A Voyage For Madmen (18 page)

With a favourable wind, the trimaran sailed fast down the East Anglian coast, across the Thames estuary, around North Foreland, and along the Kent coast into the English Channel.
The boat's progress so far had pleased Crowhurst. But as they passed the South Goodwin light vessel, the wind changed into the west, on the nose, and
Teignmouth Electron
was abruptly stopped.

Multihulls, because of their shallow keels and poor grip on the water, cannot sail as close to the wind as conventional deep-keeled hulls, and their poor windward performance is the major compromise they suffer in return for greater speed and live-aboard comfort. It's an acceptable compromise for ocean voyaging when a greater proportion of winds are expected to be from aft or on the beam. But tacking down the English Channel in stormy autumnal weather against the prevailing westerly winds and racing tides would be an exasperating exercise for the most seasoned multihull sailor. It took
Teignmouth Electron
five hours to cover the 10 miles from the Goodwin light vessel to Dover, and by then Crowhurst was dismayed by his boat's sluggardly performance.

There were good reasons for it: the boat was unweighted by any stores and so had an even more marginal grip on the water; its new sails and rigging were untried; its shortened mast reduced its effective sail area; and Crowhurst had never sailed a trimaran. All sailboats have their idiosyncrasies, strengths, and weaknesses, and their owners must learn, with time, how to get the best out of them.

Crowhurst and his crew experimented with various sail combinations, but soon the tide turned against them and a short time later they found themselves off the Goodwin light vessel again. They tacked far offshore where the tides ran less hard and came to within 3 miles of the French coast, where the wind fell light. Crowhurst used this respite in the weather to try shipping his outboard motor. This meant getting it out of a storage locker beneath the cockpit and sitting it on a bracket at the stern of the port hull. The outboard weighed nearly 100 pounds, and he wanted to do this by himself without help from his crew. It took him an hour, using a block and tackle on the main boom, during which he grew furious. They motored on down the French coast. A little later,
while charging batteries with the boat's portable generator, Crowhurst burned his left hand on the generator's exhaust pipe. Clare Crowhurst, who was superstitious, was disturbed when she later saw the burn. It had erased the lifeline on her husband's palm.

For three days they tacked between the French and English coasts, finding at each landfall that they were only a few miles beyond their former positions.

One night, mid-channel, as John Elliot slept, Peter Beard asked Crowhurst how he was going to get this boat around the world when they were having such a hard time getting it down the English Channel. Crowhurst dismissed the problem, pointing out that the majority of the winds he would encounter would be favourable.

But what if they weren't? Beard persisted.

‘Well, one could always shuttle around in the South Atlantic for a few months,' said Crowhurst. He drew a rough map in Beard's logbook, circling an area in the South Atlantic between Africa and South America. ‘There are places out of the shipping lanes where no one would ever spot a boat like this.'

Crowhurst laughed.

After four days of fruitless effort, Beard and Elliot announced to Crowhurst that they had to go home. Both had commitments ashore. Elliot promised him he would send two of his men from the yard to replace them. Running the outboard, they put into Newhaven on the Sussex coast. Robin Knox-Johnston, who was now approaching Australia, almost halfway around the world, had stopped here more than four months earlier on his way to Falmouth – that trip down the channel from London had taken
Suhaili
six days.

For two days after the replacement crew arrived, they remained stormbound in Newhaven. Then they sailed for two days, getting as far as Wooten Creek on the Isle of Wight before the two boatbuilders abandoned ship – they'd had enough of sailing with Crowhurst. He sailed on single-handed a few miles along the Isle of Wight shore to Cowes, where he found another late
entrant to the Golden Globe race, Alex Carozzo, making his final preparations. Known (in Italy) as ‘Italy's Chichester', Carozzo had been chief mate on a Liberty ship being delivered to a breakers yard in Japan several years earlier when he built a small sloop on the ship's deck. On arrival in Japan, he launched his sailboat over the ship's side and headed for California. Ten days out, the sloop was dismasted in a typhoon. Carozzo spent eighty-three days sailing to Midway Island, where he repaired his rig and shoved off on a fifty-three-day passage to San Francisco.

