The Lonely Sea and the Sky (42 page)

  My New Zealand partner, Geoffrey, visited England and suggested that I should produce my picture map of London in pocket book form. Our Pocket Map and Guide of London was the result, but for two years it did not sell, and at one time I thought about dropping it. Then it started to sell, and in 1963 we produced our half millionth copy.

  I fondly imagined that I had settled into a comfortable office chair and had finished with all the difficulties, discomforts and dangers of flying and suchlike adventures. But seven years after the war I was attacked by an overpowering urge for some practical navigation. The map business was growing slowly, but would not run to a twin-engined jet, which I should need for the sort of private flying that would interest me. So I decided to go in for sailing or gliding, and plumped for sailing, because it was more sociable; the family could weekend in a yacht, but hardly in a glider.

  My first sail was to the Baltic as crew for a friend. I accepted the invitation with the keenest anticipation of cruising over the waters made famous by Erskine Childers's
Riddle of the Sands
, which I had re-read time after time since leaving my first school. That cruise was not a success, but it did result in my becoming an ocean racer. Rationing was still in force in England, and things like butter and cheese were scarce. After my gallstone trouble I found that the vegetarian diet had agreed with me so well that I now preferred it. However, man cannot live by bread alone. My skipper had a fine hunk of cheese, but said he wanted it to last him his whole voyage, and he used to watch me like a cat whenever I nibbled at it like a mouse. One day he took umbrage at my scraping the mildew off the surface. (I think it was due to his having spent his life in the Merchant Navy.) When we reached Holland I bought some more cheese, which I thought was the solution, but when he found out he took greater umbrage. In the end we never reached the famous sands of the 'Riddle'. I suspected that he had never intended to go farther than Terschelling, and that the Baltic had been bait to get me to sign on.

  At the end of that voyage I decided that sailing would be a misery for me if I was going to worry about the weather all the time, about getting caught out in a gale and being fearful of my gear in a blow. If I was going to sail, I must learn to do it properly. I thought that the Royal Ocean Racing Club sailors would be the ones to learn from, because they raced in all weathers. I advertised my services as a navigator in an ocean race, but nobody seemed interested in an air navigator who knew nothing of the sea. So I was forced to buy a yacht of my own in order to learn. I said nothing to Sheila about this, because I felt sure that she would disapprove when we were so hard up, but I was determined to get a yacht. I went round looking at various likely yachts for sale, and finally bought a day-sailor with the horrible name of
Florence Edith
. She was fitted with two comfortable seats on each side of the doghouse, where the owner and his wife could sit while out for a day's fishing. I paid £1,150 for this yacht in September 1953, and started sailing her immediately to get in as much time as possible before the end of the year, to decide how best to convert her for ocean racing.

  Then I had to break the news to Sheila. Expecting a terrific rocket for my extravagance, imagine my astonishment when she said, 'Oh, I always wanted to sail. What an excellent idea!' I had no time to spend on navigating charged sandbank after sandbank on the east coast, and when Sheila came up to have her first sail from Brightlingsea no one had seen or heard of the
Florence Edith
. At last an old fisherman said to her, 'Oh, you mean that there yellow boat? She be lying on Buxey Sands, and it's lucky 'tis fine weather, otherwise she'd be sunk when t'sea rises. What's more, there be thick fog coming up, and if she do get off the sands, it'll be a long time before you see her in Brightlingsea.' My wife was urged by the friend she was staying with to go home and get a divorce, but she decided to defer that, and left a message in case I should turn up. The fog did come up, as the fisherman forecast, but I had an amusing bit of navigation feeling the way along the channel into Brightlingsea by means of the hand lead. Sheila had her sail next morning, and enjoyed it. She joined in enthusiastically in redesigning the interior of the yacht. We rebuilt the cabin, making berths for six, which cost as much as the boat.

