A Voyage For Madmen (22 page)

For twenty-four hours, Bill King had stood in his (below-decks, protected) cockpit, watching this same eerily moonlit storm through
Galway Blazer
's two round Perspex hatches. For a while, the wind vane held the boat on its downwind course, but as the wind and seas rose it was overpowered and King had to steer by hand. As the storm progressed, he had reefed the junk-rigged sails – he was able to do this with lines led belowdecks – until he was finally running downwind under bare poles. It was the most violent weather he had ever experienced. He estimated the waves at 40 feet in height. At the top of one wave he looked down into the trough dropping away before the boat and saw a petrel flying across a patch of moonlight far below him.

At 9.30 a.m. on 31 October, the storm reached its furious height as the wind backed to the west. With the sudden change of wind direction, the waves lost their regular pattern in a confusion of tumbling cross seas. At that point, King stopped running and allowed the boat to lie ahull – that is, with its beam to the seas, the position most boats will assume when left unattended with no sail up. King felt
Galway Blazer
rode as well like this as she had when running downwind. By the evening of 31 October, the wind began to die down, and King believed the worst was over.

He decided to go out on deck to try to find out why the wind vane had been locking. Conditions had moderated sufficiently for him to leave both plastic cockpit hatches open. He went aft, but could see nothing wrong. However, he noticed that the foresail needed lashing, so he went below again to get a length of rope.

I was sitting jambed [
sic
] into place under the open hatches, coiling down the rope, when … over she went to 90 degrees. The boat was now lying right over on her side. Hurled by the elemental forces of the breaking peak of a rogue sea mountain, she was using her side as a surfer would his board. The masts
must still have been in the air, in their proper element, and I had time to think, ‘She will come back again; that great lead keel will swing her upright.'

Even as the thought crossed my mind, a vast new force started to act upon us. In those confused seas there was no proper pattern. Some cross-riding protuberance of foam-lashed water rode across the trough in which we might have recovered. Into this obstacle our mast tops now buried themselves, driven by the frightful impetus of our sideways rush. The lever-age of a new element, imposed on our mastheads, now started the action of the mariner's most dreaded catastrophe: a complete rollover, upside down.

I had a rapid change of mind. ‘She will come back again' became ‘No, she won't'; and, indeed, she did not.

I was on my shoulders pressed against the deck head, which was normally above me, my head pointing to the sea bottom, 15,000 feet below, looking at green water pouring up through both hatches.

Poised upside down, with eternity beckoning, time elongated like a rubber band – and then snapped right back again: the 2-ton keel wrenched
Galway Blazer
back upright.

Water was calf-deep inside the boat. King pulled the hatches closed and began pumping out the water. When the pump sucked air in the bilges, he went on deck again, and saw the extent of his disaster. The foremast had broken off about 12 feet above the deck. The mainmast was still intact, though fractured, and pulled over to starboard at an angle. The wind vane was smashed.

Bill King's voyage was equally shipwrecked.
Galway Blazer
could never sail through the Southern Ocean as she was. The best he could do now was to limp towards Cape Town. It was a crushing end to a dream.

But King knew he'd been lucky: if the capsize had occurred sixty seconds earlier or later, he would have been on deck, washed overboard, or smashed in the wreckage of his foremast.

It is unfair to compare the outcome of two very different boats handled by two skippers in the same storm. Every moment at every geographic spot at sea is a unique combination of forces; add two boats several hundred miles apart and the varying factors become infinite.

Nevertheless, the management of small boats in heavy weather is of paramount importance to sailors, and it is irresistible to review the results of the different tactics employed by Fougeron and King in their dissimilar boats in the same weather event.

It seems clear that even at the height of the storm, Fougeron's boat,
Captain Browne
, still carried reduced storm sails. ‘How long can the sails hold out in this fury?' he wrote in his logbook. The wind vane was disconnected, and Fougeron was below in his bunk, not steering, not trying to make progress, but riding out the storm with the sails arranged so that
Captain Browne
was hove to.

In similar conditions, King allowed
Galway Blazer
to lie ahull, that is, with no sail up, beam-on to the seas.

Heaving to is a time-honoured method of stopping a sailing vessel in the water when wind would otherwise push it on. Pilot vessels once hove to on station while waiting for ships outside ports and harbours. Small yachts overtaken by gales can heave to with remarkable comfort until conditions improve. This is simply done by arranging sails and helm in such a combination that the boat stalls comfortably and sustainably, with its bow pointing about 50 degrees from the eye of the wind, making perhaps half a knot of drift at right angles to the wind. In this position a boat does not present its entire broadside, its most vulnerable aspect, to the oncoming waves, but points obliquely into them, parting them – even large breaking waves – and riding over them. Small sailboats are easily hove to by setting a reefed portion of the mainsail, or a storm trysail (a small ruggedly made sail dedicated to storm use set in place of the mainsail), together with a small headsail backed to windward: the small main or trysail tries to drive the boat forward and into the wind; the backed headsail opposes this drive, preventing the boat heading to windward and effectively stalling its motion. The helm (tiller or wheel) is used to fine-tune
the boat's balance, augmenting the force of either the main or trysail or the headsail. This may sound complicated, but it's not – though it requires practice. It is often said that modern sailboats with their fin keels cannot heave to properly, but this is not so. Every boat behaves slightly differently, and its captain or crew must learn its qualities and experiment with its heaving to rig by tweaking sails and helm.

