A Voyage For Madmen (8 page)

Crowhurst then told his friend that for years he had thought about sailing around the world alone and nonstop.
That
would be something worth making a fuss about.

Later that day, after they returned to port, they went home and, like everybody else, watched Chichester's arrival on television.

Crowhurst's role as a successful businessman was short-lived. Pye Radio backed out of the Navicator deal. Their initial payment gave Crowhurst and Electron Utilisation the appearance of prosperity for a while, but he was eventually forced to abandon his small factory and cut his workforce from six to one part-time assembler in his stable-workshop. The Navicator was not, as he had hoped, to be widely distributed to every ship chandlery in Britain. He was reduced to hawking it from a booth at boat shows.

But his self-belief, his intelligence, his ideas, and his charm were persuasive. Looking for new backers, he was introduced to Stanley Best, a buinessman from nearby Taunton, who had become wealthy selling caravans. In 1967 Best made a first tentative investment in Electron Utilisation. It was in the form of a loan of £1,000. Crowhurst's undaunted and enlarging vision held Stanley Best in thrall long past the point where his pragmatic business sense should have stopped him.

‘I always considered Donald Crowhurst an absolutely brilliant innovator,' Best said later, ‘but as a businessman … he was hopeless. He seemed to have this capacity to convince himself that everything was going to be wonderful, and hopeless situations were only temporary setbacks. This enthusiasm, I admit, was infectious. But as I now realise, it was the product of that kind of overimaginative mind that was always dreaming reality into the state it wanted it to be.'

J
OHN
R
IDGWAY SAILED
from remote Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands, 40 miles off the Galway coast of northwest Ireland, at 11.38 a.m., Saturday 1 June 1968, the first Golden Globe sailor to depart.

It was a hell of a place to take off from. To get there, Ridgway had sailed his little 30-footer almost 1,000 sea miles from its builder's yard in Portsmouth, down the English Channel, across the Irish Sea, up the wild western coast of Ireland, taking himself far to the north of the departure points of all his rivals, and in the wrong direction for his route down the Atlantic.

He and Chay Blyth had made landfall on Inishmore at the end of their epic row across the Atlantic almost two years earlier, and Ridgway told the reporters who had gathered to record his departure that he felt an affinity for the local islanders, ‘who live so closely with the sea, good people, who know what suffering is'. The locals reciprocated his feelings. They had erected a plaque in Kilronan Harbour to mark the spot where he and Blyth had come ashore, and danced jigs and reels in his honour at the local parish hall the night before he sailed. But Ridgway had not come all this way to make Inishmore his port of departure entirely for sentimental reasons. This was a talismanic choice, its inconvenience and geography strongly at odds with the hard pragmatism of his army training, and in making it he proved himself as classically superstitious as all those seamen who will not begin a voyage on a Friday, or who stab their knives into wooden masts for wind when becalmed. He had come all this way for luck.

Sailing Route Down the Atlantic Ocean

But minutes after leaving his mooring he found bad luck at sea. A BBC camera boat, trying to outmanoeuvre its rival ITN boat, came too close and hit the stern of
English Rose IV
. Ridgway, already anxious and struggling for composure in front of cameras and well-wishers, lost control and screamed abuse at the BBC boat. There appeared to be no damage.

About twenty minutes later, the ITN boat, a chartered 25-ton trawler carrying his 23-year-old wife, Marie Christine, and a boatload of press and well-wishers, ranged up alongside
English Rose IV
, and the sea swell threw the two boats together, making a heavy bump felt by those aboard the trawler. This time, Ridgway was so upset he couldn't talk. But his silence was admiringly noted by newsmen on the trawler, who took it as an indication of considerable aplomb, a glimpse of the tough silent stoicism with which he would meet graver conditons later on.

This collision split
English Rose IV
's wooden rubrail near the rigging, superficial and mainly cosmetic damage, but it left Ridgway badly unnerved: ‘I looked down at the splintered strip of wood … defeat filled my mind.'

Ridgway finally left the pestering boats astern as he sailed out into the empty Atlantic. His voyage had begun inauspiciously, and he couldn't forget it.

Chay Blyth, John Ridgway's partner on the row across the Atlantic, was a man in whom the Ulysses factor coursed thick and strong. He was the perfect example of the way this factor excites and stimulates others who wish to see such a man rise to
his singular calling, who gather around him and urge him on to do something none of them would dream of doing themselves.

