I’ll be in real trouble.’ In fact, the story helped in two ways. The paper was given away to all the boats in the harbour, and as a result I was invited aboard many of them. If I was not asked to any I thought looked interesting I would contemplate chipping a golf ball onto their decks to wake ’em up!

  Through the same article I met Tim Beckett, fresh from England and who, for some reason, I always thought of as a college student with a delightfully dry sense of humour. With him was the co-owner of Huzar and they were waiting for Tim’s father to join them before continuing to New Zealand. When visiting him, he would send his ropey rubber inflatable across on a pulley arrangement. Once you were aboard, it would wrap itself around you like a starving octopus. If you survived you were greeted with a chamber-pot of tea. Tim later lost Huzar on Lady Elliot Island, 60 miles off the coast of Australia, saving only the engine and his address book.

  The morning after my arrival in Tahiti, Dontcho and Juli made their appearance and I spent a week visiting places of interest and working on their boat, always with the movie camera churning away. Then they had to leave for Fiji because of the schedule laid down by their country. I made arrangements to sail for Australia the following day, a schedule dictated not by HM Government but by my pocket; I had less than $30 left. It seemed an age since I had established two rules to govern my life at sea: the first that I would always sail alone, the second that I would never accept payment for working on a friend’s boat.

  Next to Dontcho’s lifeboat was a 45ft steel boat belonging to a French aircraft pilot, Peter, who had a beautiful wife and two lovely blonde children. On the day Juli and Dontcho left, Peter and his wife invited me to a local restaurant and asked if I would stay on for a few weeks to fit out his boat. Since he was working and making good money, he could well afford to pay me. After a long talk I agreed somewhat reluctantly to bend my second rule and accept owners in employment. In Peter’s case the pay would be low, the local Tahitian rate for unskilled workers being $4 an hour and, since I had to get used to my new rule, I would take no more than a dollar an hour. During the next few weeks I worked a 60-hour week and, by saving two-thirds of my earnings, pushed my $30 up to nearly $200. Then Peter told me Kodak Laboratories wanted some fibreglassing done and would pay $4 an hour, the outcome of which was that I started on one of the worst and most dangerous jobs in my life.

  The Kodak building itself was a modern, single-storey factory with a slightly sloping roof of corrugated aluminium. The maximum space between the roof and the ceiling was 8ft, diminishing to a few inches. To prevent the heat discomforting their employees, rolls of fibreglass had been laid in the loft. Particles of this were now falling through cracks in the ceiling onto the film processing machines so they wanted the fibreglass rolled up and replaced on sheets of plastic. Entering the loft was like stepping into a cauldron and it was impossible to wear a mask to prevent glassfibre being sucked into the lungs. Joists, 4ft apart, were all I had to stand on up there. I would take a gallon of water with me and work through an 8-hour shift. Now and again they would call me down for a break, but I would explain that if I ever left their hellhole during the day I would never go back. Each night they promised me a local worker whom they reckoned would be more accustomed to the heat. Now and then a face would pop through the trap door, the whites of the eyes would start to look like two fried eggs and the face would drop out of sight. Why I carried on with the job, apart from wanting to finish something I had started, I shall never know. The only good thing to say about it was that it was great when you stopped.

  The laboratory had some splendidly hot showers, the first I had used since leaving Panama. I would stand under them for ages to open up the pores and rid myself of the itchy dust and glass, and then return to Solitaire, knowing that I had more money to spend on her. For three weeks I worked a 45-hour week. Then they asked me to knock two rooms into one. After that, would I build some storage racks? When they suggested building some car ports, I decided I was getting too civilised and left to prepare Solitaire for our trip to Australia.

  Just before leaving Tahiti a young French couple, who planned to start teaching on one of the nearby islands, came to see me. They had bought a 35ft wooden yacht to use as a home, which they considered a good buy until they discovered Toredo worm in the stern-hung rudder and then could find no one to build them a re
placement, so I stayed on two more weeks to do the job. My one regret about sailing was that I had not started when I was a young man, fitter, stronger and able to give Solitaire more care. Tahiti strengthened my regrets. I wished I could have seen these islands and met the Polynesian people before ‘civilisation’ had spoiled them.