  Next spring I entered for the North Sea race, 220 miles from Harwich to Rotterdam round the North Sea. I had been in only one race before, and was the only member of the crew who had been in any. Sheila had so much faith in me as a navigator that she expected me to win, and was most disappointed when I telephoned from Rotterdam to say that we had come nearly last. Before the start I had run aground in the River Crouch, losing my kedge anchor in the process of getting off.

  We renamed the yacht
Gipsy Moth II
. I changed her from sloop to cutter rig. With her mainsail, staysail and yankee she carried 540 square feet of sail. She was 8 tons, Thames measurement, and 24 feet on the waterline, the minimum length permitted to enter for RORC races. I had one brilliant idea after another for speeding her up. For example at great trouble and expense I streamlined her sharp-edged iron keel with a false wooden keel, bolted on below. It made not the slightest difference to her performance.

  My next race was from Cowes to Corunna. Unfortunately there was a weakness in the new masthead fitting which had been specially designed for her, and the top of the mast snapped off in the middle of the night in some dirty weather west of the Channel Islands. From the cabin it sounded like the crack of doom, and when I darted up into the cockpit there was a tangle of shrouds, halyards and wires wherever I shone the torch over the boat or in the water. Then one of the crew dropped the torch overboard with the light still shining, and as it sank getting fainter and fainter, it looked like a ghost leaving us for a better world. One of the crew evidently thought that we might be doing the same, and wanted to signal to a steamer whose lights were visible some distance off for help. I squashed that, perhaps more roughly than I need have, and told everyone to turn in except for one man to keep watch. When I awoke and went on deck I found our watchman fast asleep in the cockpit. Next morning we cleared up the tangle of gear, set a small staysail, and headed for Guernsey. There was a strong current as we approached the island, and it looked as if we were going to be carried on to the rocks. One of the crew was a very devout Roman Catholic, and I noticed his lips praying nervously as we were being carried towards the rocks. We cleared the point, sailed into St. Peter Port and tacked up to a mooring buoy by carrying from one side of the deck to the other the boom to which the staysail was attached.

  In my first season I sailed that boat 2,510 miles, including three races. Our racing record was one of the worst in the club, but I was learning.

  Next season in the North Sea Race one of
Gipsy Moth II's
crew was an ex-wartime naval commander, who claimed to have sailed a lot. He had been maddening the rest of the crew throughout the race across the North Sea. We crossed the finishing line in the dark, running downwind with spinnaker set in a fresh breeze. Two of the crew were lowering the spinnaker, I was at the helm, and I asked the fourth man of the crew, my naval friend, to take in the rotating log trailing astern. When he said he must have someone to help him do it I was so enraged that I felt a hot flood in my belly as if something had burst inside me.

  On the way back from Rotterdam to the Solent I began to feel ill. Sailing down channel I asked this same man to pump the bilge, but he refused. I pumped it myself, but shortly afterwards was in agonies. Later in the season, before the start of my first Fastnet Race, I was becoming a sick man. The race took us six days, and before it ended, I had to be helped out of my bunk to the cockpit, and had difficulty in holding on while navigating. I went off to a hospital where a specialist, after examining the X-ray, said that I was a typical case of chronic arthritis. I certainly was in a bad way; I could not open a door without great difficulty, even using two hands, and once I dropped a full plate of soup over myself because I was unable to grasp it. I started visiting the hospital regularly for treatment. One day my nature-cure family doctor said to me, 'Ask your fellow patients how long they have been receiving this treatment, and then decide for yourself whether it seems likely to cure you.' This made me think hard, and as a result I underwent a severe course of nature-cure treatment at Edstone. Shortly after I arrived there I sat down on the ground on a fine autumn day and was unable to get to my feet again. I had to wait there until someone happened along who could pull me up. Fortunately the treatment succeeded; it seemed to take a long time, but by next spring I was a fit man and started a hard season's racing in
Gipsy Moth II
.

