A Voyage For Madmen (26 page)

The Frenchman, they calculated, had by then covered 14,000 miles at an average of 128.4 miles a day, against the Englishman's 17,400 miles at 98.3 miles per day. The experts gave the edge to Moitessier, who, they thought, could reach England on 24 April, with Knox-Johnston arriving six days later, on 30 April. With shiploads of uncertainties, anything could change these dates. The race was either man's to win or lose.

For the first time, the newspaper described the young Englishman in heroic terms: the ‘courageous … ruggedly handsome' sailor was proving himself to be in the same class as Chichester. Warm praise indeed.

The
Sunday Times
was positioning itself to recognise a possible victor, but it was still hedging its bets. Moitessier was ‘a cunning navigator' who had come daringly close to the Cape of Good Hope to save sea miles and was planning to sail far south of Australia for the same reason.

Italy's Chichester, Alex Carozzo, was already out of the race. He had spent almost a week at his mooring in Cowes preparing
Gancia Americano
for sea before casting off, and had sailed as far as the Bay of Biscay, off the coast of France, when he began to vomit blood. He spoke with a doctor by radio, who diagnosed ulcer trouble, which Carozzo had suffered before. The doctor prescribed a bland diet and advised Carozzo to give up if the bleeding continued as there was a risk of haemorrhage. Carozzo sailed on, hoping for an improvement. His giant yacht was sailing fast and he was eager to keep going. But the bleeding didn't stop. Off the Portuguese coast he radioed the
Sunday Times
that he was making for Lisbon and emergency hospital treatment. A Portuguese air force search-and-rescue plane spotted him, and a pilot boat towed him into Oporto. From his hospital bed in Oporto, Carozzo told a reporter that he thought his ulcer had been aggravated by the strain of his intensive preparations for the race. He had read that Bill King was planning to try again the following year, and he was thinking of doing the same. He hoped the
Sunday Times
might be interested in a second race.

Although they were far behind Moitessier and Knox-Johnston, the
Sunday Times
did not discount the potential of the two trimaran skippers, Nigel Tetley and Donald Crowhurst, who ‘could surprise us all'.

Crowhurst in particular. After averaging 60 miles per day during his first month at sea, a slower speed than any other competitor for the same stretch of ocean, the
Sunday Times
reported a sudden surge in his performance. During his fifth week he had covered 1,020 miles, at an average of 150 miles per day. This was the sort of dazzling speed he had promised with his revolutionary boat.

Nigel Tetley was not having as much luck. A week of light winds around the island of Trindade got him 473 miles – 67 miles per day. He was still not able to transmit over his radio, though he could pick up stations as far away as Holland quite clearly. He worried about Eve and his family, who were doubtless concerned about him. Yet life aboard
Victress
was comfortable
and civilised to a degree unimagined aboard his competitors' boats. He dined on cockles, prawns, asparagus, lobster, Polish sausage, smoked salmon, mushrooms, Pacific Coast oysters, roast pheasant, while listening to Respighi, Boccherini, Delius, Sibelius, Kodály, Dohnányi, and Saint-Saëns. After seven weeks at sea, he came to the end of his Music for Pleasure repertoire and wrote conscientiously in his logbook, ‘I can say here with all honesty that the majority have given me great pleasure and contributed in no small way to my peace of mind.'

So far his voyage was slow and steady, unspectacular, and seamanlike. No great terrors of weather had been met. There were no apparent problems, other than the nagging frustration of not being able to raise anyone on the radio. It was almost dull.

Victress
was performing well, though she was not proving as fast as he had hoped. Small problems were showing themselves: the moulding strips covering the hull-to-deck joints had been breaking off, cabin windows were leaking. But these were ordinary signs of wear. Even during a long summer's sailing season, when most boats will actually spend more time at a dock or at anchor, such problems will develop.
Victress
's constant exposure to wind and sea was having the effect of steady, but so far not alarming, attrition.

