Gipsy Moth Circles the World Read online

  Gipsy Moth’s third vice was taking effect; she could not keep to her heading at the top of a wave face, but whipped round and broached to, lying broadside on to the wind and the waves. Sometimes the self-steering gear could bring her back on to her right heading, but often when the wind vane was suddenly swung 60 ° across the gale force wind, the pressure on it was too great; if the safety clutch had not given way, the vane must have broken. Broaching-to was the danger that was most dreaded by the clippers. Slewing round, broadside on to a big Southern Ocean storm, they would roll their masts down, and, if the sails went into the water, they were likely to founder, as many did. Leaving the danger aside (which, anyway, I did not consider as great for Gipsy Moth as for the clippers because Gipsy Moth ought to survive a knockdown which would cause a clipper to founder) those broachings seriously threatened the self-steering gear. To cut down the broaching, I was forced to cut down the amount of sail that I would have carried in northern waters. This was a big setback to my plans, because I had reckoned on making long runs in the westerlies down south. I had hoped, before I started the voyage, that a long light boat, which Gipsy Moth was designed to be, would knock off runs of 250 miles, day after day. I am not a designer myself, and my opinion as to the cause of this trick of Gipsy Moth’s may not be of value, but I did have a long experience of the boat and, in my opinion, her tendency to flip round as easily as a whip is cracked was due to her having too short a forefoot, and no grip on the water there, combined with an unbalance of the hull which required an excessive load on the tiller to activate the rudder.

  There were leak drips everywhere, and I made a list of them:

  Leaks

  Doghouse post over sink

  Doghouse post over Primus

  Doghouse join about Primus v bad

  Post above head of quarter berth

  Cabin hatch lets water in freely, both sides (according to heel)

  All bolts holding companion hatch cover leak

  Foot of quarter berth under outboard edge of the cockpit seat

  From deck beside head of portside berth in cabin

  Starboard forward locker—everything wet through

  Seacock in cloakroom

  Both ventilators when closed

  I had to force myself to eat something to keep up my strength, so I had a chew at some mint-cake. It was not a very successful meal, for in biting on a piece of the mint-cake a tooth broke in half. Luckily my tongue recognised the bit of broken tooth as not mint-cake, and I did not swallow it, but recovered it in the hope of later repairs. Nigel Forbes, my dentist, had given me a dental repair kit, and now had come the time to use it. But I could not tackle dentistry then and there, because it was still too rough. I cleaned and scraped the broken bit as per instructions, and wrapped it up safely to await a session in Gipsy Moth’s do-it-yourself dental chair. I made myself a cup of tea and turned in.

  I was up two or three times during the night to tend the tiller lines. I wanted to try to keep heading 90 ° off the wind, but I did not want a gybe. There seemed to be a devil of a lot of strong wind about, but I was able to snooze a bit, after a fashion. Around six o’clock in the morning Gipsy Moth did gybe, and began rolling madly. I found that she was headed WNW. It looked cold and unfriendly outside, but I had to get on with repairs to the self-steering—clearly I could not go on like this. It took me an hour to dress, make tea, collect my tools and generally screw myself up to make a start. The rolling was frightful, and I felt as feeble as a half-dead mouse. I turn to my log for some two hours later: “0909. Well, there we are. The vane is repaired, the self-steering oar in the water and in charge of the ship, the mizzen and genoa staysail are set. Of course the wind has dropped now and more sail is needed to move, but I am on strike and intend to have some breakfast first. After a 40-50 knot gale the sea is monstrously lumpy, and it was no picnic repairing the vane sticking out beyond the end of the boat. But it might have been a lot worse. The coffee is made, here’s to it.”

  That day I had a successful radio transmission with Cape Town, and felt much the better for it. Throughout this part of the voyage I was harassed by poor radio conditions, and it was always an immense relief to get through a message to the newspapers that were helping to make my voyage possible. When I failed to make R/T contact I would worry about it, for I hated not being able to do what I had said I would do. In poor conditions even a successful R/T transmission could be a strain. It might take an hour and twenty minutes to get off a 250-word cable. That used to take the stuffing out of me.