Construction on his 66-footer, built expressly for the Golden Globe race, had begun at the Medina Yacht Company in Cowes on 19 August, and was largely finished seven weeks later, an incredible accomplishment. Carozzo's audacity and confidence were a tonic to Crowhurst, who spent a day in Cowes talking with the Italian.

On Sunday 13 October, Crowhurst set out from Cowes with a local sailor, another Royal Navy lieutenant-commander, Peter Eden, as crew. They made four long tacks across the channel before reaching Teignmouth two days later on 15 October. Eden was later to report that Crowhurst's sailing skills were good, but that his navigation was ‘a mite slapdash'.

It had taken Crowhurst thirteen days to cover the roughly 300 miles from Great Yarmouth to Teignmouth, at an average speed of 23 miles per day.

He now had sixteen days before the
Sunday Times'
31 October deadline to prepare his boat to sail around the world.

O
N
F
RIDAY 20
S
EPTEMBER
, Loïck Fougeron came close enough to a fishing boat off the Cape Verde Islands to hand over a plastic bag containing film and letters for the
Sunday Times
. He also handed over his cat, Roulis. She had eaten through the aerial wire of his radio (receiver), chewed through bags containing powdered eggs, and spread the powder around the inside of his boat, she had fleas, but most worryingly, he believed she was pregnant. Fearing a boatload of kittens, he wrote to the
Times
, he had even considered making up a raft and setting the cat adrift near land.

The plastic bag and cat were delivered to a Mr Foulde, the British consul for the Cape Verde Islands. The bag was sent on to the
Sunday Times
in London, but Mr Foulde kept the cat. Very soon, however, he sent a cable to the newspaper asking to be relieved of the cat, which had proved too destructive to the consulate. The
Sunday Times
was not in the cat business, and eventually Mr. Foulde found a home for Roulis on the island.

Fougeron's progress was slow. He was enjoying himself, and the novelty of a single-handed voyage. But he knew that he had already been overtaken by Bill King (King regularly radioed his position back to England, and Fougeron would have heard this
on his receiver), and that his friend Bernard had streaked far ahead of him (Moitessier was then past the equator in the South Atlantic), and any hopes Fougeron might have had of winning the race would have been fading fast.

On 29 September, Moitessier raised the remote South Atlantic island of Trindade out of the horizon ahead. He hoped to drop off film and letters for the
Sunday Times
there. The island belonged to Brazil, and his South American pilot book, which contained sailing directions for Trindade, was one of those he had left behind while lightening his boat. Still, the land was high and jagged, and by the look of it he believed there would be deep water inshore, allowing him to approach close enough to attract attention, and perhaps a boat to come out to him.

As he sailed nearer and the island's details grew clear he saw the beautiful green of land that is always startling after weeks at sea. He hoped to get close enough to smell it.

The weather was good, clear and sunny, the wind moderate from the northeast, and
Joshua
glided in from the sea like an albatross. Through binoculars he spotted the roofs of a settlement and the wreck of an old iron ship half-sunk off the village.

He let off a blast from his foghorn and sailed back and forth along the shore. Not a living soul appeared. It was midday on a Sunday, and he wondered if everyone was at church, or indoors having a noisy Sunday lunch. After an hour and repeated blasts from the horn, he was on the point of leaving when people began to pour out of a house and stare back at him, one of them with binoculars. Otherwise, they didn't move. Moitessier raised his MIK signal flags (which, when flown together, mean, ‘Please report my position to Lloyd's of London') hoping the man peering at him through binoculars would read
Joshua
's big white letters and report him to somebody. Still the people ashore didn't move but watched him as though he were an apparition.

