A Voyage For Madmen (23 page)

November 8th, Friday

My Darling
,

I sent you a message
[via radio]
about how well I was taking the disappointment. Then I was probably in a state of euphoria, after having my life spared by thirty seconds. I do not think that survival would have been possible had I been out on deck tending the foresail when we turned over
.

As the danger recedes, I get broody. I realise the cold facts. My voyage has been stopped. My little boat lies broken, and I am alone with my bitter disappointment, creeping along at perhaps 50 miles a day. I knew such an adventure must be dicey, but I never gauged how shattering a blow this disaster could deal my spirit
.

He reached Cape Town on 22 November.

D
ONALD
C
ROWHURST RECORDED
in his logbook that he was seasick all through his first night at sea and most of the following day, as he tacked west down the English Channel towards the Atlantic. He put it down to nerves.

His first job was to store the jumbled mass of loose gear, equipment, and food that lay in heaps on his bunk, on the cabin sole, on his table, everywhere throughout the boat. One of Crowhurst's few successes with a sponsor had been the Tupperware company. Now he filled scores of plastic containers at random with whatever came to hand – food, tools, batteries, film, hardware – and stacked them on shelves on either side of the boat's one single bunk, forward of the saloon. Beneath the bunk and the saloon seats and into every pocket of the main hull he stored more food, life jackets, flares and signal flags, the film camera given to him by the BBC, sailing manuals, instruction manuals, water jugs, his harmonica, sextant, medical supplies, hot water bottle, pilot books, and the few books he had brought with him: technical reads with titles such as
Servo-Mechanisms, Mathematics of Engineering Systems
and a couple of sea books,
Shanties from the Seven Seas
and Chichester's Gypsy Moth IV
Circles the World
. He had told Clare he didn't
want any novels. Instead, for inspirational reading, he had brought
Relativity, the Special and General Theory
, by Albert Einstein.

He had enough Tupperware containers filled with electronic parts to start a small factory: boxes and boxes of transistors, condensers, resisters, switches, valves, circuit boards, wire, plugs, and sockets. These were things over which Crowhurst had mastery; they were the components and currency of his particular brilliance, out of which he could always fashion order no matter what chaos lay scattered elsewhere. The abundance of such supplies must have been a comfort to him.

Everywhere inside
Teignmouth Electron
's cabin ran neat streams of colour-coded wire, fastened to bulkheads, the cabin top, running between the masts and the hulls, all according to the complicated wiring diagrams Crowhurst had provided Eastwoods for the working of his computer-operated electronic process control systems. All these wires came together in a thick confluence that ran down the port side of the cabin and disappeared under a red seat cushion. Beneath the cushion the wires ended in an unconnected tangle – in the empty space where Crowhurst's computer was supposed to have been. In the scramble to get his boat built and to depart in time, his computer – his ‘box of tricks' he called the revolutionary device that would sense the boat's condition, adjust the sails, set off the buoyancy bag, enable Crowhurst to sail his trimaran at breakneck speeds and make the fortune of Electron Utilisation – had not been produced. It was still just a dream.

On his third day at sea, despite the early-in-the-voyage overabundance of stores, he was already worried about his supply of methylated spirits, used to prime the burners of his kerosene stove. He had calculated quantities from figures given for the needs of two people in Eric Hiscock's
vade mecum
reference book
Voyaging Under Sail
, much of which was based on Hiscock's world-girdling voyages made with his wife, Susan. Crowhurst had systematically halved the amounts suggested, forgetting that one voyager will use a stove as often as two.
Still, he calculated, and wrote down, that he had enough to last 243 days. He need not have worried: his voyage would last exactly 243 days.

