Sea Change: Alone Across the Atlantic in a Wooden Boat

by Peter Nichols

  Ridgway knew how to sail; Chay Blyth did not. He took some lessons before leaving, but required help raising and setting his sails on the day of departure, and followed friends on another boat out of port, copying their manoeuvres. Three weeks later, in a gale that was only a hint of what he would face in the Southern Ocean, he found his shallow-drafted boat unmanageable. He lowered the sails and went below, where he prayed and read sailing manuals, feeling, he later wrote, as if he was in hell with instructions.

  Knox-Johnston left next, on June 14, from Falmouth. He was followed, on August 22, by two Frenchmen (who first had to sail north to England, to leave from a British port, to be eligible for the Sunday Times prizes): Loïck Fougeron, in a thirty-foot steel cutter, and Bernard Moitessier, in his forty-foot-long steel ketch, Joshua. Moitessier, forty-three years old, was by far the most formidable competitor, already legendary in small-boat voyaging circles. Born in Vietnam, he had grown up sailing junk-rigged sampans. In 1965–6 he had sailed Joshua 14,216 miles non-stop, with his wife, from Tahiti to Spain via Cape Horn, at that time the longest non-stop voyage in a small sailboat. He had been there, he had done it. Joshua had been built with immense strength by a builder of commercial steel vessels, it was thoroughly tested, and Moitessier knew his boat intimately.

  Moitessier had written two literate, rather mystical books about his already long life at sea, Un Vagabond des Mers du Sud, and Cap Horn à la Voile. The last covered his Tahiti–Cape Horn–Spain voyage, and in it he described a controversial technique he had discovered for surviving the monster storm seas in the Southern Ocean. As Hiscock writes in Voyaging Under Sail: ‘In 1966 something happened to shake the long-accepted theory of small craft management in heavy weather.’ This theory was essentially to reduce sail and heave-to – stopping, in effect – or to slow the yacht down by dragging a sea anchor (a submersible conical device) or long ropes weighted down with anchors or even tyres. Moitessier’s radical tactic was to run before the storm at full speed and surf down the face of giant overtaking waves at a slight angle. He claimed that surfing at angles of between 15 and 20 degrees prevented the boat from either rolling over sideways or somersaulting bow-over-stern.

  Hiscock goes on:

  A year after this event I took part in a Yachting World forum, in which four of us, including my old friend Adlard Coles – perhaps the most widely experienced British ocean-racing man of the day, and whose latest book, Heavy Weather Sailing, had recently been published – discussed yacht management in heavy weather. Naturally the Moitessier method cropped up, and we all found it rather startling. Coles said he had never dared try it.

  Although Moitessier left England almost three months after Robin Knox-Johnston, Joshua’s greater length and speed, and Moitessier’s reputation as a seaman, gave him every possibility, even probability, of catching up, overtaking and winning.

  On August 24, the oldest man in the race, fifty-eight-year-old Royal Navy commander Bill King, set sail on what was supposed to be the ideal boat, one built specially for this race. Another Royal Navy commander, Nigel Tetley, sailed on September 16, in a forty-foot trimaran, a multi-hull design capable of greater speeds than any of the other boats, all monohulls, and, theoretically, capable of overtaking them all and winning.

  The eighth competitor was Donald Crowhurst. An ambitious electrical engineer, inventor and weekend sailor, he had become convinced he could equip a trimaran with his own electronic inventions and beat everybody in the race. A charismatic, persuasive man, he found backers, although late in the day, to fund him and have a boat built for the race. But he got away very late, on the thirty-first of October, and only then because he was under the gun of a Sunday Times deadline. His boat was unfinished, untested, most of his inventions and ideas unimplemented. Crowhurst’s charm, imagination and ambition, fuelled by an angry sense of thwarted superiority, got him to the starting gate, but he should not have gone. And in the end, the night before he left, he surely knew it:

  Donald and Clare [his wife] rowed out to the boat for a final inspection. It was still smothered with piled-up equipment. They sorted out as much as they could and then, at two in the morning, went back to the hotel. Once in bed, Donald lay silent beside Clare. After struggling for the right words, he finally said, in a very quiet voice: ‘Darling, I’m very disappointed in the boat. She’s not right. I’m not prepared. If I leave with things in this hopeless state will you go out of your mind with worry?’ Clare, in her turn, could only reply with another question. ‘If you give up now,’ she said, ‘will you be unhappy for the rest of your life?’