  With conditions a bit better I felt some return of appetite, and my log records a notable meal on Saturday, October 22:

  “Ai, but that was good, that breakfast! A mug of hot chocolate and sugar, dried bananas and wheat, onion pancake (aimed at omelette with dried eggs!) home-baked wholewheat toast and lime marmalade, mug of coffee.”

  I got out my dentist’s repair kit, and spent an hour having a go at my tooth. I succeeded in cementing the broken piece on again, but in doing so I cemented in a fragment of cotton wool from a cotton wool pad I had put in my mouth to keep my tongue away from my tooth while I was working on it. I left the bit of cotton wool in the repair—I felt I dared not pull it for fear of pulling off the piece of tooth I had managed to stick on.

  I found a handsome six-inch squid on deck. It had attractive, variegated colouring rather like tortoiseshell, not at all like the pallid ones I had met before. It seemed just the thing for a good bouillabaisse, but I couldn’t face eating it.

  Birds continued to bring much interest to my life. The prions would cavort madly round the yacht. They seemed to like flying through the wind shadows of the sails—I suppose the turbulence must be unexpected and intriguing. I threw out some old wheat grains, but they did not appear interested. When emptying my gash-bucket of scraps I would bang it on the rail, and that would bring along the Cape Hens (white chinned petrels). They would alight and pick over the scraps. I had a feeling of meanness every time this happened—compared with the waste from a liner, my vegetable scraps, perhaps no more than a dessertspoonful, because I harboured my stores carefully, must have disgusted them.

  At this time, too, I began to meet real albatrosses; not that my earlier albatrosses, or the birds I called albatrosses, weren’t real, but they seemed tiny compared with the big fellows I met now. One beautiful bird soared by with a wing-span that must have been at least eight feet across.

  Alas, my tooth-repair did not hold. I tried it out at supper time, and it was no good—the broken bit simply came off again as soon as I tried to bite. Perhaps the best dentists do not mix cotton wool with their cement. I had another shot at cementing, this time without cotton wool fragments, but the repair was no more successful. In the end I got a file and filed down the jagged edges of the piece of tooth still in my jaw, and left it at that.

  What had I expected from the Roaring Forties? They are not seas that many yachtsmen frequent; indeed, few ships of any sort go there now, because with steam and the Suez Canal the modern route to Australia is quite different. From my reading of the clipper logs I had an impression of a steady, surging wind, strong, driving ships day after day on towards the east. Of course, life is never quite like the tidy pattern that imagination makes of it. The clippers had great passages, and it is these that stay in the memory, but they had days (and weeks) of exasperating frustration too. Then one can gain a quite misleading impression of the seas from the logs of big ships—compared with Gipsy Moth, Cutty Sark, Thermopylae and their peers were all enormous. A gale that forced me, singlehanded, to lie ahull, at the mercy of wind and sea, to them might have been a good sailing breeze. I knew enough of singlehanded sailing in small boats to have assessed these things rationally, but rational assessment, and emotional preparation for the reality of something in life, are by no means the same. From my reading, and study of the clipper passages, I had expected the Forties above all else to be steady. That is just what they were not—it seemed luff and puff, luff and puff all the time. B
ut it was luff and puff with a difference, nothing gentle about it; the difference, one might say, between the playful games of a kitten, and the gambolling of a tiger cub. The squalls with which the weather, as it were, changed gear, were not a nice gentle change from, say, 20 mph in a car to 25-30 mph. They were like a fierce racing changing from 20 to 90-110 mph. Another thing which I find hard to describe, even to put into words at all, was the spiritual loneliness of this empty quarter of the world. I had been used to the North Atlantic, fierce and sometimes awesome, yes, but the North Atlantic seems to have a spiritual atmosphere as if teeming with the spirits of the men who sailed and died there. Down here in the Southern Ocean it was a great void. I seemed planetary distances away from the rest of mankind.