  Only in smoke-filled night clubs could you watch their beautiful native dancing. If you saw a Polynesian thrusting his canoe through the water with muscle power it simply meant that his outboard had broken down and he was on his way back to the garage to get it fixed. Large white cruise liners would dock and release a flood of even whiter chattering mice, all wearing the same brightly-coloured shirts, hats, sunglasses and cameras. False teeth flashing even falser smiles, they would stream past the dancing girls swaying to Hawaiian guitars. The tide would flood the shops to devour everything in sight, prevented only by pavement vendors holding out armfuls of shell necklaces and beautiful woven straw hats. Cameras would click, click, then their Pied Piper would toot toot on the ship’s siren and the tide would reverse. The heavily-laden mice would be sucked back into a hole in the ship’s side. A puff of smoke on the horizon, and they were gone. The locals would count their profits and a street cleaner remove the last traces of their presence. Weeks later postcards would arrive in New York, Tokyo and Scunthorpe, ‘Having a wonderful time in Tahiti, wish you were here.’

  When I recalled Hiva Oa in later years, I remembered the Chinese man who thought he was English. Tahiti, for me, meant a small American boy. The local paper printed my story on a Saturday and next day it was customary for children from the cruising ships to attend Sunday school with the locals. I was walking past the church when an avalanche of these terrors descended. Within seconds I had them climbing over me, one even trying to pull off my shorts, so small I had to get on my knees to hear what he was saying. ‘Mister, I’d sure be proud to shake your hand,’ he said. It was like holding a butterfly. For days after I would smile when I remembered his serious face. He made me feel good inside, wishing that he would always stay young and innocent and not change with the years like Tahiti.

  Sunday was always the best day of the week. Now that I was earning good money I could afford to buy the excellent French wines, the crusty rolls and make crisp, fresh salads. The harbour front was Papeete’s main street and Solitaire was only a few yards from the sidewalk. Sunday was the day that the visits I had made in the week were returned, a day we all looked forward to.

  My last hours on the island were spent scrubbing Solitaire’s antifouling, not a particularly pleasant chore as the waste from 90 yachts was dumped in the harbour. The sensible thing would have been to go over to the unspoilt Moorea but there had been too many delays and I had to push on.

  Saturday, September 25th, was set for my departure and I had chosen Gladstone, about halfway up the east coast of Australia, as my destination. It was just below the beginning of the Great Barrier Reef, the ideal place from which to start the following stage of the voyage. Another consideration was that I would have to remain in port for five months during the hurricane season and, as Gladstone had a large aluminium plant and was building a power station, I thought it should be possible to find work there. I would have liked to have visited Auckland but New Zealand was further away and had few job prospects. I would make the final choice halfway through the voyage when the current started to swing south towards Auckland.

  The first leg would take us just below Rarotonga, 700 miles to the WSW, 200 miles south of Tahiti, which had a strong RDF station to confirm our position. After that our course would be virtually due west, dropping only another 200 miles in the next 3,000. Provided we did not go further south than Gladstone’s latitude, we should have a good passage. The pilot charts showed much the same pattern as our previous voyage: winds over our stern from the east to south-east around Force 4, with only three per cent calms and a few gales close to Australia, but no worse than an English summer. In all, a voyage of 4,000 miles, no more than 40 days at sea if the pilot charts were correct.

  The most upsetting thing about the trip was the places we would miss: magic islands whose names rolled off the tongue, Moorea, Huahine, Bora Bora, Tahaa, Fiji. Each year that would change as more and more hotels and flats destroyed them. It seemed foolish to be wishing I could have been in the South Pacific 50 years before when they would change that much again in the next five. I was giving up seeing them just to sail around a piece of rock called Cape Horn.

  As food in Australia would be cheaper than Tahiti’s, I kept my stores to a minimum although the cash situation was quite good: in fact I was richer than when I left England and now had $700 in hand. The tucker I would not be running short of was onions as an Australian yachtsman had asked me if I had plenty on board and was amazed when I told him I had never even considered carrying them. Onions last for months and are full of vitamins, he lectured me, and to make sure I got the message, he turned up with a sackful. He must have told the story to all the other cruising people because Solitaire was soon packed with them!