  Donald did not answer, but started to cry. He wept until morning. During that last night he had less than five minutes’ sleep. ‘I was such a fool!’ says Clare Crowhurst now. ‘Such a stupid fool! With all the evidence in front of me, I still didn’t realize Don was telling me he’d failed, and wanted me to stop him.’

  This quote is from my British Penguin edition of The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall (who, at the time of the race, was the assistant editor of the Sunday Times). On the back it says: ‘The twisted epic of a man who sailed single-handed over the horizon of sanity.’

  The last competitor, Italian Alex Carozzo, also sailed on the October 31 deadline, in a brand new, purpose-built sixty-six-footer, which, like Crowhurst’s boat, was unfinished.

  Ridgway and Blyth, lonely and demoralized when their weekend sailboats began to show the stress of ocean sailing, dropped out early on. Loïck Fougeron and Bill King were 380 miles apart in the South Atlantic when both had their yachts rolled over by the same storm. The masts were snapped off King’s boat; Fougeron suffered no severe damage, but was frightened and knew then he didn’t want to face what awaited him in the Southern Ocean. Both withdrew from the race. Soon after his late start, Alex Carozzo began vomiting blood from what appeared to be a hæmorrhaging ulcer and sailed no farther than Oporto, Portugal.

  By December 1968, six months after setting out, Knox-Johnston was already past New Zealand, heading for Cape Horn, with Moitessier somewhere behind him – not far enough, he was sure. He had continued through an unending series of setbacks, which included the smashing of his self-steering wind vane (a home-made affair very similar to mine on Toad), a wave knocking Suhaili’s cabin roof askew, and sewing his moustache to a sail. He had considered giving up several times but had continued as long as he could find a way to do so.

  Far behind – about 12,000 miles behind, and still in the Atlantic – the two trimarans followed. Nigel Tetley was doing poorly, averaging only 68 miles a day. But Donald Crowhurst, in the same sort of boat, appeared to be doing far better. On December 10 he radio-cabled his press agent in England that he had just sailed 243 miles in a single twenty-four-hour period. This appeared to be a record. Crowhurst was suddenly the lead in the Sunday Times’s next instalment on the race:

  CROWHURST SPEED WORLD RECORD?

  Donald Crowhurst, last man out in the Sunday Times round-the-world lone-man yacht race, covered a breathtaking and possibly record-breaking 243 miles in his 41 foot trimaran Teignmouth Electron last Sunday. The achievement is even more remarkable in the light of the very poor speeds in the first three weeks of his voyage; he took longer to reach the Cape Verdes than any other competitor.

  What Crowhurst had done to boost his poor performance, and put himself in the spotlight, was to begin to lie. From this point on, he radioed back to England increasingly exaggerated positions. In the newspaper maps, and in the minds of most people following the story, he now leaped ahead in a series of dazzling runs. He shot far past his real position, and in order to make this at all credible, he was forced to make up and maintain a fraudulent navigational record, a second set of books. As Hall and Tomalin note in The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst: ‘His forgery is, in many ways, the most impressive bit of technical expertise of the entire voyage. To calculate backwards from an imagined distance to a series of daily positions, and from them via declination and other tables to the co
rrect sun-sightings is a formidable and unfamiliar job, far harder than honest navigation.’

  Most people accepted Crowhurst’s claims. But Sir Francis Chichester phoned the Sunday Times to say that Crowhurst had to be ‘a bit of a joker’, and the Times’s navigational consultant for the race, Captain Craig Rich, of the London School of Navigation, expressed ‘considerable surprise’.

  Crowhurst had gambled everything on this voyage. Financially, he faced ruin if he did not at least win the £5,000 cash prize for the fastest voyage, and do well enough to generate a lot more than that in book sales and endorsements. He had also nailed his personality to this cross. He had postured to everyone, but most of all to himself, as the sort of bluff, patriotic, English adventurer who could pull off this epic caper. He wasn’t.