Much shorter than his 6-foot-tall captain, stocky, and inferior in rank, Chay Blyth was no less an adventurer. He was mentally tougher, and far less given to doubts and introspection than Ridgway. Years earlier, paired as a team, the two had won an arduous 75-mile overnight army canoe race only because of Chay Blyth's unfaltering determination. After capsizing in frigid water and being flushed through the white water of a lock and almost drowning, emerging only to face the quick onset of hypothermia, Ridgway suggested they give up. ‘No! We're going to win,' said Blyth. He pushed them on and they did win. It was a revelation to Ridgway, the degree to which Blyth's absolute mindset had so altered their apparent situation. Before their transatlantic row, the two had shared survival training in Middle Eastern deserts and the Canadian Arctic. Ridgway always acquitted himself well, but Blyth positively embraced hardship.

Blyth had watched Ridgway first prepare for the OSTAR and then set his sights on a nonstop circumnavigation with irresistible envy. It seemed to him the grandest survival test of all. Ridgway had done some sailing and had made his 500-mile solo passage to Fastnet Rock and back, but Blyth had never sailed a mile. It didn't faze him; before he set off to row across the Atlantic, Chay Blyth had never even been aboard a boat. When he decided that he too wanted to sail alone around the world, nobody thought to ask a man who had rowed across the Atlantic what his qualifications were. If Ridgway could do it, so could Blyth.

Exactly as happened with Ridgway, Blyth was readily offered the use of a boat by a company eager to see its product tested in the high-stakes arena of a round-the-world race. The boat, named
Dytiscus III
, was a Kingfisher 30, another bilge-keeler, almost identical to Ridgway's
English Rose IV
.

Sailors, navigators, experts of all sorts lined up to instruct him and help him on his way. When he confessed to them his complete lack of sailing experience, none suggested it was absolute madness for a novice to sail to the Southern Ocean and Cape Horn in a
bilge-keeled family cruiser. All of them wilfully shoved common sense aside. Some did express doubts about the boat, but they all helped Blyth, eagerly, towards the edge of an abyss that none of them would have approached themselves.

Although they were preparing their boats at the same time, a quarter of a mile apart on the Hamble River, and saw each other often, Blyth didn't tell his former partner of his plans until shortly before they both left. He was too afraid Ridgway would ask him the question nobody else was asking: ‘What in God's name do you think you're doing?' He concentrated on his preparations and studiously avoided examining the overwhelming weight of reasons against going.

Chay's wife, Maureen, proved his most ardent champion and ally. Although their daughter was just 10 months old at the time of his departure, Maureen too looked only on the positive side. She helped him plan, pushed him on, and organised and packed all his food supplies, giving him an ample, healthy, and varied diet, including packages of paella, tins of haggis and roasted grouse, and a seemingly limitless supply of his favourite sweets, Smarties. Once at sea, he ate better than most of his competitors.

On the day of his departure – 8 June, one week after Ridgway had set sail – the 27-year-old Blyth told a
Sunday Times
reporter his reasons for going. ‘Out here it's all black and white, all survival. I'm not particularly fond of the sea, it's just a question of survival.'

Few people leaving a dock for an afternoon's sail in a dinghy have cast off with less experience than Chay Blyth had when he set off to sail alone around the world. Overwhelmed by the details of outfitting his boat, he never managed, as he had once hoped, the OSTAR's 500-mile qualifying passage (not required under Golden Globe rules, which, in the interest of including all-comers, conveniently presumed a certain level of competence). Chay Blyth had sailed no more than 6 miles by himself, and that in mostly calm conditions.

Friends came aboard
Dytiscus III
that Saturday morning, raised and set the sails and the self-steering gear, and then got off,
while others went ahead in another sailboat so that Blyth could copy their manoeuvres as he left port under the gaze of television cameras. But with the wind vane steering the boat, there was nothing for him to do, so he sailed away with his hands in his pockets until he was out of sight.

Then he discovered he was lost. Out of sight of land for the first time, his hastily acquired navigational techniques deserted him. He knew only that he was somewhere in the English Channel, and that the Atlantic lay to the west. He steered in that direction. Five days later he saw and correctly identified the French Ile de Ouessant at the western end of the Channel. He sailed on into the Atlantic.

Three weeks later, on 1 July, having found his way to Madeira and beyond, he sailed into an unseasonable gale and got his first taste of the bilge-keeler's behaviour in bad weather. Running before the wind, the self-steering vane would not hold the boat on course. Steering by hand, Blyth couldn't do much better. The two shallow bilge keels lost their grip in the tumbling water near the surface and
Dytiscus III
began broaching uncontrollably: slewing sideways out of control with one wave, to be smashed into by the next. The boat became unmanageable. Nothing Blyth did seemed to help.

So I lowered the sails … and once I had lowered them there was nothing more I could do except pray. So I prayed. And between times I turned to one of my sailing manuals to see what advice it contained for me. It was like being in hell with instructions.