A Voyage For Madmen (11 page)

Ridgway later wrote:

Whenever we were really miserable Chay would strike up with the old Scottish songs of his childhood. ‘The Road and the Miles to Dundee' never failed to rally my spirits; he was tremendous when things seemed really grim.

When they were closing with the coast of Ireland and worried that a storm might throw them against the cliffs, Ridgway had offered to make a call for help on their radio. ‘We'll go on,' said Blyth unhesitatingly.

Now Ridgway suspected that on his own he wasn't hungry enough to win.

A seaman is not made by simply going to sea. He must also find in himself a love for it. Ridgway was not engaged by the sea. He had no feeling for it, no love of its literature, no sea heroes to emulate. As with his transatlantic row, the sea was simply a hostile environment to be survived, the voyage an ordeal to be endured. Ridgway kept his mind ashore. He thought of home. He thought of the adventure school in Scotland that he hoped to start with Marie Christine. He listened to broadcasts of cricket test matches on the BBC World Service and vividly remembered his own visits to Lord's cricket ground, and ‘the great bags of cherries eaten very slowly in the stands, while white figures dashed about the green grass, far below. The pigeons, muted applause, the scoreboard – I could see it all.'

He pushed
English Rose
south, but his heart was no longer in the voyage.

A few hundred miles astern of Ridgway, Chay Blyth was in much the same frame of mind. He was also having trouble getting his radio to transmit, his boat was worrying him, and he was lonely. He had a further problem: he was still uncertain of his position. His early efforts at celestial navigation had him on dry land smack in the middle of an island among the mountainous Cape Verde group (6,000 feet high), yet he could see nothing but empty ocean all around him.

He wondered how Ridgway was doing, enviously supposing that his former shipmate was untroubled by the same worries and loneliness. But Blyth had only seen Ridgway in the company of Blyth, and he did not imagine that his superior officer might be going to pieces without him, without the obdurate driving force of Blyth's personality.

Yet the image of Ridgway doing so much better was a boon to him – as were all his difficulties. Adversity was like an electric cattle prod to Chay Blyth. It spurred him on. His reaction to difficult or desperate conditions had always been the opposite of Ridgway's.

Ridgway, a deeply introspective man, was acutely aware of his tendencies towards weakness and softness. He had fought this by boxing at school and in the army and by driving himself to become as hard and tough as he could be. He believed it was his own strength or weakness that would bring him success or failure. He counted only on himself. Chay Blyth had a far simpler view. His efforts would count for only so much; after that it was up to God. And God was on his side, he had no doubt of that. When he prayed during bad weather and the weather subsequently got better, he knew why: ‘It has died down a bit now,' he wrote in his logbook, ‘after I had prayed for it to go down. Nobody on this earth could convince me that there is no Lord.'

Now, in the middle of the Atlantic, lost, lonely, and bruised
inside his lurching weekender's cruiser, Chay Blyth was unavoidably becoming aware of his boat's shortcomings, its inherent unsuitability for the Southern Ocean. He was beginning to realise that at some point ahead, probably around the time he entered the Southern Ocean, he would face a choice between persisting with the voyage despite being both fundamentally unprepared and in the wrong boat or giving up. Yet for the time being he pushed on with savage determination. He embraced almost exuberantly everything that was thrown at him with all the toughness his years of army training had bred in him.

Blyth was getting a feel for the sea. He was becoming a seaman.

In contrast, Robin Knox-Johnston's contentment at sea was striking. He had already spent two years living aboard
Suhaili
, in port and at sea, and he felt completely at home in her. He quickly and comfortably fell into a seagoing routine adapted from his 10,000-mile voyage from India.

Unlike most sailors, solo or sailing with others, Knox-Johnston enjoyed jumping overboard for a swim if the day was warm. The perimeter of one's vessel at sea is the very clear boundary of safety; beyond it lie peril and possibly death, and their nearness is keenly felt. It helps keep one aboard. The visceral, unreasoning fears of abandonment, the abyssal depths and all its creatures, make it very difficult for most people to jump overboard once the shore has receded beyond a short distance away, even with trusted companions aboard a boat. On one occasion when Ridgway and Blyth were rowing across the Atlantic, one of them had to go in to see if the boat's rudder had been damaged. The weather was hot, the sea was calm, yet they argued all day to see who would go overboard. Eventually Ridgway dived in, inspected the rudder, and got out fast. ‘Go on, Chay, it's lovely,' he said, grinning. Blyth went in and was quickly back on board. Neither of them went in again.

Knox-Johnston was untroubled. Trailing a line astern, he
would jump from the bowsprit and swim alongside
Suhaili
until she overtook him, then grab the line and pull himself aboard. This, he felt, kept him fit and clean.

He might have been on holiday.

A sedate lunch followed my swim, usually consisting of biscuits and cheese or the like, with a pickled onion on special occasions as a treat. The afternoons would be spent just like the morning, working or reading, until 5 p.m. when, if I felt like it, I dropped everything for a beer or a whisky.

And from his logbook:

I repaired the Gilbert and Sullivan tape cassette … and had a wonderful evening. I joined in sitting at the table in the homely light of the cabin light. It is not cold enough yet for clothes, just pleasant … I think I'll have a nip of Grant's. I can think of no one with whom I'd trade my lot at present.

He was by now a seasoned navigator, with a seaman's knowledge of the ocean's wind and current systems, and he made steady if unremarkable progress south, gaining on the two army sailors.