  But there is no doubt that this is exactly what Robin Knox-Johnston is. No demonic neuroses for him. His heroes, often invoked in his book, are Elizabethan seadog adventurers, Drake and Frobisher, who sailed for gold and the glory of their queen – at least that’s what schoolboys are told. Here is his account of his Christmas aboard Suhaili in the Southern Ocean:

  Two glasses later I clambered out on deck and perched myself on the cabin top to hold a Carol Service. I sang happily away for over an hour, roaring out all my favourite carols … At 3 p.m. my time I drank a Loyal Toast, wishing that I had been up early enough to hear the Queen’s speech at 6 a.m. my time. Somehow, gathering to listen to this speech adds to the charm of Christmas.

  That evening on the radio he heard about Apollo 8 going around the moon and thought about the differences between their voyage and his own:

  I was doing absolutely nothing to advance scientific knowledge; I would not know how to … True, once Chichester … had shown that this trip was possible, I could not accept that anyone but a Briton should be the first to do it, and I wanted to be that Briton. But nevertheless to my mind there was still an element of selfishness in it. My mother, when asked for her opinion of the voyage before I sailed, had replied that she considered it ‘totally irresponsible’ and on this Christmas Day I began to think she was right. I was sailing round the world simply because I bloody well wanted to – and, I realized, I was thoroughly enjoying myself.

  A psychiatrist who saw him before and after the voyage, described him as ‘distressingly normal’. I’m not sure normal is the word, considering the strength of his extraordinary resolve. He might worry about his boat, he might modestly belittle his voyage, but he had not a shred of self-doubt.

  Crowhurst was a different sort altogether, made of frailer, darker stuff. As he sailed south down the Atlantic, his fake positions grew farther and farther away, in seas he was never to sail to: the Indian, the Pacific Ocean. He sailed towards Cape Horn, as if to turn around there and head for home – not at the head of the pack, for even with his false positions he was too far behind Knox-Johnston, but he could give everyone a run for their money making the fastest voyage and pick up the cash.

  On January 17, 1969, Robin Knox-Johnston rounded Cape Horn.

  My first impulse … was to keep on going east. The feeling of having got past the worst was terrific and I suppose this impulse was a way of cocking a snook at the Southern Ocean itself, almost as if to say, ‘I’ve beaten you and now I’ll go round again to prove it.’ Fortunately this phase passed very quickly … I thought of hot baths, pints of beer, the other sex and steaks and turned up into the Atlantic for home.

  At this point, Bernard Moitessier, sailing 20 per cent faster, was only nineteen days behind him. It seemed possible that the two men could race up the Atlantic and reach England, after 30,000 miles and ten and a half months, in a photo finish.

  The Frenchman was as unlike the Englishman as two men can be. It would appear, from his book about the race, The Long Way, that Moitessier spent at least half the voyage standing on deck, spiritually and sensually intoxicated, absorbing the elements around him by means of a mystical osmosis. So deep is his communion with the ocean and its creatures, that a pack of porpoises comes to warn him as Joshua bears down on New Zealand and takes a wrong turn:

  A tight line of 25 porpoises swimming abreast goes from stern to stem on the starboard side, in three breaths, then the whole group veers right and rushes off at right angles, all the fins cutting the water together and in the same breath taken on the fly … I watch, wonderstruck … Something pulls me, something pushes me. I look at the compass. Joshua [steered by wind vane] is running downwind at 7 knots straight for Stewart Island, hidden in the stratus. The steady west wind had shifted around to the south without my realizing it.

  Moitessier then alters course, back onto a safe heading.

  And then something wonderful happens: a big black and white porpoise jumps ten or twelve feet in the air in a fantastic somersault, with two complete rolls … Three times he does his double roll, bursting with a tremendous joy, as if he were shouting to me and all the other porpoises: ‘The man understood that we were trying to tell him to sail to the right … you understood … you understood … keep on like that, it’s all clear ahead!’

