The Lonely Sea and the Sky (46 page)

  Next morning Robert Clark arrived and rowed with me round the moored boat. 'What's wrong with the doghouse?' he asked. The doghouse is the raised part of the cabin roof at the aft end. I said, 'It seems all right to me; in fact Sheila and I were saying how attractive the yacht looked.'

  'Oh well,' said Robert, 'if you are satisfied, that's all right.' It appeared that the Tyrrell family, who have been building boats for generations and have strong views of their own, had reversed the doghouse, so that it sloped down aft instead of up. This was a much better design, made the cabin roof stronger, and gave the whole line of the deck a more handsome look. The price we paid for it was countless cracks on the head when stepping too quickly from the cabin up to the cockpit outside.

  I had often puzzled why a famously fast yacht or ship had never had an equally fast sister ship. Now I realised why.
Gipsy
Moth's
designed length was 38 foot 6 inches overall. When launched she measured 39 feet 7, which is 13 inches longer. I mentioned this to Robert, and he said, 'If that's the only difference from the plan, you ought to be grateful,' implying that no wooden vessel can be built exactly as planned. The yacht suited me. She was staunchly built, and gave me confidence. She seemed so powerful that I felt at first like a small boy astride a tall, strong, broad-backed horse which would not stop. When we left for England on Saturday, four days after the launching, I think that there were several leprechauns still on board. One must have had his feet jammed in the rudder stock. By the time we reached the Solent I could only move the rudder by exerting my full strength with both hands on the tiller, and both feet on the cockpit seat opposite. However,
Gipsy Moth III
has always had a friendly atmosphere, as if she carried the goodwill of the craftsmen who built her, and I try to avoid strangers coming aboard for fear they might trample the Little People and drive them away.

  The rudder stock tube could not be trued up until the yacht was hauled out, so that I had no chance to try out
Gipsy
Moth's
sailing qualities before she was laid up for the winter. As a result I had only ten weeks from when she was launched in the spring, on 3 April, until the start of the race on 11 June, in which to try her out for sailing qualities, to learn her tricks and foibles, and to improve my handling of her. I need two seasons of solid sailing to get anything like the best out of a boat, and would prefer to have three seasons. I think this might well apply to all yachts; certainly the last race for the America's Cup was won by a 12-metre which had been raced hard for three seasons.

  
Gipsy Moth III
was a good deal bigger than my
Gipsy Moth II
, and I soon found that there were drawbacks as a result. She drew 6 foot 5 inches and I went aground several times. With her high freeboard and 55-foot mast, the windage was considerable, and with her 13 tons she was likely to go aground good and hard. When I laid out a kedge anchor by myself to kedge her off the mud it was desperately hard hauling without a winch.

  The high freeboard made it more difficult to haul the dinghy on deck by myself, and because of this I lost the dinghy one day. I was sailing out through the Needles, towing it astern, when the painter snapped. There was a short, steep sea and a tide race, and although I sailed up to the dinghy several times, I could not get hold of it with the boathook while controlling the yacht at the same time. In the end I hauled down the sails to try approaching the dinghy under motor. While lowering the mainsail I lost sight of the dinghy, and was never able to locate it again. I spent my first night alone at sea looking for it. I carried out a square search, increasing the length of the sides each time. I had no self-steering device fitted then, the wind was unusually fickle, changing speed and direction every few minutes, and I could not make
Gipsy Moth
sail herself, though I kept on trimming and retrimming the sails. When I was not exhausted with the effort of handling the heavy gear, sweating with heat under my thick clothes, I was shivering in the cold wind. My 380-square foot mainsail, with its 18-foot boom, was awkward and heavy to handle. While lowering it, one of the runners (movable stays bracing the mast) had to be slacked away, and its big blocks would be flying round, trying to dash my brains out as I gathered in the mainsail for furling. My main halyard carried away one of the main jumper struts at the top of the mast. I had no lifeline or harness, and nearly fell in.

