A Voyage For Madmen (19 page)

As he neared Walker Bay on Sunday 20 October, the wind rose to about 30 knots but the sky remained cloudless, typical conditions for the Cape's notorious ‘southerly busters', and he grew convinced that no yachts would be out day-sailing in such weather. Meanwhile a steady stream of tankers and freighters was passing him; his MIK flags were flying and now Moitessier worried that they would all report his position and course – north, apparently Cape Town-bound – to Lloyd's, confusing the
Sunday Times
and his friends and family about his intentions.

One small freighter was slowly overhauling him and he saw that it would pass close by his starboard side. Close enough perhaps for him to throw his package aboard. It was a gamble: a ship of any size – another yacht even – can blanket a sailboat's wind and render it unmanoeuvrable, and a sailor's instinctive fear in such a situation is that the crew of the other ship might misjudge the distance and cause a collision. There is also the visceral, unreasoning, hackle-raising fear engendered by the unreal enormousness of a ship that close at sea, with nothing in the visible world to give it scale but one's own tiny boat. The sailor feels like an ant negotiating space with an elephant. But with the rising wind and deteriorating weather, this one looked like today's best bet. Quickly, Moitessier wrote out a message asking the captain to slow down and remain on a straight course so he could throw over a package. He put this message in a film can weighted with lead, grabbed his slingshot, and waited as the freighter drew up.

The black freighter is 25 yards off to my right. Three men are watching me from the bridge. Snap! – the message lands on the ship's foredeck. One of the officers twirls a finger at his temple, as if to say I must be a little nuts to be shooting at them … I yell, ‘Message! Message!' They just stare at me, bug-eyed. At this range, with lead balls, I could knock their three hats off with three shots …

The bridge is almost beyond us: I have to salvage the situation fast. I brandish the package, and make as if to give it to them. An officer acknowledges with a wave, and puts the helm over to kick the stern my way. In a few seconds, the main deck is 10 or 12 yards off. I toss a package. Perfect!

It is time I pulled away, but I am going to make a serious mistake by throwing the second package instead of racing to the tiller to steer clear. I won up and down the line with my first package; I will lose it all with the second. By the time I dash to the tiller, it is already late. The freighter's stern is still slewing my way. To make matters worse, she has blanketed my sails by passing me to starboard while I was on the starboard tack.

Joshua
begins to pull clear, but not fast enough. By a hair, the stern's overhang snags the mainmast. There is a horrible noise, and a shower of black paint falls on the deck; the masthead shroud is ripped loose, then the upper spreader shroud. My guts twist into knots. The push on the mast makes
Joshua
heel, she luffs up towards the freighter … and wham! the bowsprit is twisted 20 or 25 degrees to port.

The ship changed course as if to come back to help, but he waved ‘all's well', fearful that if it came back it would finish him off.

Moitessier was stunned, then angry with himself, and finally grateful the damage was not worse: he was amazed that the mainmast had not snapped. At the moment of collision, the solid telephone pole had ‘looked like a fishing rod bent by a big tuna', and had sprung back straight. The two shrouds, whose ends had only slipped in their cable clamps at deck level, were easily repaired. The spreaders were flexibly mounted on the mast and were straight and undamaged when Moitessier had tightened and reclamped the bottom ends of the shrouds.

The bowsprit – the long spar that extends the rig forward of the bow – was the problem. A wooden bowsprit would have snapped like a dry twig as it hit the freighter's hull, and the loss of the sprit would have seriously reduced the sail area of
Joshua
's rig, and
probably caused Moitessier to drop out of the race. But
Joshua
's bowsprit was a steel pipe, 3 inches in diameter, with a 3/16-inch-thick wall, 6 feet 10 inches long. With the marvellous elasticity of steel, it had simply bent, severely. But it was now too bent to use effectively; the forestay, on which the big pulling sails of the rig's fore triangle were hanked, was now canted far off centre to the left. It would not be impossible to sail in this condition, but the boat's efficiency would be reduced, and worse, in Moitessier's eyes,
Joshua
was marred, and a stain was thrown across the sharpened mystic beauty of his voyage – no little thing to this man.

The expected southeasterly gale came in the night, and Moitessier spent it hove to, unable to sleep while thinking about the bowsprit. He spent all the next day, Monday 21 October, riding out the gale, trying to figure out what he could do to repair the bowsprit. He remembered what César, the foreman overseeing
Joshua
's construction in the boiler factory, used to say about steel at moments when it appeared reluctant to take on the shapes required of it: ‘Man is always the strongest.'

