A Voyage For Madmen (14 page)

Late into his preparations, Commander Bill King had found that the project was costing him far more than he had anticipated – as can happen with most things, but with boats in particular. He quickly had to find another £7,000. He got a few hundred selling film and television rights; a publisher advanced him money for a book about his voyage. But he was still far short. So he plundered his life savings, sold all his cattle and sheep, leased the grazing rights on his farm, and sold his car.

When he had first thought of his voyage, it was something he was doing for himself; he hadn't seen it as a race, which had come as an unwelcome surprise. But the staking of all his financial
resources on his effort now left him with a feeling that would be common to all his rivals, each of whom eventually found every aspect of his life taken over by this race: he had to win.

King sailed from Plymouth on Saturday morning, 24 August, two days after Fougeron and Moitessier.
Galway Blazer II
ghosted out of the harbour with an honorary escort of three naval vessels; a navy cannon on the breakwater fired a salute. The sea was quiet in the channel, but the light wind had turned, as Moitessier and Fougeron had feared it would, and was now blowing from the southwest, dead ahead of King. The junk-rig was at its best with the wind on the beam or from aft – the predominant conditions expected on this circumnavigation, and for which King's boat had been expressly designed – but it could not point nearly as close to a headwind, especially a light one, as conventionally rigged modern yachts. He began tacking down-channel, off to a slow start.

With just over two months' head start, Robin Knox-Johnston was then at 33 degrees south, 13 degrees west, or about 1,500 miles west and a little north of Cape Town, South Africa. He was well south of the tropics now; the weather was growing colder and the wind stronger. He was approaching the Southern Ocean, which officially began at 40 degrees south, just 420 miles ahead. But
Suhaili
was showing more signs of wear, and this was beginning to sap Knox-Johnston's confidence.

The halyard winch brakes were failing: while raising or reefing the mainsail and headsails, the brakes were letting go and dropping the sails on to Knox-Johnston's head. This would be no more than annoying in fine weather, but in strong winds, which had already arrived, it could make sail-handling impossible.

He fixed the brakes temporarily, but on 6 August he noticed that the main gooseneck – the hingelike piece of hardware connecting the main boom to the mast – was beginning to come apart. Failure of the gooseneck would leave him without effective
use of his mainsail, which would slow him drastically; coming at the wrong moment it could result in damage that would force him out of the race.

That night, Knox-Johnston wrote in his log that during the day he had seriously considered giving up and making for Cape Town. He tried to cheer himself up by singing along with a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta on his tape recorder and imagining his sea heroes, Drake, Frobisher, and Nelson, looking down on him.

But heroes were not much good as company. Like everyone else in the race – including, occasionally, Bernard Moitessier – Knox-Johnston suffered from loneliness. The first minutes of his voyage, when the boat carrying his family turned back to Falmouth, had been devastating. Two months later, on a Saturday night, listening to Lourenço Marques radio from South Africa, he wrote in his log: ‘I feel lonely tonight. Listening to L.M. has brought back memories of South Africa … I can remember the parties all too well.'

It was his own considerable dogged ingenuity, his rising to challenges, that sustained him. After a radio exchange with a South African station, he found that his battery charger was not charging, and he took it apart. When he'd cleaned grease off the spark plug points, he realised he had no feeler gauge aboard to reset the spark plug gaps. He made his own by counting the pages of his logbook: the gap needed to be between 12/1000 and 15/1000 of an inch. Two hundred pages to the inch meant that each page was five-thousandths of an inch thick. He set the spark plug gap of 12-15/1000 using three pages and the charger worked. There was a way, it seemed, around any difficulty.

As he neared the Southern Ocean, Knox-Johnston began preparing for the storms he knew were coming. He stored most deck gear below; storm sails, sea anchor, spare lines and lashings were placed ready for quick deployment. From the bulk stores in the forward cabin, he topped up the frequent-use containers of kerosene (light and cooking) and gasoline (battery-charging) that he kept in the saloon. He put away his tropical clothing and got out sweaters, jeans, and socks.

Finally, on 27 August, he encountered his first real gale of the voyage. But the wind was not westerly, which he could have expected so close to the Roaring Forties. It blew from the southeast, the direction in which he was trying to go.

Suhaili
made little headway against it. She was not designed to pound to windward, and Knox-Johnston reefed her down to avoid straining her. For a night and a day she bobbed alternately northeast and southwest, either side of the eye of the wind, on whichever tack appeared the best course. The seas built up until they were steep and breaking, but the heavy double-ender was in her element. Perfectly balanced under shortened rig, she rode the waves beautifully.