In a gale, the difference between a boat running downwind at high speed (corkscrewing wildly over the waves) or beating hard to windward (constant bone-jarring pounding) and a boat hove to in the same conditions has to be experienced to be believed. With the speed and violent motion of progress come the fear and anxiety for one's own safety and the boat's structure. Hove to, noise and motion are amazingly reduced, and hot drinks and meal-making can be possible where minutes before they were unthinkable.

A further, almost magical component of heaving to, is the slick, or wake left by a boat's hull. This is the area of sea immediately to windward, between the boat and the oncoming waves, created by the wind pushing the stalled, resisting boat slowly through the water. The water surface in the boat's wake appears slightly disturbed, like the water on one side of a moored buoy in a strong tidal stream, and almost glassy, like an oil slick. This has the astonishing effect of interrupting the heaping waves as they reach it. Large breaking seas are suddenly tripped by the slick, lose their height and power, and tumble harmlessly before reaching the drifting boat.

The wonderful skill of heaving to was once part of the seaman's standard bag of tricks, learned from older salts or on the decks of ships. It was well-understood and routinely employed. But with modern yachts being purchased as easily as cars and no licence required to sail them, this vital piece of seamanship is often forgotten about, or not learned, or learned improperly. It's also understandable that few recreational sailors will take the time to head offshore into bad weather for the purpose of trying out the heavy-weather tactics they've read about in the books.

Yachts are marvels of engineering; their three dimensions of compound curves are arranged in beautiful sculptural shapes designed to accommodate the sea in so many of its moods. They generally behave so well that it's easy for the inexperienced sailor to believe that a good sea boat will fend for herself in large seas. And in conditions where wind has risen past a point where fully reefed storm sails still make a boat feel overcanvased, it can seem reasonable and prudent to remove sail altogether. The boat will then lie beam-on to the seas, and – in most cases – this will result in no more than discomfort. Few recreational sailors will ever experience conditions that will demand a true seaman's reservoir of knowledge and skill in order to survive. Thus, the easy and usually adequate ‘technique' of lying ahull becomes the favoured storm tactic of most small-boat sailors.

Yet in severe conditions, lying ahull can be deadly. The fourth edition of
Heavy Weather Sailing
, the classic book on storm tactics at sea by the late English author and sailor Adlard Coles, and Peter Bruce, clearly presents the conditions – proven through tank testing – under which lying ahull will result in disaster.

It is breaking waves that cause capsize. If the yacht is caught beam-on to breaking waves of sufficient size … a full 360-degree roll will be executed. How big do breaking waves need to be to cause this type of behaviour? Unfortunately, the answer is, not very big. During the model tests … when breaking waves were 30% of hull length, from trough to crest, they could capsize some of the yachts, while waves to a height of 60% of the hull length would comfortably overwhelm all of the boats we tested. In real terms this means that for a 10 metre (32 ft 10 ins) boat … [a] breaking wave 3 metres (9 ft 10 ins) high … presents a capsize risk, and when the breaking wave is 6 metres (19 ft 8 ins) high, this appears to be a capsize certainty for any shape of boat.

The book goes on to report that the same model boat, differently aligned so that it is not beam-on to the breaking wave (but, rather, pointing obliquely into it, for instance, as if hove to) will not capsize.

Heavy Weather Sailing
is filled with stories of boats lying ahull being rolled over, capsized, dismasted, of crews being lost. But it contains only one such incident while a boat was hove to. In the disastrous Fastnet Race of 1979, which was disrupted by a strong gale, 158 boats out of a fleet of 300 adopted storm tactics: eighty-six lay ahull, forty-six ran before the wind either under bare poles (Moitessier's choice) or towing warps (Knox-Johnston's tactic), and twenty-six hove to. One hundred of these boats suffered knockdowns, seventy-seven were rolled over at least once. Not one of the boats that hove to were rolled, capsized, or reported any major damage.

Bill King, the navy commander who had cruised the world in submarines and sailed across the Atlantic, chose to lie ahull during his storm, and
Galway Blazer
was capsized and rolled over, wrecking its rig.

Loïck Fougeron, who didn't have the years at sea under his belt that King had, adopted the tactic of heaving to in his smaller, heavier boat, which was knocked on its side, but otherwise suffered no major damage.

It is just possible that tactics made the difference.

When the great storm abated, Fougeron steered for Cape Town. But headwinds and cold finally dissuaded him and he turned north, making his first landfall in three months on 27 November at the southern Atlantic island of Saint Helena. There he found much kindness from the local doctor and residents.

Bill King raised the two struts that had been handily built to lie on
Galway Blazer
's deck in case of the loss of his unstayed masts, and headed for Cape Town under jury-rig. He was in daily radio contact with friends in England and Cape Town and
sent messages to his family, keeping up a cheerful front. But he was deeply depressed by what had happened and confided this to the log he was writing to his wife, knowing she would only read it long afterwards.