Finally, on Tuesday afternoon, with the wind and sea down, he went to work. Fixing a chain to the end of the bowsprit, he ran a four-part block and tackle between the chain and the cockpit winch. With heavy shackles, he attached the spare mizzen boom between the base of the bowsprit and the chain to act as a strut, increasing the angle of purchase. Then he went back to the cockpit and began winding the winch handle. Very slowly, to his amazement and joy, the bowsprit straightened until it was almost as it had been before the accident. He tightened the bowsprit's bobstay and whisker stays and straightened the galvanised steel-tube pulpit in the bow where it had been bent. The boat appeared as good as new.

Worn out by fatigue and emotion, I fall into bed after swallowing a can of soup for dinner. I am tremendously tired, yet I feel crammed with dynamite, ready to level the whole world and forgive it everything. Today, I played and won. My beautiful boat … is as beautiful as ever.

The film cans Moitessier had tossed aboard the freighter – the Greek-registered
Orient Transporter
– quickly reached the
Sunday Times
. The following Sunday 20 October, the newspaper ran an article with photographs of
Joshua
rushing through the sea. The article also reported his position and the last known positions of the other competitors.

Using their speeds to date as the basis for projections, the article ranked the competitors according to who was most likely to pick up the two prizes, the £5,000 for the fastest voyage and the Golden Globe for the first yacht home. It was immediately clear that in both cases Moitessier was the man to beat.

The newspaper still judged that Moitessier's overall time and speed would fall below Chichester's (who had taken 226 days), finding that his average so far was 9 per cent slower.

What the article revealed for the first time was that the boats everyone had presumed should prove the fastest were not fulfilling their promise: Nigel Tetley's Piver trimaran had taken eight days to cover his first 510 miles – that's a laggardly 64 miles per day, slower even than Knox-Johnston's first week in his tubby monohull. And Bill King, in his specially designed racing machine that displaced less than half the weight of the steel
Joshua
and should therefore have proved faster, was so far averaging only 110 miles per day, and was ranked behind Robin Knox-Johnston. ‘It's not the ships but the men in them,' the old saw goes, and it seemed to be the case still. But these averages were misleading: Knox-Johnston's daily mileage figure reflected the great increase in his speed since he had reached the high winds of the Southern Ocean; King had actually outperformed him in the early stages. The projections were simply an exercise based on the sketchiest of details for the benefit of the newspaper and the readers it was attempting to interest in ‘its' race. In the end, the final race result bore no resemblance to the
Sunday Times'
careful calculations, or to anyone's best guess of who might win.

Bill King soon heard over his radio of Moitessier's position and his dazzling runs. The news may not have surprised him, but it robbed him of an elemental requirement for bashing on alone around the world for the better part of a year when one has staked all on such a voyage: a reasonable hope of winning. He tried to shrug this off, unconvincingly, in his logbook (his daily entries were written as letters to his wife, each beginning, ‘My Darling').

My Darling … This evening I learnt that Bernard Moitessier has worked out a big lead. This, of course, must be a great disappointment to me and destroy my peace of mind. I built this boat specifically to pioneer this trip, not for ocean racing. When it transpired that a race was on, there was nothing else to do but join it, but now I have to realise I have little chance of winning it. Already I face the same sort of emotional situation that must have faced Scott when Amundsen reached the South Pole first … This sort of thing is a test and discipline of one's character which must be faced, but I did not set out to test my character …

I cannot drive
Galway Blazer
against faster boats. I will plod on around the world, revelling in my boat's special poetic
beauty, in her strength and power. I will put disappointments from me – but I wish now I had no radio contact.

But he could not put away his disappointment. He later wrote:

I had a great struggle with depression over the slowness of my progress. The peace of the long sail, of the months away from mankind with only the sea and the sky with which to battle, and my beautiful boat as a companion, this peace is wrecked by the nagging knowledge that I am in a race and reluctant to force the pace.

That 20 October, the
Sunday Times
also reported that Donald Crowhurst would set sail early in the week.

A
S SOON AS
Teignmouth Electron
reached its home port, it was hauled out of the water at the Morgan Giles boatyard. Men from the Eastwoods yard had come down from Norfolk to fix the leaking ‘watertight' hatch on the cockpit floor (beneath which lay the boat's generator) and, essentially, to finish building the boat. Piles of equipment, stores, spares, and donations Rodney Hallworth had secured from local merchants – wedges of cheese and bottles of sherry – began to accumulate on the dock beside the boat. Stanley Best brought in campers to house the Eastwoods, the Elliots, and himself and other Crowhurst friends. All these people turned to the enormous job of attempting to make the boat ready for sea – for a voyage around the world – in a little over two weeks.

From beginning to end, it was chaos. The local fishermen and boatbuilders gathered in their working-men's pub, the Lifeboat, to heap scorn and ridicule upon the man and his boat. Crowhurst, they decided, appeared to be in a ‘daze', unable to supervise the preparation of his boat, which they described as ‘a right load of plywood'.