A Voyage For Madmen (30 page)

Tacking northeast and southeast, according to whichever slant was more favourable, adverse winds drove him north above the fortieth parallel. When he slept, he began to be tortured by a recurrent nightmare that his entire voyage was simply a qualifying preliminary to the real race, which would begin once they had all returned to England. Finally, when he reached 37 degrees south, he altered course in disgust and headed south, even a little west of south, for three days until he found the consistent westerlies he'd been looking for. He concluded that he had strayed too far north and should have turned south much earlier, and had wasted ten days. For the rest of December he tried to keep to 48 degrees south. This was close to the dotted line on his chart that showed the northerly limit where icebergs might be encountered, but he felt he had lost so much ground to Moitessier that he would chance it.

Although it was now midsummer in the Southern Hemisphere, the weather remained grim. Gales and hail-hurling squalls regularly overtook
Suhaili
. The seas were still high, throwing the boat around, and Knox-Johnston inside it. Water still poured in through the closed hatches and around the edges of the cabin, and he lived and slept surrounded and clothed by constant wet and damp. He thought longingly of the tropics, which were, as they seemed, half a world away. He had by now read all the novels aboard, so when he huddled in his sodden sleeping bag reading for escape, it was now Bertrand Russell's
A History of Western Philosophy
that he waded through.

Early in January he added more south to his course, crossing into the fifties, and began his descent towards the Horn, which lay 1,500 miles away at 56 degrees south. As he neared South America and dropped further and further south, the weather brought authentic Cape Horn conditions: depression followed depression racing east, overtaking the boat, bringing gale-force winds that boxed the compass, epic crashing waves, and a steep drop in temperature. He had a heater aboard but stopped using it after 13 January because it was consuming too much kerosene. Wet clothes hung everywhere in the streaming cabin, and Knox-Johnston smoked, drank coffee, and upped his whisky intake in a vain effort to stay warm.

In the early hours of 10 January, he was awakened by the boat's violent motion as it lost way and luffed up into the wind. On deck he found the mainsail had split in half along one seam. It would take hours of sewing to repair, but he had an older mainsail aboard which he raised in its place – the older one now didn't look so bad compared to the frayed and damaged ‘new' one. Later, as he was making breakfast, the boat lurched and steaming hot porridge covered his hand. Large blisters rose over the burn, which he soon broke during hectic sail-handling, leaving the raw skin exposed to icy sea spray.

Repeated soakings and constant wet had taken their effect on his Marconi radio. It would still receive, but seemed no longer able to transmit. Daily he tried placing calls to stations he could hear, but none could hear him. The British newspapers reported that although he was expected off the Horn around 12 January, he had not been seen or heard from since leaving Otago on 21 November. Knox-Johnston heard on the shortwave
Voice of America
that the Chilean Navy was looking out for a ‘damaged' ketch battling towards Cape Horn.

On Sunday 12 January the
Sunday Mirror
, Knox-Johnston's sponsor, took the optimistic line that he had rounded the Horn and was already heading north in the Atlantic. Falkland Islands Radio was listening for him. The
Sunday Times
speculated that he
could still be in the Pacific, with ‘the hour of his trial' still awaiting him. In fact, that Sunday he was still 480 miles from the Horn, painfully breaking the repaired blisters on his burned hand.

On Monday, he noticed that the jib stay was stranding – its wires breaking and unraveling. In 40-knot winds and above, Knox-Johnston crawled out on to the bowsprit with wrenches in both hands – ‘hanging on with my eyelashes' as the boat lifted and plunged him in and out of drenching waves – while he unscrewed the bottom of the stay, lashed it back on board out of the way, and set the jib ‘flying', supported only by its own luffwire.

On Tuesday, the gooseneck of the main boom broke again. The metal casting where it was bolted to the fitting on the mainmast had sheared. The flying jib had flogged and opened a seam in its foot, and Knox-Johnston crawled to the bow to sew a few stitches in place.