As he packed things away and tried to arrange his stores over a period of several days, he also had to navigate and handle sails and keep the boat moving, and he discovered, in quick succession, a cascade of important failures. His Blondie Hasler-designed steering gear was an early and consistent problem: screws and bolts from it began to work loose and disappear. The gear had been quickly and poorly installed – as had been the lifting genoa track on deck, noticed days earlier by the BBC cameraman. Electrical parts he had aplenty, but Crowhurst had brought along virtually no spare screws and bolts, so he was forced to take screws from other places on board to use on the wind vane gear. Those too soon worked loose and disappeared overboard, infuriating him. ‘That's four [screws] gone now,' he wrote. ‘Can't keep cannibalising from other spots for ever! The thing will soon fall to bits!' Then he cut a finger on his left hand while trying to hoist a metal radar detector. ‘Blood everywhere – first aid kit out. Certainly well stocked in this department!!'

On Tuesday 5 November, he noticed bubbles blowing out of the hatch on the bow of the port hull. He opened it up to find the bow compartment flooded to deck level with water – a galvanising sight. He quickly bailed the water out with a bucket. The problem, he hoped, was not the hull but the seal of the hatch, and he screwed its wing nuts down again over a new fibreglass gasket.

Less importantly, but far more demoralising for him, he was having trouble with his radio equipment. He could not pick up signals on his Racal receiver and spent hours taking it apart. Then he couldn't raise Portishead Radio on his Marconi transmitter.

He made painfully slow progress out into the Atlantic. From 2 to 6 November he sailed 538 miles according to the readings on his log, which was a fast 134.5 miles per day, suggesting good
progress. However, this was mileage covered while tacking south and west, and the true distance made good along his route was 290 miles – an average of 72.5 miles per day.

Despite the troubles aboard, Crowhurst never forgot that he had embarked on an extraordinary voyage, something well beyond the scope of what most people might ever experience. BBC Bristol had given him £250 and a 16-millimetre camera, film, and a tape recorder to make a film of his voyage, and though he did little filming to begin with, he soon began making tape recordings. Crowhurst took seriously the charge to bring home a record, and he looked well beyond a simple description of his daily routine. Sailing around the world alone in a small boat would, he believed, prove to be a seminal experience, and he wanted to make sure he got it down on film and tape. ‘I feel like somebody who's been given a tremendous opportunity to impart a message,' he recorded soon after leaving England, ‘some profound observation that will save the world.'

On 13 November, Crowhurst found that the ‘waterproof' hatch on the cockpit floor, which had leaked on the maiden voyage but had supposedly been repaired by the Eastwoods crew at Teignmouth, was again leaking badly. He had been pushing south against strong head winds and water had streamed aboard, repeatedly filling the cockpit, which although fitted with drains, drained slowly. Seawater had flooded the engine compartment immediately below the hatch, soaking his generator and the bulk of his working electrics. For Crowhurst, this was a disaster graver than a leaking hull. The possibility of being unable to produce electricity completely undermined him.

The growing reality of his adventure, which he had so forcefully, cleverly brought on himself, risking everything – bankruptcy, the well-being of his family, his self-respect, and his life – crept upon him in the cold, wet cabin where he now found himself alone, somewhere at sea off the wintry coast of northern Europe, with devastating starkness. His boat had begun to fall apart even before he left port and had been breaking down ever since in reasonable, if unpleasant weather.
The prospect of Cape Horn and the Roaring Forties was now a grim one.

Crowhurst's reaction was commendably sane. He considered, perhaps for the first time, giving up.

Friday 15 (November)

Racked by the growing awareness that I must soon decide whether or not I can go on in the face of the actual situation. What a bloody awful decision – to chuck it in at this stage – what a bloody awful decision! But if I go on I am doing [two] things:

1. I am breaking my promise to Clare that I would only continue if I was happy that everything was as it should be to ensure the safe conclusion of the project. Unless I can get the electrics sorted out, I cannot honestly say the conditon is met. Furthermore I am placing Clare in the horrible position of having no news of me for seven to nine months, as the radio would not be functioning.