Like all solo sailors, he had to determine how long he could sleep before waking to check that he was not about to be run down by a ship. Figuring the likelihood of encountering a ship at sea is impossible. Until the middle of the twentieth century, most ships kept to well-defined shipping lanes, routes across oceans that offered the most favourable combination of weather and ocean conditions, and economical distance run. The British Admiralty publication
Ocean Passages of the World
, which the Golden Globe racers carried aboard their boats, is a pilot book detailing these preferred routes for high-and low-powered vessels, as well as for sailing vessels. It comes with charts showing these shipping lanes.

Early single-handers – and the sleepy shorthanded crews of other small sailboats – could avoid these highways in the sea or, if
they had to cross or approach shipping lanes, knew what to expect and could remain awake or catnap for a few days. Afterwards, out of harm's way, they could, and usually did, turn in for hours at a time. But about the time of the Golden Globe race, ships began to stray out of their lanes. They became more powerful, able to head more directly for their destinations against prevailing winds and currents. They began to get daily radio reports from shore stations giving them optimum courses around local weather systems.

At one time, the single-hander under sail could hope that the approaching ship would see him and alter course, as it is legally obliged to do: a vessel under sail has right of way over an engine-driven ship. Sailors could reasonably expect that any oncoming vessel would have a man in the bow peering out into the dark ahead who would see their little light and send a message back to the bridge, and the ship would turn away. But by the 1960s, this was increasingly not the case. As ships have grown larger and their systems more sophisticated, manpower aboard has been cut back. A supertanker may have fewer than twenty men aboard, and at any given time a third of that complement will be off duty, asleep, or below reading. A few shipping lines still maintain a good lookout, posting a man on the bow in radio contact with the bridge. Other ships, particularly those registered under the less demanding requirements of flags of convenience, are not so scrupulous. Lookout may be by radar alone, and if the radar doesn't pick up a boat, it's invisible. Yachts, particularly wooden yachts, do not make good radar pictures. They're small, their radar echoes may be lost in ‘sea clutter' – just more waves on the radar screen. And as sailors often find when calling a ship by radio to ask what sort of radar picture their boats make, the radar may be turned off.

The bridge of a large tanker may be a quarter of a mile astern of its bow and 150 feet above the water – something like the view from the upper floors of a condo in Miami Beach looking out at the Florida Straits. The crew on the bridge can see the big stuff, other ships, from up there, but little sailboats can go unnoticed. At night, a sailboat's navigation lights, close down to the water, will
almost certainly not be seen farther than half a mile away, even if anyone's looking – scant minutes to collision. Then, if seen, the manoeuvrability of a large ship is poor and slow.

The curve of the earth, it soon becomes apparent at sea, is quite pronounced. The horizon seen from the deck of a small yacht is about three miles away. Beyond 3 miles, a ship will be ‘hull-down' below the horizon: only its superstructure is visible. Eight miles away, the whole ship will be below the horizon. Conditions of haze, cloud, rain, fog, or a large swell on a sunny day can reduce this to yards. A ship moving at 18 knots (the speed at which the average container ship might travel; many travel faster), unseen when the sailor comes on deck to make a careful scan of the sea before going below again, can steam up over the horizon and run a yacht down in twenty minutes or less.

Clearly, most sensibly, it's up to the sailboat to stay clear of the ship. The single-hander, therefore, must wake, climb on deck and look around every fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes – there is no rule, it varies from single-hander to single-hander.

Knox-Johnston, the merchant seaman who had been trained aboard rigorously well-run British ships, had a touching, old-fashioned faith in the idea that all ships maintained a lookout. Before his voyage was over, this faith would be shattered. Near land and shipping lanes, he dozed in the cockpit, ready to wake and alter course. Mid-ocean, he was as untroubled by doubts as he was when swimming, and tended to sleep for hours at a time when the weather was fine and
Suhaili
didn't need attention.

But
Suhaili
was not without her problems. Even in quiet weather, the bilges were filling with water, and Knox-Johnston was having to pump them dry twice a day. She had leaked before, on the voyage from India, and he had noticed it again on the run from London to Falmouth. Now the leak was worse. A little water in the bilges is not uncommon for any boat, and more the rule for wooden boats of conventional plank-on-frame construction like
Suhaili
. But the amount of water now flowing into the boat was significant, and Knox-Johnston was worried that this might indicate a weakness in the hull.

Becalmed south of the Cape Verde Islands, he pulled on a mask and snorkel, jumped overboard, and swam down underwater to inspect the hull. The trouble was immediately apparent: a long gap showed in a seam between planks just above the keel, near the spot where the foot of the mainmast was anchored into the keelson. There was a similar gap in the same place on both sides of the hull. As
Suhaili
rolled slightly, Knox-Johnston could see the seam opening and closing with each roll. He surfaced, hauled himself aboard, lit a cigarette, and considered the problem. He was worried that the floor timbers – not the floorboards, but the thick-sawn members that joined the hull frames to the keel and held the bolts that kept the heavy iron ballast attached to the bottom of the boat – might be weakening. A failure with the floors could be catastrophic, even resulting in the bottom of the boat coming apart and falling off. Most of the floors were covered by water tanks built into the boat, but Knox-Johnston poked around in the bilges, inspected those he could see, and did what he could to convince himself that the floors were not failing. It was simply a caulking problem, he decided – the only problem he could realistically fix.