A Voyage For Madmen (20 page)

Crowhurst's friends also noticed a wholly uncharacteristic, subdued numbness settle over his normally effusive personality.
The enormity of what remained to be done, the incredible range of details, overwhelmed him and scattered the focus of his mind.

He carried around loose sheets of paper that were paradigms of the greater disorganisation around him: notes of unfinished work, diagrams made for himself and others, addresses, phone numbers, workmen's hours, half-drafted letters, reminders, lists of things to buy – socks, blowtorch, brass strips, gloves, hacksaw blades, pencils, logbooks, lighter with fuel and flints, barometer, flares, life jacket, screws, bolts, tools. Sometimes he was able to delegate some of these purchases to others. Stanley Best was sent to a used-car dealer to buy two dozen small electrical fuel pumps, though he had no idea what they were for. Clare Crowhurst was sent to a local baker to find a recipe for baking bread at sea.

Despite his promises of local sponsorship, Rodney Hallworth had raised only £250. Yet he would haul Crowhurst off at a moment's notice to attend local functions that might only possibly yield more money but certainly boosted the civic pride of Teignmouth. Crowhurst continued to write letters asking for sponsorship or donations of equipment until just days before he sailed.

Reeling from a vertigo of overwhelming details, he would fix on some item and spend hours tracking it down, even getting into his minivan and driving great distances to find some small thing he wanted. No doubt it was a relief to get away.

A BBC television crew arrived to film the preparations. Crowhurst found time to give them a lengthy interview, during which he sounded like a Cape Horner: ‘I have felt a community with long dead seamen on many occasions … seamen who have come this way centuries before you would understand your feelings, and you understand theirs …'

When asked by the interviewer, Donald Kerr, if he had ever faced a situation at sea when he thought he was going to drown, he recounted, in detail, an episode when he fell overboard while sailing single-handed along the south coast. Fortunately, he said,
the boat headed up into the wind after a quarter of a mile and he was able to swim back to it. A quarter-mile swim in the hypothermia-inducing English Channel would be a lucky and heroic accomplishment. He had never mentioned this either to Clare or to any friends, although it was exactly the sort of tale he would have loved to tell.

Five days before he was due to sail, Crowhurst, John Elliot, and a BBC camera crew took
Teignmouth Electron
out for a day of sea trials. The genoa sheet track quickly began lifting from the deck, its screws pulling up through the plywood either because they were too small or had not been sunk into backing blocks below the deck. The gasketing beneath the newly rebuilt hatch in the cockpit floor peeled away when the hatch was raised. Crowhurst spent much of the day angrily complaining to John Elliot about the hardware Eastwoods had installed and trying various sail and sheeting combinations to see if the boat's performance to windward had improved, but it sailed no better than before.

The BBC crew hung around through the last days before Crowhurst's departure. At a certain point, Donald Kerr told the crew to change the emphasis of their coverage. He sensed a tragedy in the making.

On 30 October, the day before the
Sunday Times'
departure deadline,
Teignmouth Electron
remained an unfinished project, surrounded by piles of stores and equipment on the dock. Donald Kerr told his camera crew to stop filming and they began to help where they could through the last hours of preparation. They went off into town with lists of things to buy. At teatime Kerr pulled Donald and Clare away to a local teashop. Crowhurst was in a grim mood and kept saying, ‘It's no good. It's no good.' It seemed to Kerr that Crowhurst didn't want to go but couldn't bring himself to call it off.

That evening, the Crowhursts ate a last dinner at their hotel, the Royal Hotel, with Clare's sister and Ron Winspear, one of Donald's best friends. The hotel proprietor gave them a bottle of champagne but the mood was funereal.

After dinner the Eastwoods, Elliots, Beards, Stanley Best, and Rodney Hallworth joined them for a drink. Only the irrepressible Hallworth still saw the Crowhurst of his image-making: ‘He was cheery and raring to go.' Hallworth wanted Miss Teignmouth 1968 to sail aboard
Teignmouth Electron
as far as the starting line, give Crowhurst a kiss, and leap overboard as a gun went off. This didn't happen.

After the drink, Crowhurst and Clare rowed out into the cold late October night, away from the cheery lights of shore, to where the boat was moored in the harbour. Unstowed equipment still lay piled on deck and below. They worked on the boat until two in the morning before returning to the hotel. In bed, Crowhurst was silent. ‘Darling,' he said finally, ‘I'm very disappointed in the boat. She's not right. I'm not prepared. If I leave with things in this hopeless state, will you go out of your mind with worry?'

Clare bravely did what she thought was best. ‘If you give up now,' she said, ‘will you be unhappy for the rest of your life?'

Crowhurst didn't answer. He started to cry. He cried all night.

The weather was raw and drizzly in Teignmouth on Thursday 31 October 1968. It was a miserable day to go to sea.