  When it was too dark to look for the dinghy any longer I tried to make
Gipsy Moth
sail herself so that I could have some sleep. She pigheadedly refused to settle on any of the courses I chose. Finally I gave in to her, furled the mainsail, made the tiller fast and waited to see what she would do. She swung round on to a south-south-west heading and stayed on it, jibbing along at half a knot. This was taking her right into the main shipping lane, but I switched on all my navigation lights and slept soundly till dawn. I had lost my dinghy, but I certainly gained plenty of experience that night.

  I was hampered in my trials by having no self-steering gear until 5 May, only five weeks before the start of the race. It was clear that no yacht without a self-steering gear could have a chance against yachts equipped with them. One of the rules of the race was that no yacht could use an automatic pilot – or any other gear – driven by electricity or any other form of power. We were allowed only wind-powered or hand-operated gear.

  I had been thinking about self-steering gear from the start, and I had talked it over with an old friend, Allen Wheeler, who was at school with me at The Old Ride, and who is now a celebrated boffin or aviation consultant. He said, 'You must have a modern self-steering device operated by an air-driven propeller.' This was to be like a windmill at the stern of the boat. It would be kept facing into wind by a wind vane, and it would wind up a cord attached to the tiller to pull it one way or the other if the boat's heading changed relative to the wind. This sounded marvellous, and I was stuffed full of hope. Presently Allen said that he had not enough time to make it work. By now I was so intrigued with the idea that I took it over myself. I niggled away at the design until I had a model in Meccano working satisfactorily. I showed this to another friend, Dingle Bell of the Sperry Gyroscope Company, and he was enthusiastic about it. He said that Sperry's would make it for me, and pay me a royalty if it turned out to be a popular design and suitable for all yachts. It was not until March that their engineers came to the conclusion that it would need a minimum of 7mph of wind to actuate it. My hopes were shattered; half my sailing would be done with less than that wind strength. And so in March, after I returned from visiting Vence to get my lung checked up by Jean Mattei, I was stuck with the task of getting myself a self-steering gear with only three months in which to design, to build, and to practise sailing with it.

  Every Sunday morning I took a bus to Kensington Gardens where I watched the model yachts being sailed across the Round Pond. I reckoned that if a model yacht can be sailed across the Round Pond without a helmsman, then my yacht could be sailed across the Atlantic in the same way. I bought an excellent book on model yacht sailing, and incidentally learned a lot about ocean racing from it though I dare say the author would be surprised to hear it. My new design was in principle a wind vane, which would always weathercock into wind. In fact it was a mast which could rotate in a socket at the stern of the yacht, with a flat sail instead of a metal vane. As soon as the yacht was sailing to my satisfaction I would lock the vane to the tiller. If the yacht came up into wind, the vane would be moved round with the yacht, and the wind would press on the side of it. This would pull on the tiller until the yacht had been steered back on to its original heading, when the vane would be weathercocked again, and do no work as long as the yacht kept on its original heading. The model yacht book told me that the area of the vane must be four and a half times that of the rudder, and so I designed my vane sail to be 45-square feet. The chief problem in design was to make all the parts, the stays, and the spars, strong enough to stand up to a gale, or even a storm, without being so heavy that it would require too much wind to weathercock the vane. I cannot describe how ugly it looked on the beautiful
Gipsy Moth
.

  It was not till 7 May that the yard finished and installed the vane. I crossed the bar at the entrance to the Beaulieu River, headed the yacht across the Solent and locked the vane to the tiller.
Gipsy Moth
started tearing through the water, sailing herself entirely. Her wake was almost dead straight; it was fascinating to watch. That was one of the most thrilling moments of my life. Gradually I found out that Miranda, as I christened the self-steering device, required just as much skill to get the best out of her as does setting the sails of a yacht in a keen race. Also it gave me the same pleasure to succeed.

  There were jobs like swinging the compass and calibrating the D/F loop to do, besides the sailing and self-steering experiments, and the sail handling drill. Sometimes I felt such despair, swamped by worry at the hopelessness of getting all the countless jobs done in time, that I longed to chuck up the whole project. My hands became so sore that I had to use my little fingers to pump water at the galley. Some of my swollen fingers would not close, and my fingernails were torn to the quick.