Wednesday he made a crude but ingenious repair to the broken gooseneck, pirating a metal plate from the defunct self-steering system, sawing a slot into the end of the boom into which he bolted one end of the plate, bolting the other end on to the mainmast. He reinforced the jury-rigged end of the boom with a wrapping of fibreglass, and when that had hardened, rove around the repair two ‘turk's heads', decorative-looking rope whippings that were in fact stronger than the fibreglass. He finished the ropework as the wind and sea rose and waves began breaking over the boat. He was now 200 miles from Cape Horn.

Thursday, another depression brought storm-force winds of 50 knots. While he was sail-handling on deck, hail drove into the raw, weeping flesh exposed beneath the blisters on his burned hand.

Early on Friday morning 17 January, he spotted the lonely Horn outrider islands of the Diego Ramirez group 15 miles to the south. The drowned chain of the southernmost Andes appeared to the north a few hours later. The day was squally, but with clearing periods between the squalls, when Knox-Johnston could gaze at the rugged cordilleras capped with glacial ice and think about
the immensity of his voyage and the home stretch awaiting him after rounding this last and greatest marker on the race course. The cold wind backed from the west-northwest to the west during the day, and dropped in strength through the afternoon until it blew at a gentle 5 knots by early evening.

At 1900 a brief rain squall passed over the boat and when it cleared, Cape Horn – a false cape, for it is really a small island with a sphinxlike profile, far less impressive in appearance than Gibraltar – was clearly visible to the north. He had already passed it.

‘Yippee!!!' Knox-Johnston wrote in his logbook. Then he had a drink and opened his Aunt Aileen's fruit cake. It had spent seven months wrapped in foil inside a cake tin and was in perfect condition. Also in the tin was a page of the
Times
. He had something new to read.

Sailing Route Across the Pacific Ocean

Cope Horn passages: Robin Knox-Johnston, 17 January 1969
Bernard Moitessier, 5 February 1969
Nigel Tetley, 18 March 1969

B
ERNARD
M
OITESSIER CROSSED
the Pacific fast. Daily runs: 146, 148, 143, 149, 148, 152, 166, 158, 147, 162, 169, 130, 111, 147, 142, 166. A thousand miles a week, week after week. The lightened
Joshua
was far fleeter than she had been three years earlier on the Tahiti–Alicante passage. Moitessier had evolved as a seaman. His daily runs through this same stretch of ocean were 20 to 40 miles greater than on the earlier voyage.

He had reduced Knox-Johnston's original nine-week lead to only two and a half weeks, and as the Englishman had suspected, he'd been luckier with the weather. He had the westerlies, but for many days past New Zealand they were light. However, Moitessier coaxed consistent runs out of
Joshua
. The midday temperature in his unheated cabin was in the 70s. He walked about the deck barefoot and was able to do his yoga exercises naked in the cockpit. He was more than halfway between New Zealand and the Horn before his first Pacific gale found him. It turned the sea white with foam, but it was not on a scale to trouble
Joshua
or elicit high-flown prose from her captain. The wind vane steered. Moitessier sat on his perch inside the hatch staring out of his turret at the fast-passing seas.

He ate well. Skinny all his life, with a tendency to lose weight, he began to gain, always for him a sign of a sympathetic environment. His unceasing close communion with the three constant physical elements of his world – his boat, the sea, and the weather around him – filled him with joy. And to complete the picture of happy asceticism, his hair and beard had grown long and matted until he resembled a sailing holy man.

Not since Captain Nemo had a man felt so comfortable and self-sufficient at sea. He had entered into a kind of seagoing stasis. The beginning and end of his long voyage grew remote, and deep in the vast middle he was untroubled by anything but the daily concerns of sailing ever onwards. The rhythm of the sea, the endless passing of waves, the daily surging progress of
Joshua
, the now perfect vessel, and his own highly attenuated skills and sensations all blended into a harmonious chord that pealed loud and clear inside Moitessier and gave him peace. He was a man who had gone to the mountaintop and found the elusive thing he had been looking for, and he had grown reluctant to think much beyond the looming milestone of Cape Horn.