Crowhurst and his team spent most of the day carrying supplies aboard and rushing around town making last-minute purchases. Rodney Hallworth's more dramatic ideas for a send-off had been vetoed, but he did inveigle Crowhurst into a nearby chapel, where he hoped to photograph the intrepid lone mariner in an attitude of prayer. Crowhurst, wearing a tie, merely sat in a pew, leaning forward slightly, looking tired and pensive.

Meanwhile, Clare Crowhurst filled a carrier bag with buns, ham, and salad from the Royal Hotel, together with some gifts: a book of yoga exercises, a china spoon, a box of cherry nougat, a ventriloquist's doll – her Christmas present for her husband – and a long letter. She took the carrier bag down to the boat and put it on Crowhurst's bunk.

At 3 p.m. – nine hours before the
Sunday Times
cut-off deadline –
Teignmouth Electron
was towed out of the harbour by the local pilot boat, accompanied by three launches carrying forty friends, well-wishers, reporters, photographers, and Donald Kerr's BBC film crew.

Crowhurst started to raise his sails and immediately had trouble. John Elliot had hanked his jib and staysail on to the wrong stays. Their halyards had been wrapped in the lashings at the top of the mainmast that secured the large, heavy, deflated buoyance bag. Unable to raise sail,
Teignmouth Electron
was ignominiously towed back to shore, to the vocal and guffawing delight of the harbour sceptics.

Back at the dock, a Morgan Giles rigger climbed up the mast to free the halyards while Crowhurst hanked on his headsails in their proper postions. (It is striking that he did not go aloft to free the halyards himself to make sure it was done properly; with so much of his boat's preparation necessarily delegated to others, it's possible he had never been up his boat's mast at all.) Rodney Hallworth, ever ready to forge an association or provide a plug for any Teignmouth body, chose this frantic moment to come aboard and hoist the burgee of the Teignmouth Corinthian Yacht Club to the masthead (where it might easily have fouled the buoyancy bag's lashings).

Towed out again, now with the early autumnal dusk falling, Crowhurst raised sail and the trimaran crossed a locally designated starting line at 4.52 p.m. The Yacht Club fired a gun. The wind was southerly and strong, forcing him to beat to windward (the trimaran's worst point of sail) across Lyme Bay to clear Torquay, Brixham, and the long southerly jut of land that stretched away to Start Point, the southernmost tip of Devon. The motorboats, with Clare in the bow of the pilot boat, followed him for only a mile before he disappeared into the murk of rain and the early onset of night.

Evidence of the disorganised send-off remained ashore. When he returned to the dock, John Elliot was dismayed to see a load of hardware and spare cuts of plywood shaped for emergency repairs lying on the Morgan Giles slipway. He had personally put these things aboard the trimaran. The Morgan Giles men later said these supplies were never put aboard.

Two days later, Stanley Best appeared at the Crowhursts' house in Bridgwater with the carrier bag full of presents that Clare had left on her husband's bunk. It had been found on the slipway with the other supplies.

S
EVEN
G
OLDEN
G
LOBE COMPETITORS
now lay scattered across half a world of ocean.

‘Italy's Chichester', Alex Carozzo, also officially ‘sailed' on 31 October. He was, if possible, even less ready than Donald Crowhurst – or perhaps more deliberate – and simply moved his boat,
Gancia Americano
, to a mooring off the boatyard at Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, where it had been built. There it would swing in the tide, technically departed, until Carozzo felt he was ready to put to sea. The 66-footer, a cold-moulded wooden monohull, was strong and light, and while it was then almost impossible for Carozzo to catch up with the leaders, he seemed a likely candidate to take the £5,000 prize for fastest time. Certainly, he should have worried Donald Crowhurst.

As Crowhurst was tacking south and west through the English Channel, 5,000 miles down the Atlantic Nigel Tetley was nearing the Brazilian island of Trindade, where Moitessier had waved to the astounded inhabitants almost a month earlier. The wind had been light all day and fell away to nothing at dusk, leaving him becalmed. Tetley's radio had been giving him trouble for a week, and he had not been able to broadcast his position. He was worried that Eve would be anxious about him. He
tried Cape Town Radio again that evening as
Victress
lay becalmed, but got no response. ‘It was a disturbing experience trying to communicate with no one answering,' he wrote in his logbook, ‘as if one were dead.'

Eighteen hundred miles to the southeast – roughly midway between South America and South Africa – Loïck Fougeron had a lot more wind.

The day before, 30 October, he had passed the island of Tristan da Cunha. Conditions had been light to calm all morning, but in the early afternoon the wind reappeared and within a few hours was blowing at strong gale force. It soon whipped up seas larger than Fougeron had ever seen before. They broke repeatedly over
Captain Browne
, exploding on deck with such force that he was worried the boat's revolving Perspex hatches would be smashed, sending water flooding below. By the early hours of 31 October, he estimated the wind at hurricane force. Above the crashing seas, the sky was occasionally clear and a brilliant full moon lit up the wild scene. It was the worst weather he had ever seen, and he was afraid.