  You might pooh-pooh such a thing, if you didn’t know about Pelorus Jack. Pelorus, the Latin name of the pilot of Hannibal’s ship, is the name given to a nautical device for taking bearings. Pelorus Jack was a porpoise that swam about off French Pass, New Zealand, in the nineteenth century. He met all ships approaching the pass and piloted them through its maze of rocks. One day, a passenger aboard a ship pulled out a pistol and shot Pelorus Jack, for sport. The porpoise was wounded but recovered. He continued to meet ships off French Pass, with the sole exception of the ship that carried the passenger who shot him.

  After rounding the Horn, Moitessier too felt an impulse to keep going east – and he did. He never turned left.

  He carried no radio. His method of communicating his position to the Sunday Times, and his thoughts to the outside world, was to lob by slingshot small plastic containers with notes inside them onto the decks of passing ships. The first news of his decision came from Cape Town, where he lobbed a note to the Sunday Times onto the bridge of a tanker anchored in Table Bay as he sailed past. ‘The Horn was rounded February 5, and today is March 18. I am continuing non-stop towards the Pacific Islands because I am happy at sea, and perhaps also to save my soul.’

  He had decided that he had little interest in continuing back to Europe to win a race. ‘Leaving from Plymouth and returning to Plymouth now seems like leaving from nowhere to go nowhere’, he writes in his book.

  He was happy aboard Joshua, and felt he could go on for ever. The privations of a long voyage didn’t trouble him. It had been six months since he had bathed, back in the Doldrums of the Atlantic. His hair had turned into dreadlocks: ‘My hair has grown so long it tangles on top of my head; the comb has not been able to run through it for several weeks. I thought I had got tar on my hair.’

  When the news reached England that Moitessier had kept on going, it was widely assumed he had gone barmy. Whatever his state of mind, it worked for him. He sailed on to Tahiti, arriving there on June 21, 1969, ten months after leaving Plymouth. He wrote The Long Way, which became a best-seller in France, remarried and started a new family.

  It would have been a close race indeed if he had continued on to England. Knox-Johnston calculated that theoretically he would still have won:

  Moitessier would have been slowed in the Variables and the doldrums just as I was, but even if one ignores this and allows him his full average speed of 117 miles a day all the way home … he would in theory still have had fifty miles to go to Plymouth on the day that I arrived in Falmouth.

  Fifty miles is just ten hours’ sailing.

  Moitessier is far better remembered for going on than he ever would have been for coming in second.

  Knox-Johnston sailed into Falmouth, amid a flotilla of welcoming boats, on April 22, after 313 days at sea.

  There remained only the two trimarans, sailed by Crowhurst and Tetley. With the spectre of Crowhurst catching him up,
or at least bettering his time for the cash prize, Nigel Tetley had pushed his trimaran hard. He had sailed almost entirely around the world, but his boat had become damaged, the structure joining the three hulls had weakened. In the middle of the night of May 21 – 1,100 miles from England – his boat broke up and sank. Tetley took to his life raft and was picked up by a ship.

  On June 29, in response to a BBC request for an ETA, Crowhurst radioed a Morse-code position of 32° north, 40° west (not far from where I am now, same latitude, several hundred miles due east). It was his last contact. Eleven days later, and about sixty miles farther north, the Royal Mail vessel Picardy, bound from London to the Caribbean, came across a ghosting trimaran. The ship sounded its foghorn three times. There was no response, so a boat was lowered and three of the Picardy’s crew boarded the trimaran. They found it as mysteriously deserted as the Mary Celeste. The life raft was still lashed on deck. Three blue logbooks lay on the chart table. The Picardy informed Lloyd’s of London, which in turn notified the US Air Force. A search was begun for a swimmer, or a body, but none was found. The Picardy hoisted the trimaran aboard and steamed on. A group from the Sunday Times flew to meet the Picardy when it docked in Santo Domingo, and the logbooks were handed over. They made stunning reading, revealing that Crowhurst had never left the Atlantic. They contained twenty-five thousand words of rambling mathematical and philosophical thoughts and revelations that showed a progressive decline into a madness brought on, in part, by a moral grief at what he had done. ‘It is finished, It is finished, IT IS THE MERCY,’ he had written in his final entry. It was deduced from his writings that at eleven-twenty a.m. on July 1, he had jumped into the sea and watched his trimaran sail on without him.