A Voyage For Madmen (28 page)

Nigel Tetley had made contact with Perth Radio, Australia, even more recently, on Friday 20 December, giving a position in the middle of the Indian Ocean, not far from Amsterdam Island and St Paul's Rocks. He had covered a fast 185 miles in the previous twenty-four hours. His total distance sailed was now 9,900 miles at an average of 100 miles per day. Tetley's steady, dogged, seamanlike progress provided little in the way of exciting copy, so the
Times
noted that both Amsterdam Island and St Paul's Rocks were uninhabited but stocked with depots containing clothing and provisions for castaways.

Rodney Hallworth had not yet turned Trindade into Tristan da Cunha, and the
Sunday Times
, while reporting that Donald Crowhurst had crossed the equator, gave only his last known position, several hundred miles north of the equator. Despite his surging progress, Crowhurst's daily average was still far below Tetley's, at 79 miles per day. But his every communication was more exciting, and the newspaper was able to relate the damage done by the 45-knot wind that had smashed his self-steering gear and a jib pole.

It was a week before Christmas when Varley Wisby and his two sons, fishing off the southwest coast of Tasmania, saw a red-hulled ketch coming straight for them. On deck a lone man was flashing a small mirror, catching the sunlight – he was signaling to them. They steered for the sailboat, then slowed, manoeuvring
their fishing boat carefully until it ranged alongside the ketch, close but not too close, matching its speed.

The sailor, a Frenchman, who looked emaciated beneath a filthy wool sweater and baggy black trousers, his hair and grey-streaked beard as long and wild as a yogi's, tossed a metal film can across the water to the Wisbys. He told them he was in a yacht race and asked them to give the can to someone who would pass it on to the
Sunday Times
in England. Varley promised to give it to the commodore of the Royal Tasmanian Yacht Club when they returned to shore in three days' time.

The Frenchman asked the whereabouts of three other racers – Bill King, Nigel Tetley, Loïck Fougeron – but the Wisbys knew nothing of them. One of Varley's boys had heard something about an English yachtsman who had sailed past New Zealand without stopping. When? the Frenchman asked eagerly. The Wisby boy didn't know. He'd heard it on the radio sometime in the past month maybe. The sailor thanked them, turned his boat by fiddling with the little vane at its stern, and veered off towards open water. Varley and his boys watched him go.

Moitessier had sworn to himself he would not risk his boat and voyage again to send word to his family and the press, but he also hungered for news of his friends and rivals, and he had spent a long day and a sleepless night sailing through rain squalls in the Entrecasteaux Channel, off Hobart, Tasmania, in hopes of finding a boat. During the black night, the phosphorescence in the water was so bright and glowing that he repeatedly believed it to be breakers on a reef. He hove to half a dozen times to listen for any sound of danger. He was breaking all his own well-learned rules to be here, and all through the night he feared the price was waiting for him somewhere in the darkness.

But then dawn came and he found the fishing boat, delivered his can of film and letters and messages, and made his getaway without mishap. The sky cleared, the wind fell away to a breeze from the west, and he headed offshore, gliding close enough to a lighthouse to hear the ratcheting of a cricket ashore. Anxiety gave way to joy as he sailed into the Tasman Sea.

Moitessier had found a very different Indian Ocean to the one that had pummelled Robin Knox-Johnston and
Suhaili
. Calms and winds too light had been his portion. He spent weeks sailing slowly if steadily, spending a lot of time on deck watching the ever-present albatrosses, mollymawks, Cape pigeons, and shearwaters. He practised yoga daily. He sat meditating for hours on
Joshua
's deck, his long skinny legs easily pretzelled into the full lotus position.

Once into the Tasman Sea, however, the Southern Ocean winds found him again and his speed picked up. With sails reefed and water tearing past
Joshua
's hull, he made daily runs of 164, 147, 153 miles. He now religiously listened to the BBC World Service for news that he had been sighted off Tasmania, hoping that this might prompt a mention of Fougeron, Tetley, and King, but he heard nothing.

Nowhere in Moitessier's writing is he as respectful and affectionate as with his sailor friends, with whom he formed his closest bonds. They alone, he believed, shared and understood what he felt and knew about the sea – they understood him in ways his wife, girlfriends, and children did not. He was well aware that the greatest sailorly skills could mean nothing on the wrong day at sea, and he was constantly anxious about the welfare of the three men with whom he had shared plans, techniques, and hopes at Plymouth. His daily hope of hearing any word about them went unsatisfied. Whether because of this, or his brief contact with the Wisbys, or because he was less self-sufficient than he liked to think, with the approach of Christmas Moitessier was uncharacteristically overcome with loneliness.

On Christmas Day he sighted the Cameron Mountains on New Zealand's South Island. In unusually clear conditions, they stood up above the horizon, 50 miles away. Usually spartan and routine with his food, Moitessier took pains to make himself a Christmas dinner. Into a pot went a smoked York ham, a can of hearts of lettuce, garlic, onions, a can of tomato sauce, a quarter of a can of camembert cheese.