2. As the boat stands, I cannot drive her much above 4 knots in the 40s. The Hasler performs wild broaches that would be fatal in big – really big – seas, when running … I cannot reasonably see a fast passage in the 40s in safety without self-righting gear, the buoyancy bag device, in operation. Particularly bearing in mind that I started late … as it means arriving at the Horn far later than I anticipated, in six or seven months' time – April/May [nearing the southern winter]. With the boat in its present state my chances of survival would not, I think, be better than 50–50, which I would not regard as acceptable. ‘The boat in its present state' – what does that mean?

He listed the problems. First was the possibility of not being able to generate electricity. If he had no electricity he would have no radio communication, no masthead buoyancy, no time signals, no light.

Leaky hatches had let in 120 gallons in five days. The cockpit hatch had leaked 75 gallons overnight. The only proper
solution – screwing it down permanently – would seal off the generator and shut down the boat's electrical system.

Far worse than this, he had no way of pumping out the leaking hulls. Getting water out of the inside of a boat, where, it will inevitably find its way sooner or later, is a fundamental principle of seaworthiness. But Eastwoods had not installed the hose for his bilge pump, which rendered it useless. The only way Crowhurst could get rid of the large quantity of water leaking into the boat's three hulls was to bail it out with a bucket. This could hardly be done in bad weather, when water would be most likely to come in.

It was a thorough, rational list, chilling in its presentation of the situation. Inside his logbook, he wrote pages of arguments for and against several options: he could return to England and try again the next year, at least for a faster time – except that Stanley Best had already paid out far more than he'd ever expected to and would be unlikely to support the project through another year. Losing Best's support meant more than just an end to funding: Crowhurst's business and house were now virtually owned by Stanley Best, who, Crowhurst feared, had every reason to call in the debt. Another idea was to save face, and perhaps boost the value and notoriety of
Teignmouth Electron
, by sailing it as far as Cape Town or Australia and selling it there. But this seemed a slim possible benefit at the end of a long, hard voyage.

Crowhurst argued back and forth with himself on paper, but all ideas, all possible alternatives, resulted in the same unacceptable conundrum: returning home would result in shame and bankruptcy, yet to sail on appeared profitless and dangerous. He could not bring himself to make a decision.

I will continue south and try to get the generator working so that I can talk to Mr Best before committing myself to any particular course or retiring from the race. I suppose I'm just putting off the decision? No. It's far better that he should know before I commit the project to withdrawal, and that I should have his views. If he doesn't want anything further to do with
the nonstop project (as distinct from the S. T. race) things would be really black – but at least I'd know where he stood. In the final analysis, if the whole thing goes quite sour: Electron Utilisation bankrupt and Woodlands sold, ten years of work and worry down the drain, I would have Clare and the children still and:

If you can make a heap of all your worries

And risk it on one turn of pitch and toss

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breathe a word about your loss

O
N 3
N
OVEMBER, 300 MILES
southwest of Melbourne, Australia,
Suhaili
's self-steering trim tab broke again; the metal shaft sheared off and the bottom of it sank into the ocean. This was the original trim tab, which Robin Knox-Johnston had repaired and shipped back into place when his spare had similarly broken and sunk. This meant the end of his self-steering gear.

Suhaili
had received a terrible battering in the Indian Ocean. The constant flood of seawater into the boat from the hatches and around the cabin edges had taken its corrosive toll below, knocking out his Marconi transmitter six weeks before. Rust stains from the rigging streaked the hull. Important parts of the boat were now held together literally with string. The tiller had snapped off, and the rudder was loose on its pintles (the hingelike bearings on which the rudder hung), so Knox-Johnston had lashed the spare tiller to the rudder head and wound more line between the rudder and the metal pushpit tubing around the stern to hold it in place in case the pintles broke. Had she been in the English Channel, any sailor coming upon
Suhaili
looking as she did now would have presumed her to be a vessel in distress and offered to tow her into the nearest port. Knox-Johnston's
round-the-world effort gave every indication of being pulverised into submission, and with the long Pacific leg of the Southern Ocean ahead and Cape Horn at the end of it, heading for Melbourne made compelling sense.