He gybed, waved again with both arms in a gesture meaning
good-bye, and headed
Joshua
out to sea. Suddenly, as if breaking from a spell, all the people ashore began waving madly. Some ran down the beach into the sea up to their waists, shouting after him, imploring him. But they had no boat that could come out to him, and without a chart or sailing directions, Moitessier dared sail in no further. He sailed away.

He sailed southeast into cooler seas, steering now for Cape Town, where he hoped to shoot off a packet of mail. Well north of the fortieth parallel (south), in an area supposedly dominated by easterly winds, he found strong westerlies and big seas, almost Southern Ocean conditions. Moitessier clapped on sail and streaked diagonally across the South Atlantic in a series of tremendous daily runs, as high as 182 miles in one twenty-four-hour period. The wind continued from the west, strong enough to make him reef his sails and send
Joshua
surfing, yet these were conditions with which he and his boat were familiar, and he was happy. In a week he covered 1,112 miles – an average of 158 miles per day, well above the Chichester pace.

Ever since his dramatic storm-surfing episode in the Southern Ocean between Tahiti and Cape Horn, Moitessier had believed that lightness and speed were the key to fast and safe passage-making. Without a doubt, he now realised, the ton of excess weight he had removed from the boat in France and England had improved its performance. Now, in a ruthless, exhilarated mood, he looked around inside the boat and began to throw overboard anything else he could consider deadweight: a box of army biscuits (35 pounds), a case of condensed milk (45 pounds), twenty-five bottles of wine, 45 pounds of rice, 10 pounds of sugar, 30 pounds of jam, a box of batteries, four jerry cans of kerosene, gallons of denatured alcohol, a coil of 3/4-inch nylon line weighing about 60 pounds. (Thirty-three years ago, in a world apparently far less threatened by pollution than we know it to be today, such a dumping at sea would have seemed harmless, even among enlightened nature lovers like Moitessier.)

This enabled him to empty
Joshua
's forward and aft cabins completely, concentrating all her weight amidships, making her
more buoyant and able to surf in heavy seas. It also meant the boat would sail faster in light airs and require less sail raised to drive it in heavy winds.

Stripping away the last threads of superfluous restraint (and one must suspect that his wife Françoise and some of the tidier notions of marriage had been one of these), Moitessier was getting closer and closer to his idealised state of man and ship flying as one across the sea in a way few had ever approached. He also knew he was becoming a stronger competitor in the race every day. ‘The great game of the high latitudes is just ahead,' he wrote in his logbook. And he and
Joshua
were readier than they had ever been.

On 19 October, his fifty-ninth day at sea, Moitessier's noon sight placed him 40 miles southwest of Cape Agulhas (the true southerly promontory of Africa, 30 miles further south than the more famous and picturesque Cape of Good Hope). He had two plastic bags full of film – he had photographed every page of his logbook – that he wanted now to throw aboard some vessel and have sent on to the
Sunday Times
. This closing with land and shipping, and the risks of embayment and collision, went against all his seaman's instincts, which would have him steering clear and flying on south and east into the Southern Ocean. But letting the
Sunday Times
know where he was and how fast he was sailing was suddenly important to him. He had become gripped by the race; he knew he was already making a rare and phenomenal passage and he wanted the world to know it. He also wanted to tell his friends and family that he was well. Pushing his instincts aside, he headed north.

As he did so, the wind changed from the west to the southeast, and from the appearance of the sky, his barometer, and his own beautifully attuned weather sense, Moitessier believed a southeasterly gale was imminent. To make use of the new wind, and to be able perhaps to get away before it grew stronger, he headed
Joshua
up the coast between Cape Agulhas and Cape Town, making for a small port he found on his chart called Walker Bay. There could be yachts there, and, it being Sunday
again, he hoped he might find one sailing in the bay on to which he could lob his packets. The yacht might even have news of the locations of his friends in the race, Fougeron, King, and Tetley.