Still he felt blue. He missed his friends and his family. And to torture himself, he remembered with remorseful detail a rat he had killed years before in Tahiti. He had found it on board and caught it by jamming it against the floor with a book. As he put a stone to his slingshot and took aim, the rat had given him a look that was haunting him still. Moitessier knew how the rat had felt: when the Japanese captured Saigon near the end of the Second World War, he had been imprisoned with his family. One day a Japanese guard came into the 20-year-old Moitessier's cell intending to kill him. He raised his pistol, but they locked eyes until, inexplicably, the guard lowered the pistol and walked away. Now, years later, tenderised by solitude, Moitessier wished he had spared the rat.

He drank away his guilt and grief and loneliness with a bottle of champagne given to him by
Joshua
's designer, Jean Knocker, and went to bed with
Joshua
ghosting again over a calm sea.

Two days later, the animal kingdom reappeared with an unequivocal message that the business with the rat was forgotten. The west wind was freshening and
Joshua
was sailing fast, passing south of Stewart Island (which Knox-Johnston had passed to the north during his storm in the Foveaux Strait). Moitessier's dinner was growing cold in the pressure cooker on the stove because he wanted to pass the longitude of South Trap, a dangerous outlying reef below Stewart Island, before relaxing his vigilance and eating and sleeping. South Trap would mark his entrance to the Pacific Ocean, the last rocky obstacle between him and Cape Horn. He hopped up and down between deck and cabin, listening to and watching the sea, tweaking sheets for speed, rolling cigarettes below.
Joshua
sped on, steered as always by her vane gear.

In the afternoon dark clouds obscured the horizon to the north, where he might have seen Stewart Island, and a large school of porpoises, perhaps a hundred of them, appeared around the boat, whistling and clicking, turning the water white with their breaching and splashing. Usually, these ‘playful' (we anthro-pomorphically like to suppose) creatures swim alongside a yacht,
criss-crossing singly or in synchronised groups in front of the bow wave. But that afternoon they gave Moitessier a show he had never seen before.

A tight line of twenty-five porpoises swam abreast off his starboard side, rushing from stern to bow, and then veering off sharply, always to the right. Again and again and again, more than ten times, they regrouped and made this same manoeuvre, while the rest of the school behaved in a manner Moitessier construed as nervous: they moved erratically, they beat their tails on the surface, they created pandemonium around the fast-sailing
Joshua
. All the while, a single platoon continued its streaking, abrupt right-hand-turn manoeuvre.
To the right. To the right
. Moitessier watched astounded.

Finally, instinctively, he looked at the compass, something he had not done in a while with the wind vane doing the steering. The west wind had shifted into the south without his noticing it, and
Joshua
was racing north, not east, towards the reefs of South Trap. Normally a shift in wind will alter the wave patterns of the surface, and very soon have them running at an angle to the older swell, a visible alteration of the sea state, and immediately felt by a sailor aboard a boat. But that afternoon there was, unusually, little or no swell, and Moitessier, not for the first time in his wreck-strewn life, had been fooled. He altered course to starboard, to the east – to the right, the direction of the porpoises' abrupt turn.

Their behaviour changed immediately. Their nervousness, their disruption of the sea surface, disappeared. Now they swam in their usual playful way. And as Moitessier watched them, wondering but not wondering at all about what had happened, one large black-and-white porpoise leapt clear of the water and somersaulted twice in the air before flopping back on to the surface. Twice more it leapt out of the sea to perform its ecstatic double somersault. The school remained swimming alongside
Joshua
for another three hours, for a total of five hours, an extraordinary length of time for such a visit. At dusk, when he was well past South Trap, the porpoises disappeared.

On Monday 23 December, a strong gale overtook Nigel Tetley and
Victress
. At noon the thin PVC-coated wire connecting the steering wheel to the rudder parted. The same thing had happened 8,000 miles earlier, on 11 October, when he had been off the Cape Verde Islands. This time he replaced it with heavier rigging wire, hoping it would last longer.
Victress
was doing well in the strong winds, being steered by her wind vane, but Tetley, still getting used to Southern Ocean conditions, went to bed fully dressed in rain gear and sea boots, ready to jump on deck for anything.

At nightfall on Christmas Eve the wind moderated, and Tetley began preparing his Christmas Day dinner. He had decided on a mushroom sauce for his roast pheasant and soaked some dried mushrooms. He tidied the cabin, baked bread, and got out his two presents to be opened in the morning.

The weather cooperated with his Christmas plans. The moderate wind settled into the west, and Tetley raised his twin running sails, which helped the wind vane, and the boat steered itself all day.

He opened his presents: a pewter tankard from Eve, a stainless steel comb from his son Mark. Strong metal from both. He drank sherry before lunch. He listened to a tape of Christmas carols from Guildford Cathedral.

He took a photograph of himself tucking in to his Christmas dinner. It shows that he has done his best to make the occasion and his surroundings as civilised as possible. The cabin table is decorated with his last two or three oranges, the contents of his last packet of nuts, some raisins and sweets. There is his roast pheasant in his mushroom sauce on a small plate, Eve's tankard partially filled with champagne from the bottle that also sits on the table. There is little in the spacious cabin to indicate that he is far out at sea, or even (if one ignores the Indian Ocean chart partially visible in the foreground) on a boat at all. He looks for all the world like a man sitting down to his solitary Christmas
dinner in a rather cramped but neat bedsit in London's Earl's Court, filled with dutiful Christmas spirit, and he couldn't look any lonelier.