  The first race of the season was the 220 miles race from Southsea to Harwich by way of the Hinder Lightship in the North Sea.
Gipsy Moth II
won this race outright. It sounds terrific, but the truth is that the going was very slow in light airs as far as the Dover Straits, and many of the other competitors gave up. One of our own crew said we must stop racing and put him ashore. I said, 'There's the shore; you can swim for it if you wish, but
Gipsy Moth
is racing on.' Perhaps the real reason why we won was because we had Marston Tickell, a Sapper Colonel, on board, who is one of the best ocean racers that I know. The way he made
Gipsy Moth
sail was a revelation to me. When we reached our mooring at Harwich at the end of the race we found the
Ann Speed
not only moored up but all her crew were away ashore. We were much depressed to think of one of our competitors having got in so far ahead of us. It seems extraordinary how this deep depression can go with success; our rival had given up the race at Dover, and cut across the Thames Estuary to shorten the distance by 45 miles.

  The next year we raced hard again. The Cowes-Dinard Race was interesting. Sheila sailed in it, and two other members of the crew were Martin Jones and Michael Jones. Martin had crewed for me in a number of races, and I regarded him as hard to beat as a deckhand and helmsman. Michael was a lieutenant in the Navy, and later became the Queen's Sailing Master skippering
Bloodhound
, the Duke of Edinburgh's 34-ton yacht, and a very different proposition from
Gipsy Moth II
. There was a fresh wind with a choppy sea, and I was cutting the corner fine at Guernsey, standing in as close to the rocks as I dared in the hope of avoiding a tack and the loss of time that it would cost. Mike did not like being in so close, because he had been wrecked on these rocks in another boat, and Sheila was gossiping with him below about social nothings because, she told me afterwards, she thought the atmosphere was too tense. I barked harshly at them (a sure sign that the skipper is too tense himself) because I wanted to be ready to tack at a second's notice. At that moment I saw a column of water shoot 20 feet straight into the air, where a wave had hit a submerged rock a cable's length (200 yards) on the beam. I said nothing to Mike, because I thought he would have a fit, but I laughed to myself and carried on – if the rocks were going to show up as clearly as that, I need not worry. We managed to scratch past without having to tack. Sheila was presented with a cup by the handsome commodore of the Dinard Yacht Club, and I think nothing could have given her more pleasure.

  At the end of
Gipsy Moth's
fourth racing season she had started in sixteen RORC races and I had learned a lot about sailing; perhaps more important, I was aware how much more there was to learn.

I find it difficult to think about my whole lung cancer story. It was so dreadful for me that for a long time I could bear to think of only a small bit of the story at a time; sometimes I could talk about a part of it to a friend if I felt strong sympathy with him. Recently, however, Tubby Clayton, of Toc H, pressed me to tell the story; he said it was my duty to do it for the good of other sufferers. I shrank from it, but came to realise that since I was the only person who
could
tell the story, I must face up to it. It was really this decision that made me write the whole of this book.

  In 1957 I had a tough year in the office, with a lot of worry, and also a hard season's sailing. I raced my own
Gipsy Moth II
in three RORC events, and at the end of the English Channel race in my own yacht, jumped aboard
Figaro
, the crack American yacht, to navigate it for the owner, Bill Snaith, in a series of races for the Admiral's Cup. This cup was presented by the Admiral of the RORC for international competition by teams of three yachts.
Figaro
had a crack crew; Bill Snaith was a first-class sailor, and an excellent, hard-driving skipper, but fair; Bobby Simonette had been acclaimed one of the world's best foredeck hands; Ed Raymond was one of America's best sail makers and a real old salt; Kanud Reimers, the Swedish yacht architect, told me that he had designed more yachts than he could remember; young Buckie was a first-class deck hand. Buckie had served in the Korean war, and now acted as permanent crew for Bill, looking after the yacht for him. They were a fine crowd to sail with. I enjoyed studying the famous American out-to-win methods, and I learned a lot from them. Also the differences between the American and British viewpoint amused me continuously; little things like eating marmalade on bacon. I don't know what they thought of me.