On 21 January, after his first Pacific gale had passed, the course turned more southerly as Moitessier began his descent towards the Horn. As he dropped through higher latitudes, he left the fine weather behind. The sky grew overcast and the temperature fell. Waves broke over the boat and sluiced along the deck. Now he wore foul-weather clothing and seaboots outside. When he came below with soaking socks, he changed into dry ones to wear in the cabin and tried to discipline himself to put the wet socks back on before going topside to handle sails, but it was too easy not to. Socks and wet clothes now hung in the cabin, the hatches remained closed, and it grew damp below. Southern Ocean conditions prevailed.

He started wearing a safety harness, something he was not used to. Loïck Fougeron had given him one of the two harnesses that had come with
Captain Browne
. These were made of nylon webbing, and in the 1960s they were becoming popular on yachts, replacing the sailor's old standby, at extreme moments, of
tying a rope around the waist. Once a harness comes aboard a boat, it seems foolhardy not to wear it, but it comes at a price. A harness interferes with one's natural and unconscious accommodation to a boat's movement, something acquired after a few days at sea. It makes one move awkwardly, stopping and starting to clip on and off every few feet. Harnesses have unquestionably saved people from going overboard, but they have also failed, come undone, broken, chafed through, and sent people to their deaths. An overreliance on them breeds an atrophy of the best of all devices to keep a sailor aboard: a fully developed horror of going overboard. A thoughtful, determined refusal to go overboard, a most careful premeditation and visualisation of one's movements on deck, lines strung around the perimeter of a boat, and an overall design to ensure staying aboard put the occasional wearing of a safety harness in its proper place: an additional measure, rather than a single fallible device.

Moitessier's harness bore the name ‘Annie' marked with indelible ink. It had belonged to Annie Van de Wiele, an accomplished cruising voyager who, with her husband Louis, had sailed around the world in the steel yacht
Omoo
before they had built and sailed
Captain Browne
to the West Indies and sold her to Fougeron. Moitessier wore it mostly during the heaviest weather, when he clipped its snap-shackle to 3/16-inch steel wires stretched flat on deck, running from bow to stern on both sides of the boat. He learned the wire trick from Bill King, who used it aboard
Galway Blazer II
, which had no guardrails at the edge of its rounded decks. This allowed Moitessier to clip on once and move fore and aft while handling sail. He appreciated the harness and this wire system, but he also felt less mobile using it, and he felt the loss of his own more sensitive and certain link to his boat. He felt foolish ignoring the harness, however, so he tried to keep it with him – mostly in the pocket of his foul-weather jacket.

As
Joshua
drove further south, the cold night sky made the stars and moon unusually luminous. Sometimes at sea, the moon's first appearance above a dark horizon can have a startling effect.
The points of its early or late crescents can resemble bright, unearthly horns coming out of the ocean a short distance away. It can suddenly pierce a clouded horizon and take on the characteristics of a city or an ocean liner. When one has been surprised by more than a few of these creepy apparitions, one reacts to weird night lights at sea by thinking, ‘Oh, yes, the moon doing one of its numbers again.' So Moitessier thought one night close to Cape Horn when a slender spire of light rose from the sea into the clouds like a spotlight. How did the moon do that? he wondered. Then the ‘moonbeam' widened and glowed and played among the clouds until he realised the phenomenon he was seeing had nothing to do with the moon. He wondered, with a chill, if it was the ‘white arch' that Joshua Slocum had written about, the spectral white-squall forerunner of a great Cape Horn gale that had almost ended
Spray
's voyage by carrying her into the ‘Milky Way', a cluster of reefs and white water at the edge of the Straits of Magellan.