But her Indian-carpentered hatches leaked copiously. Such leaks do not bring the disquiet that comes with water seeping in through the hull below the waterline, but they produce a sodden misery for the sailor in his home at sea. With every wave that broke over the deck and cabin, salt water poured in through the companionway hatch and splashed over the chart table, the book rack, and the Marconi radio. Knox-Johnston covered these with towels and rags, but they only ensured continual dampness. The skylight dripped incessantly above his sleeping bag, which he tried to keep from being soaked by placing a piece of canvas over it. There was so much water coming in that during this first gale Knox-Johnston wore his oilskin jacket and trousers below, and these, streaming salt water, added to the thick damp in the cabin.

A small boat at sea is its crew's only port in a storm, and if the boat is cold and wet below, its gear beginning to fail, the dismalness of such a situation can't be exaggerated. It undermines the sailor's most important illusion: that he is safe. As he lay soaked and battered a thousand miles west of Cape Town, the proximity of safety, warmth, and company ate at Knox-Johnston and he thought again of giving up.

Only a few hundred miles away – two days ahead of Knox-Johnston and leading the race – Chay Blyth was battling the
same gale. The weather system (travelling across the ocean from the west) that had passed over Robin Knox-Johnston on 27 August, reached Blyth and
Dytiscus III
, a lesser sailor and a lesser boat, in the dark early hours of 28 August. But nobody was the equal of Chay Blyth for his soldierly attack at whatever was thrown at him.

For two days the gale drove him (as it did Knox-Johnston) northeast, then southwest. When it was over, after a day of respite, gale-force winds rose again from the south. Blyth headed east, pushing
Dytiscus III
as hard as he knew how – harder than he knew he should, for he was now well aware of his boat's frailty. The little weekend cruiser was leaking badly, its gear was showing signs of wear, things were breaking. But what he had been able to do with it so far was remarkable. Knox-Johnston was being careful with
Suhaili
, determined not to strain her during this first gale, but Chay Blyth was actually doing his best to push
Dytiscus III
to the breaking point. South Africa was his last possible stop if he was to abandon the race before heading east and further south into the truly dangerous seas of the Roaring Forties. To break something important, to lose a mast for example, far out in the empty wastes of the Southern Ocean, could be a fatal exercise. If such a catastrophe was to happen, he wanted it sooner rather than later.

On 6 September, Chay Blyth sailed into the Roaring Forties.

The next day, his ninety-second at sea, his voyage became as long as his Atlantic row, and as if on cue, signalling Blyth's move into new territory, the servo blade (which served as the trim tab) of his wind vane steering gear broke.

This was the sort of crucial gear failure he had feared, and even expected. But when it came, it threw Blyth into a crisis of indecision. Unlike deeper-keeled boats,
Dytiscus III
did not track well with her shallow bilge keels without constant attention to her helm, whether from Blyth or the wind vane gear. Without self-steering, he could not go on. He replaced the broken blade with his one spare and now thought hard about putting in to South Africa so a new one could be flown out to him.
This would not be allowed by the
Sunday Times
, but this no longer worried him. According to the rules, he had already disqualified himself.

Weeks earlier, he had found that his supply of petrol had turned a milky white: it had become contaminated with salt water from one of the boat's many leaks. This meant he could no longer run his battery charger, which he relied on for his boat's navigation lights, but more importantly, for his communicating radio. He was immediately concerned that without radio transmissions his wife Maureen would worry about him. He first thought of stopping at South Africa for gas, where of course he would be disqualified. Finally he decided to head for Tristan da Cunha, a small, isolated South Atlantic island group belonging to Britain, where he hoped to pass close enough to shout a message at someone to tell people in England that he was all right.

He reached Tristan on 15 August, approaching the high, forbidding island in circumstances that would frighten any sailor. The wind was behind him, a shore of cliffs rose ahead of him, and he had no chart of the sea bottom beneath him – a recipe for disaster. Getting closer, he saw a ship anchored ahead, and he fired off a flare, a distress signal. This is not a seamanlike practice when there is no emergency, but Blyth got the reaction he wanted: a small boat put out from the anchored ship and approached him. The vessel, the men in the boat told him, was the Tolkienesque-sounding
Gillian Gaggins
, and she had arrived from Cape Town only that morning on one of her three annual visits to pump petrol ashore to the island. The men from the
Gaggins
told him there was nowhere safe to anchor nearby and that he could lie to the ship's stern on a line. Blyth sailed
Dytiscus III
up to the ship and was hailed by its captain, Neil MacAlister, another Scotsman, who invited Blyth aboard for a drink and offered to give him petrol and whatever assistance he needed. This was too much for Chay Blyth. It bore all the signs of holy intervention.