  Just as I was getting ready for breakfast on Sunday, October 23, I had a bad shaking. In England before I left, Sheila Scott had given me a toy Koala bear, and it lived on a perch beside my Marconi set. It was always falling off its perch and that morning, as so many times before, I went to pick it up. I was holding the bear with one hand and making my way across the cabin from handgrip to handgrip with the other, when a violent lurch caught me between handgrips and threw me hard against the table. When I picked myself up a place in my ribs under my right arm felt very sore. I thought some ribs must be broken though I could find nothing wrong. The same old lesson was driven home to me forcibly again—never to move about below without one handgrip, or at least an eye on the next one, so that it can be grabbed instantly if the boat lurches. Those lurches, as a beam wave caught her, made Gipsy Moth move like a whip cracking. I consoled myself for my sore rib with the reflection that I might have been much more seriously hurt, and that the accident would have done good if it made me remember the lesson about holding on.

  When I had recovered from my shaking and had some breakfast I went on deck to replace the trysail with the main. The wind seemed lessening, and I felt that Gipsy Moth needed the main. I did not like that main, it was my least-favourite sail. For one thing, it required too much brute force to handle, for it was always pressing against a shroud or binding on a sheet; for another, I had to trot to and fro from mast to cockpit about six times during the hoisting. First I had to slack away the vangs as the sail began to rise; then to alter the self-steering trim to head more into the wind so that the head of the sail would not foul the lower aft shroud; then several times to slack away the sheet as the sail went up. After that the lower shroud runner had to be released, and the shroud tied forward to another shroud. Why, then, did I use the mainsail? Well, it was double the area of the trysail and had much more drive, and when I did get it up and trimmed, it set better. Furthermore, it was my collecting-sail for rain, and I needed more rainwater in my tanks. But man is adaptable, and before the end of the voyage I had devised a method of raising the mainsail in a Force 6 when going downwind with no trouble at all!

  That evening I was involved in a silly accident to the rigging. I had the starboard levered shroud, which was slacked off, tied forward to another shroud with the lever released, so that the wire should not chafe the mainsail. Gradually the tie worked its way up the two shrouds, until it nearly reached the lower crosstree. As a result, I could not tauten the shroud with the lever when I needed to. I tried for half an hour to get down the tie with a boathook, but I could not shift it. Then it got dark, and I decided to leave it until daylight, when I intended to go up the mast to free it. During the night I worried about the safety of the mast with an un-tautened shroud and at 1.30 in the morning I got up and shone a torch on the mast. It looked quite unmoved, but I dared not come up closer to the wind, which I wanted to do. At 05.30 I went on deck to tackle the shroud, and determined to have one more try at freeing it before climbing the mast. I got my long burgee stick (5 feet 6 inches) and taped a foot-long carving knife to it. The knife had a sharp, narrow blade—I had carried it on board various boats for at least ten years, and this was the first time I had ever used it. By standing on the main boom, I could make the knife just reach the nylon tie binding the two shrouds together. I sawed and stabbed at it with the knife, and after a somewhat lengthy process I contrived to cut it through.

  While I worked at the shroud, Gipsy Moth galloped along on a grey-green sea. There was too much heel for comfort, but I left the mainsail up, because I expected the wind to veer and free the boat, and I went below to try for a little more sleep. Alas, I was wrong, for instead of veering the wind backed, and soon Gipsy Moth was hard on the wind coming from the south-east. I sweated up the main to get it setting better, and felt most unfairly treated, because according to the US Pilot Charts a south-east wind should have been pretty rare in that area of sea. I wrote in the log: “What an indignity to have to cope with an east wind in the Roaring Forties.”