But a routine check below the floorboards of
Victress
's outer hulls revealed them to be awash with seawater: 10 gallons in the port hull, 70 gallons in the starboard; he had been carrying 800 pounds of extra weight. This had not been apparent before because to check below the floorboards he had to remove all the gear piled on top of them, not a job he could do often, and then only in fine weather. This showed steady leakage that he would have to keep an eye on.

On 19 November he at last made patchy contact with Cape Town Radio, and over the next few days transmissions became clearer. He learned that Bill King had dropped out, and he heard that Robin Knox-Johnston was apparently in some trouble off New Zealand. These reports was unnerving to hear, but his
weather, in approximately the same area where
Galway Blazer
had been rolled over and
Suhaili
had suffered her first knockdown, remained almost too benign, resulting in frustratingly slow speeds.

Early in December he passed south of Cape Town and sailed into the Indian Ocean. He still didn't quite venture into the Roaring Forties, but sailed east, keeping several degrees north of the fortieth parallel, the northerly limit of the Southern Ocean. Nevertheless, he got a taste of Roaring Forties weather. He experienced the strongest gale of his voyage so far on 11 December, when he estimated the wind at force 9 (41 to 47 knots). He steered downwind, reducing sail until
Victress
carried only a storm jib sheeted flat.

After a long night sitting in the wheelhouse spinning the wheel from side to side to keep the stern before the waves, Tetley was cold and miserable and wondering what exactly he was doing there. He had every reason to believe Moitessier when the Horn-tempered Frenchman had advised him to run before the wind under storm conditions; but now, cold, hungry, fed up, and unable to leave the wheel if he did keep running, he decided to drop all sail and lie ahull. But this seemed to suit the trimaran; its shallow purchase on the water gave it little resistance to the wind and waves, and it rode easily, like an albatross, Tetley wrote in his log, beam-on and skidding away sideways before the waves. Below the motion was easier, and he was glad to make himself a breakfast of coffee and Irish stew.

Because of his latitudinal fence-sitting, staying just north of the Southern Ocean, Tetley was frustrated by a mix of light and heavy winds. On 15 December, after a fast, bumpy night during which he carried full sail, he recorded his best run of the voyage so far, an impressive 202 miles for the last twenty-four hours. The next morning he was becalmed, and the wind, when it returned, remained light for several days. He carried as much sail as possible, hoping to make up for the slow days, but this was clearly not the latitude at which to maintain speed, and he knew it.

Tetley carried the same pilot charts and sailing directions from
the British Admiralty publication
Ocean Passages for the World
that all the other sailors had aboard their yachts, which show the routes and pathways in the sea where the most advantageous winds, currents, and conditions would be found. Admittedly, these directions were not intended for small yachts; they were written for and based on the observations of large sailing ships – the tea clippers, the four-and five-masted grain ships – which had always sought out the strongest weather in order to make the fastest voyages. Yachtsmen following in their wakes using these big-ship guidelines faced the task of plotting a course somewhere between prudence and the prescribed fastest routes which lay to the far south in the high Roaring Forties and the Furious Fifties, where Antarctic fogs hide drifting icebergs. This was a highly individual choice. Knox-Johnston tried to keep to the fortieth parallel and found it appreciably windier than just a few hundred miles to the north, where Tetley was staying. Moitessier had plunged deep into the Southern Ocean. In addition to
Ocean Passages
and the usual charts, Moitessier had with him fifteen letters from old ‘Cape Horners', men in their eighties, dim of vision but still sharp of memory, to whom he had written asking about Southern Ocean conditions. From their accounts, and his own earlier voyage around the Horn, he believed 1968 was proving to be an exceptionally warm and benign year in the Southern Hemisphere, and he made good use of the winds in the far south.