  The one thing I did not take was a cockroach, although Tahiti breeds some of the world’s finest. After dark you could see whole families of them walking along the sidewalks, every now and then stopping to inspect a yacht before deciding whether or not to make it their new home. I believe every craft suffered from them, certainly all those I ate on. You would be eating dinner when they would walk across your plate, splashing through the gravy without so much as a by-your-leave. Because they were a topic of conversation and, cockroach-less, I could not join in, vicious rumours were spread. It was reported that they had been seen walking up Solitaire’s shore lines and that on reading her name on the stern there had been a panic to disembark again. It was also claimed that I spent half the night trying to entice the poor creatures on board with bits of cheese which was a lie since I discovered they did not particularly like it! When Solitaire sailed through the reef to start her voyage she had not a single cockroach on board and at the time I was concerned, remembering stories of rats deserting doomed ships.

  We had arrived in Tahiti on June 19th and left on September 25th, after Solitaire had been rested for more than three months. The early stages of the voyage went well enough with a pleasant sail close to that island paradise, Moorea, but during the night things started to go wrong. We ran into fierce squalls and a batten pierced the mainsail, which meant that the batten pocket could not be used again that trip, and a 5-gallon water container burst – nothing to worry about at that stage since I still had another 25 gallons left.

  I picked up Rarotonga’s RDF signal on the third day out, 400 miles away! A week from Tahiti and Rarotonga hove in sight 20 miles to our north. The pilot charts had been correct up to that point. From then on had I reversed the information it would have been near enough correct. Instead of stern winds from the east at Force 4, Solitaire was pushing into winds from the west dead on her nose, anything from Force 6 to complete calm. Under these conditions we could not sail close to the wind as short, choppy waves kept pushing her bow to one side. Solitaire, facing a fighter with a long, left jab, would shake her head to recover and try to move forward, only to be hit again. At the halfway mark, passing under the Tonga Islands, I nearly decided to give up and head for New Zealand, 1,000 miles to the south.

  Had I changed course then we would have had a current of 10 to 15 miles a day in our favour and, had the winds stayed constant, we would have been sailing with them abeam. Solitaire, staggering like a punch-drunk fighter, refused to give up but carried on for Australia and Gladstone.

  We had one particularly bad storm that led me to conclude that I should dispense with battened sails. Battens were forever fouling the shrouds, particularly when running, and if they broke they inevitably damaged the sail. Certainly they allowed a larger sail area with a roach but the increased speed was not worth the trouble as I was racing no one. In future I would have battenless mainsails with a straight leech and would also change my reefing system. Although roller r
eefing was fitted to the boom, I had never used it, preferring to slab reef since my halyards led back to the cockpit.

  For the first time in this particular storm I decided to try the roller reefing. The job was nearly done when a squall strained the leech where it wrapped around the boom. The sail shredded in half, making its repair a lengthy project. For the rest of the trip to Australia I had to tie the main off at its last reefing point, cutting the sail area by more than half!

  This was turning out to be another protracted voyage thanks to light winds and a small sail area. We were becalmed a few times and I went over the side in the dinghy to clean the waterline, which was largely unencrusted. Some 700 miles from Australia the split pin holding the self-steering rudder broke and I made the rest of the trip without its help. Normally I would have lost the rudder but since I had never liked this method of attachment, I had drilled it and connected a safety rope. Our landfall was Lady Elliot Island, 60 miles off the Australian mainland, which we passed on November 30th. That night we had an electrical storm and I sat watching the lightning under bare poles as if in daylight.

  Next day we drifted by the Bunker reefs, sighting land with the dawn. I motored all that windless day to arrive at six o’clock local time in the broad creek on which Gladstone lies, after the longest time we had spent at sea so far, 69 days, beating our previous record by a day. We had logged 4,212 miles.

  Australia is psychotic about the import of animals, plants, seeds or food. Normally when clearing Customs I have been asked if I had drugs, guns or drink but the Australian Customs man who boarded Solitaire could not care less if I was head of the Mafia or carrying an atom bomb.