  For the next twenty-four hours the wind went on backing, with intervals of light, flucky airs, or all-but calm. I was up and down at the sails, constantly fiddling at the trim to get the best out of the yacht, and became drowsy and doped with fatigue. At last, during the morning of October 25, the wind began to return to the west, and as it did so, it increased in strength. Suddenly, there was a major crisis. I suppose I should not have let myself get caught, but due to fatigue I was not at my best for dealing with emergencies. As I was trying to eat some breakfast, a particularly fierce squall struck. I grabbed my padded coat and rushed into the cockpit—still in my “indoor” slip-on sheepskin boots—to turn downwind and run before it. With so much sail set I could not move the tiller, even with the help of cords after I had disengaged the wind vane. Later, I realised my mistake; I had released the self-steering vane, but I ought to have released the self-steering tiller lines to the rudder quadrant as well. I was pushing the tiller against the immense power of the self-steering oar locked to one side. I redoubled my efforts with the cords, and suddenly the tiller responded. Before I could check the turn, Gipsy Moth had gybed.

  The boom came over with an almighty “wham”, the vang tearing a stanchion out of the deck. As it came across, the main-sheet slide shot across the track rail, and tore out the permanent stop screwed to the end of the rail. The slide holding two parts of the mainsheet came off the rail or horse.

  I gybed back again, because of the headsails being on the other gybe. I did not notice that when the boom crashed over to starboard the first time the topping lift from masthead to boom end had hooked up behind the upper crosstree. It was amazing, and a great tribute to the rigging and spars, that the crosstree did not carry away when I gybed back. All this time I was still in my “house” boots, bareheaded, and without a safety harness. Fortunately I had stowed away a spare harness in the cubby hole at the side of the cockpit. I struggled into this, took off my boots and dropped them into the cabin, thinking that I might as well keep them dry. I could not leave the cockpit in those boots, because without non-slip soles they would have been dangerous.

  As soon as I had the tiller lashed so that it should give me sufficient time before gybing or tacking, I went forward along the deck in bare feet. I dropped the mainsail, letting most of it (the bunt) fall into the water—the boom was way out abeam. Then I dropped the genoa staysail, and the jib, in each case securing the halliard after removing it from the head of the sail—I did not want halliards winding round the crosstrees! I let the sails lie, partly in the water. As I left the cockpit I had freed the mizzen halliard, hoping that the sail would drop of itself. This it did not do, and was damaged. I told myself: “Never mind. It might have been much worse.”

  When I turned to the main boom I noticed the topping lift hooked up to the weather crosstree. First I furled and tied the sail in three places to reduce windage—it was blowing a stiff 45 knots—and then I brought the boom inboard by hauling on the weather vang. As soon as I could reach the end of the boom I freed the topping lift from it, and dropped the boom on deck, lashing it there. After that I hoisted the spitfire jib, and engaged the self-steering as soon as Gipsy Moth started moving again. I hurried over this for fear that the self-steering gear wo
uld be damaged while Gipsy Moth lay ahull. Waves knocking the gear from side to side shook the whole boat with shuddering bangs.

  One’s thoughts at these moments of crisis are sometimes curiously detached. My chief personal worry during the gybe and the troubles that followed it was that, without a cap to protect them, my spectacles would blow away. I had intended to have a washing bout that morning, and I reflected that at least my feet were getting their wash in advance.

  7. Overcoming Disaster

  I began to understand why these lonely seas are called “The Roaring Forties”. It is the noise of the wind in the rigging. I would not call it a roar exactly, but I know of no other way of describing it—a hard, compelling noise that seems unique to those latitudes. In the days of the clippers, with their forests of masts and rigging, the noise must have been awe-inspiring.

  My sense of spiritual loneliness continued. This Southern Indian Ocean was like no sea I had met before. It is difficult to paint the picture with words of what it was like down in the Southern Ocean in those spring months. I have sailed across the North Atlantic six times, three times alone, and experienced winds up to 100 miles per hour (87 knots) there, but looking back it seemed so safe compared with this Southern Ocean stuff. This Southern Ocean was totally different; the seas were fierce, vicious and frightening. The boat was under big accelerations from the powerful, monumental waves. It was hard to say what the speed was. From the deck it seemed slow, but the foam on the water and the whole water surface were moving fast themselves, which made it difficult to judge.