Holding to his more northerly latitude, probably out of concern for
Victress
's light construction, Tetley was plagued by light winds and poor progress. Now that he had regained radio communication, Cape Town Radio was able to patch him through to contacts at the
Sunday Times
. They were disappointed by the lack of drama in his voyage. Had he fallen overboard, perhaps, or had anything else exciting happened to him, they wanted to know.

The dullness and monotony of his voyage was bothering him too. With winds more often too light than too strong, he spent hours staring at the flat sea, frustrated by his poor progress. Windless calm at sea is the sailor's true bane, worse than any storm, which at least provides him with steady physical and
mental activity. Becalmed, he can do nothing to bring wind but wait for it. He can read or write or listen to the radio, but he will also idle away hours staring at the pretty sea in every direction, trying to stave off the creeping, irrational fear that the wind may never return again. He is repeatedly forced to acknowledge its stretching absence as he records conditions every few hours in his logbook, writing ‘becalmed' again and again, while the handwriting betrays the mounting tension as the pencil pushes deeper into the paper, the word scrawled off with anger. Time and geography grow perversely elastic. The quiet that comes with a true calm at sea is, like the reverse picture of a photographic negative, pronounced and conspicuous for its inversion of the normal. No wind or water noise, no breath of air across the ear. The boat nearly still, heaving slightly on the ghost of a swell, will provide the only real sounds: the rolling pencil on the chart table. The aural void then fills with the rhythmic rushing of one's own blood, reminding the listener of his mayfly speck of mortality. He goes below to flip on the radio again. To be becalmed during an ocean crossing that may take a total of three or four weeks from shore to shore is one thing; but in a race around the world, the enormity of which can boggle the mind at the happiest of times, lying utterly still on the perversely flat sea while being certain that one's fellow competitors are being blown along at speed elsewhere, is hard to bear. It can be unhingeing.

Not a chatty logbook writer like Knox-Johnston or a soulbarer like Moitessier, Tetley nevertheless had admitted in his log on 27 November to a growing depression. ‘The further I go, the madder this race seems. An almost overwhelming temptation to retire and head for Cape Town is growing inside me – the cold finger of reason points constantly in that direction.'

But the very next day, he believed he had cured himself of his melancholy. He had been neglecting his daily milk-and-vitamins drink, he wrote, which, once taken up again, magically lifted his mood of depression. It's possible that Nigel Tetley's low spirits were revived by vitamins and minerals, as he believed, but there would come a time when no amount of milk would save him.

O
N 15
D
ECEMBER
, the
Sunday Times
reported that Donald Crowhurst's speed had increased again, dramatically.
His name – largely ignored through the long months leading up to the start of the race – now led the news of the fleet.

C
ROWHURST
W
ORLD
S
PEED
R
ECORD
?

Donald Crowhurst, last man out in the
Sunday Times
round-the-world lone-man yacht race, covered a breath-taking and possibly record-breaking 243 miles in his 41-ft. trimaran
Teignmouth Electron
last Sunday. The achievement is even more remarkable in the light of the very poor speeds in the first three weeks of his voyage; he took longer to reach the Cape Verdes than any other competitor.

Is the 243 miles in one day a world record? Captain Terence Shaw, of the Royal Western Yacht Club, Ply-mouth, says: ‘If anyone has bettered it, and I doubt if they have, they can come forward with a counter claim.'

The 36-year-old Bridgwater man now feels he has a fair chance of being the first home … His message
ended: ‘I have been listening to the European money crisis on the BBC and you can tell the
Sunday Times
that if I win they can pay me in Deutschmarks.'

Crowhurst had cabled the news of his record-breaking run to Rodney Hallworth on 10 December. The short cable also gave his daily mileages for the preceding four days: Friday (6 December) 172, Saturday 109, Sunday 243, Monday 174, Tuesday 145. He made a radio-telephone call to Hallworth the following day, Wednesday, during which he made the comment about the Deutschmarks, which Hallworth could not resist passing on. It made great copy.