  But sometimes when I had had a good day, and thought that I was getting ahead with my single-handed training, or beginning to master the tricks of the wind vane, Beaulieu River seemed to be a river in paradise. Gliding up to my mooring at dusk I would see the trees and clouds etched in the still surface of the river, and I would hear the occasional plop of a sea trout jumping. After dark the nightingales would start singing in the woods alongside the mooring, and in the morning the sun would light up the pale green, tender, young, spring leaves on the trees.

  At Sheila's invitation, Tubby Clayton came aboard with three disciples. He donned his robes in the fore-cabin and held an impressive service of blessing the ship. With Edward and Belinda Montagu there were ten of us standing in the cabin. When Tubby imperiously demanded to be disembarked, I found that Giles had gone off with the dinghy. So, somewhat fortified with 'Liffey Wather', I offered to motor the yacht down to the jetty at low water of a spring tide, with the mud-banks showing horribly on each side. Turning 30 yards below the jetty we went on to the mud, where we were presently heeled over 43 degrees. To run aground within an hour of the ship's being blessed must be a record.

  One night I wrote in my log, 'I feel very happy again tonight. I have not enjoyed myself so much since I was preparing to fly out alone to Australia in 1929. I was thinking the old query, 'Is fate too strong for man's self-will?' Am I so happy because I am doing the sort of thing I was destined for? How I enjoyed my flying – no, that's not right because I hated a lot of it, always scared stiff. No, I should say, 'how it satisfied me!'

  'Somehow I never seemed to enjoy so much doing things with other people. I know now I don't do a thing nearly as well when with someone. It makes me think I was cut out for solo jobs, and any attempt to diverge from that lot only makes me a half person. It looks as if the only way to be happy is to do fully what you are destined for.'

  The stores came aboard at Buckler's Hard. They were no trouble to me because Sheila had prepared a list of them. One hundred was my magic number; I had 100 lbs of potatoes, 100 fresh eggs, 100 apples, onions, carrots and oranges, and also 100 bottles of grog. (This last hundred was an exaggeration, because most of them were only cans of stout.)

  On 5 June, Sheila sailed down to Plymouth with me, and we tied up alongside the three other British entries for the race. We had four days of rushing about, press and television interviews, visits and talks; it was all great sport. On the night before the race, Sheila and I decided to have a quiet dinner together with Giles at Pedro's. Lindley Abbatt of
The Observer
asked me if he and his wife could join us, and before we had finished it was a dinner party of seventy people. I always intend to start an ocean race with a clear head, after no drink taken. Perhaps one day I shall succeed, but that night I remember walking up to the Hoe after the party with Mike Richey, secretary of the Institute of Navigation, and a very experienced ocean racer. Sheila asserts that at 1 o'clock in the morning we were trying to get a star fix from a street lamp.

  Dawn came cold, blustery and wet, and my spirits sank to their lowest ebb. Sheila and I went down early to move
Gipsy
Moth
out of the tidal dock at high water. We tied up in a little basin outside, and I tried to eat something on board, but could not. My three rivals looked fairly bleak, too. They were Blondie in his junk-rigged
Jester
, David Lewis in
Cardinal Virtue
, and Val Howells in
Eira
.

  Several owners who had intended to start in the race did not come up to scratch; one American in a handsome yacht was prevented by his young wife; another American, Piver, on his way over from America in his trimaran with a full crew, had not yet arrived, and when he did he found he lacked enough time to chase after us and take part in the race. I met one of his crew in New York afterwards who told me that nothing would have induced him to try sailing it across alone. Piver had done well to sail it with a crew from west to east. Humphrey Barton had intended to start in his 12-ton
Rose of York
, but withdrew because he could not make her sail herself. He had made a forty-seven day crossing in
Vertue
with O'Riordan as crew.

  In the tensed-up jockeying for position at the start I cursed one of my friends out alone in a yacht who baulked me. It was enough to keep clear of rivals, without having to dodge yachts, launches and a big trawler full of sightseers.