A Voyage For Madmen (21 page)

Only a few hundred miles away to the southeast, a little ahead of Fougeron, Bill King and
Galway Blazer II
lay under bare poles riding out the same storm.

I had seen storms from the tiny platform of submarines or on sailing boats all over the world; but no mental picture ever occurred to me of the typhoon tumult which now battered
Galway Blazer
… In the very midst of the hurricane, the sky cleared, and I saw a full moon flaming coldly, detached from the awful scene.

Yet
Galway Blazer
rode the seas well through a long night and a day, and towards the evening of 31 October – Hallowe'en night – King felt the worst had passed.

Sailing Route Across the Indain Ocean

Two thousand miles to the east – 1,100 miles the other side of Cape Town, well into the Indian Ocean – Bernard Moitessier was sailing through the choppy aftermath of a brief gale that had struck the day before. The wind, which had begun in the southeast, had backed through the northeast to the north during the night, before dropping away to a breeze on the morning of 31 October.

But the surface of the sea around
Joshua
was still disturbed by the winds that had swept fast through 180 degrees of conflicting directions. Heaps of foaming water tossed around the boat making a strange noise. It made Moitessier think of the sound of a multitude of termites clicking their mandibles or the scattering of dead leaves. The confusion of heaping waves breaking against other waves in nearly calm conditions astonished him, demonstrating that the sea, no matter how well one knew it, was always capable of showing something new.

The gale had not been severe enough to trouble him, but a few days earlier, in similarly rough, disturbed seas,
Joshua
had been knocked flat. An enormous breaking sea had smashed into the side of the boat, so hard that for a moment Moitessier could not believe his portholes had not shattered.
Joshua
came up quickly and sailed on. The only damage on deck had been the wind vane, smashed when the mizzen boom was pushed across the deck. But the vane was simply constructed and Moitessier quickly shipped a spare.

An hour later, sitting on his perch beneath the turret hatch, he saw a freak wave, twice as high as those around it, rise up astern. He jumped down, wrapped his arms around the chart table, braced his legs, and felt
Joshua
take off in a surge of acceleration. Then she went over again, slammed down on her side.

Once more, the buoyant, boilerplate
Joshua
rose upright. Her telephone pole wire and rigging suffered no damage. The wind vane held the boat on course, and she ran on downwind without a touch from her captain.

And still further to the east, more than 4,000 miles ahead of Moitessier, Robin Knox-Johnston was halfway across the Great Australian Bight between Cape Leeuwin and Melbourne. October 31 was a quiet day for him, and unusually warm. He had woken smelling land, and through the day saw a great number of insects and many butterflies in the air. He immediately worried that his navigation might be off and that he was far closer to shore than he suspected. But he traced the land aroma to the weed growing at
Suhaili
's waterline that had dried and become smelly in the warmer weather, and he reminded himself that Charles Darwin had found spiders clinging to HMS
Beagle
's rigging when the ship was hundreds of miles off the South American coast. Darwin concluded that they had been blown out to sea.

The good weather was a welcome respite from a brutal passage across the Indian Ocean.
Suhaili
had been knocked down again. The gooseneck on the main boom had broken, as Knox-Johnston had feared it would; his spare trim tab for the wind vane had broken, as the first had, and most of its parts had sunk, precluding a repair. On 13 October, a southerly storm blowing great waves up from the Antarctic Ocean – ‘by far the worst weather I had ever encountered' – began pounding the boat so hard that Knox-Johnston thought she was going to break up. His mind raced ahead, imagining the coming disaster:
Suhaili
being smashed by the wave that would finally split her open, the cold inrushing sea, the frantic effort to break out the life raft and abandon ship, the tins of dried fruit he would grab – make sure to grab the can opener … But as he was thinking this, bracing words from a Robert Service poem,
The Quitter
, filled his mind.

When you're lost in the Wild and you're scared as a child,

And Death looks you bang in the eye,

And you're sore as a boil it's according to Hoyle

To cock your revolver … and die.

But the Code of a Man says: ‘Fight all you can,'

And self-dissolution is barred.

In hunger and woe, oh, it's easy to blow …

It's the hell-served-for-breakfast that's hard.

The boat wasn't coming apart yet, but he was. He was ashamed of himself. He went up on deck and watched the seas, and then took action. He streamed a large diameter polypropylene warp astern, sheeted his jib flat amidships, and
Suhaili
suddenly lay quietly with her pointed stern to the overtaking seas. No longer was she being battered, and Knox-Johnston was amazed at the difference, both in
Suhaili
's apparent situation and his own outlook.

This was exactly the technique Moitessier had employed – and then abandoned – in the South Pacific in favour of his surfing run ahead of the waves. It didn't work for
Joshua
, Moitessier had felt, but it worked now for
Suhaili
, underscoring the truth that there is no one right way of handling storms at sea. There is only what works for different boats and their captains in different storms, an improvised alchemy of conditions and intuition.

Suhaili
rode out that storm. Later, Knox-Johnston ingeniously repaired the original trim tab and once more went overboard into frigid tossing seas to fit it into place behind the rudder. He knew, however, that it was only a matter of time before it broke again, and he would be left without his self-steering gear. Then what? He would worry about that when it happened. Next he repaired the gooseneck, spending a day breaking and nursing drill bits while hand-drilling through metal plates inside the violently lurching boat. But he and
Suhaili
were both showing the wear of the voyage, and he wondered how long it would be possible to continue. Sails were splitting regularly and he was spending hours sewing with cut and calloused hands. His body was bruised, he was sleep-deprived, and he remained anxious. Australia was nearby and the
land and its treats were again pulling strongly at him. He had done well in his small, rough boat, and no one would think poorly of him if he headed for port.

But he was now halfway around the world – further, in fact, because with prevailing westerly winds from astern, his fastest route home would be to keep going. He had a commanding lead. He decided to continue as long as he could make progress. His sea heroes were watching.

Knox-Johnston, Moitessier, King, Fougeron, Tetley, Crowhurst, and Carozzo on his mooring. This was the arrangement of the race fleet of seven boats across 15,000 sea miles on 31 October. Blyth and Ridgway were out. By nightfall, two more sailors would join them.

H
OVE TO IN THE STORM
during the moonlit early hours of that 31 October, Loïck Fougeron curled up in his bunk, unable to sleep, waiting for what he feared would happen. He felt like a nut about to be crushed beneath an elephant's foot.

Suddenly the boat was slammed sideways by a tremendous force. The cabin's kerosene lamp went out. Everything movable – pots, plates, glasses, food, a crate of wine, books, tools, and Fougeron himself – was hurled across the cabin, which had turned on its side. In that moment, Fougeron believed he was about to die and join the multitudes of seamen who had perished far from their loved ones. He thought of his family and friends, certain he would never see them again.

But – miraculously, it seemed to him –
Captain Browne
rolled back upright. Fougeron sat on the cabin floor with blood running down his face. Going up on deck, he found the mast intact, although parts of the rigging hung slack and loose. With a surge of relief, he realised that both he and the boat had survived the knockdown intact. His next decision came to him instantly, with wonderful life-affirming clarity: he was giving up the race and heading for Cape Town.