A Voyage For Madmen (9 page)

As the two paratroopers got under way, Robin Knox-Johnston was nearing his own departure date. He had hoped to sail on 1 June, the earliest date allowed under the Golden Globe's few rules, but the thoroughness and difficulty of his preparations delayed him. He did most of this at Surrey Commercial Docks
on the south shore of the River Thames on the outskirts of London. It was a rough but practical location, cheaper than any yacht yard and close to his parents' home in Downe, Kent, where he was living.

One of the most crucial jobs for any single-hander is the installation of self-steering gear. If sailing meant sitting in a boat's cockpit and steering day and night, eyes glued to a reeling compass, with only quick dashes to the galley for food, few people would ever go to sea for pleasure. Even on a fully crewed boat, a two-hour watch at the helm is the most onerous and boring task afloat, and sailors have brought all their ingenuity to inventing and rigging systems to avoid it. Today, most yachts employ battery-powered automatic pilots, but the batteries needed to drive them weren't available in 1968 and the Golden Globe racers couldn't hope to use them without carrying large generators and enormous tanks of fuel. Instead, they employed mechanical, wind-powered self-steering gears. These often look like small weather vanes designed by Rube Goldberg, but when there is any wind at all they manage to keep a boat heading in approximately the right direction. The wind is natural and free, and a device that makes such clever use of it has something of a serendipitous wonder to it. It's not surprising that sailors, particularly single-handers, tend to anthropomorphise their wind vanes, give them nicknames, and talk to them with affection – and sometimes irritation.

They are simple in principle: a wind vane, rotating on a vertical axis like a weathercock, is linked to a small trim tab attached to the aft (or trailing) edge of the rudder, like the flap on an aeroplane's wing. When the boat is on course, the wind vane is set so that its leading edge points into the wind, offering no resistance. When the boat veers off course, the wind vane presents its side to the wind, which then pushes it around its axis, and this movement is transferred by linkage to the trim-tab, which, like the wing flap, moves the entire rudder, steering the boat back on to its original course. The engineering of such gear can be crude and inexpensive or elegant and
costly, but the arrangement is simple, generally robust at sea, and, to the single-handed sailor facing a voyage of tens of thousands of miles, a vital piece of equipment.
*

Normally, this gear is attached to a boat's stern, directly over the rudder. On
Suhaili
, however, this couldn't be done, because her mizzen sail and boom stuck out over the rudder and would have interfered with a wind vane there. Knox-Johnston finally designed his own gear, which consisted of two wind vanes, each mounted on steel-tube outriggers on both sides of the boat, the linkage being ropes running through sheaves to the stern. It was at best an awkward arrangment, the outriggers and rope linkage interfering with his movement on deck, but it was entirely in keeping with the boat's rough-hewn character.

Though she was only 2 feet longer than Ridgway's and Blyth's boats,
Suhaili
was twice as heavy as the bilge-keelers. She displaced double the volume of water; she was, literally, twice as much boat. Some of this greater weight came from her massive all-teak construction
(Suhaili
might easily have damaged the trawler that knocked into Ridgway's
English Rose IV)
, but most of it was in the form of greater hull volume, into which Knox-Johnston was able to pack an immense amount of food and seagoing stores.

Divorced and having no one to worry about his lonely dinners, Robin Knox-Johnston opted for the standard yachtsman's diet of the day – tins of corned beef or baked beans, grub the avid weekend sailor didn't mind subsisting on from Friday to Sunday nights – and then factored a ghastly 300-day-plus multiplication. Such fare reflected the stolid dreariness and paucity of the English post-war diet, compounded by Knox-Johnston's years of eating the institutionalised food aboard British merchant ships. He loaded
Suhaili
with over 1,500 tins, each one stripped of its paper label, varnished (against rusting by seawater),
and coded. This was the time-honoured practice espoused by English yachtsmen long used to sailing leaky wooden boats.

His staples were:

216 tins of corned beef

144 tins of stewing steak

48 tins of pork sausages

72 tins each of green beans, runner beans, carrots, and mixed vegetables

144 tins of Heinz baked beans

48 tins of Heinz spaghetti in tomato sauce

216 tins of condensed milk

40 tins of processed cheese

And tins of fruit, jam, salad dressing, cooking fat, soup, and much, much more.

To cram it all in, Knox-Johnston tore out the bunks in
Suhaili
's forwardmost compartment, the fo'c'sle, and built shelves and lockers. More food was packed in 5-gallon jugs and containers, until there were jugs, drums, crates of food and drink filling the floorboard space between the main cabin bunks, jammed into the cockpit, and packed into every conceivable space in the boat. He also took aboard a small ship chandler's warehouse of stores, including tools, extra sails, lines, rigging wire, anchors, jugs of kerosene, diesel, and petrol, and spare parts for every device aboard. The boat was prepared for an almost indefinite stay at sea.

Despite being a bookworm, Knox-Johnston's reading of the classics had been spotty. He now had the ultimate opportunity, that unlikely ‘someday' suddenly looming before him. Dr Ronald Hope of the Seafarers' Education Service provided him with a boatload of such works as
Tristram Shandy, Vanity Fair, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Tom Jones, Clarissa, History of Western Philosophy
, and instructive works like
Chess in a Nutshell, A Textbook of Economics, and Elementary Calculus
. There was much more, but like his diet, it was unrelievedly solid stuff.

He also brought along a correspondence course for the Institute of Transport examinations. This was a conscious decision to give his mind additional exercise. In the same spirit, his sponsor, the
Sunday Mirror
, sent him to a psychiatrist so that his state of mind could be compared before and after his voyage. The psychiatrist declared him ‘distressingly normal'.

His ‘normalcy' was no doubt a distress to the psychiatrist, but the diagnosis was fundamentally mistaken. Normal people aren't driven to try to sail alone around the world without stopping. They don't stop their lives midstream and embrace, with single-minded effort and every resource available to them, a hair-raising stunt never before attempted and which has every chance of killing them. None of the Golden Globe sailors could have been called normal, but alone among his rival competitors, there seemed to be no dark streak of introspection in Knox-Johnston's forthright personality. He was what might pass for normal in some sunny world where human nature is not best defined by its aberrations from a hypothetical model.

On 3 June he sailed from Surrey Commercial Docks. Waving good-bye to him from shore was his 5-year-old daughter Sara, the product of his marriage that had crumbled in India under the strain of a seaman's absentee lifestyle. He had got to know her well since returning to England, and they had spent his last weekend ashore together. It was a wrenching moment for him, and he hoped it wouldn't be too bad for her. But she was used to him departing for long periods, and he was relieved when she stopped waving and began playing with a small radio.

Carried on the tide down the sea reach of the Thames,
Suhaili
presented a curious sight: with her two wind vanes (which Knox-Johnston had painted Day-Glo orange for visibility) mounted on steel outriggers on either side of the hull, she now had the appearance of some strange homemade fishing boat. And loaded with a year's supply of food and water, she floated low in the water and was sluggish under way, her
already slow hull-shape slower. Knox-Johnston could only hope she would pick up speed and buoyancy as he neared the Southern Ocean and ate his way through his cargo.

He took with him a crew of three, including Bruce Maxwell, a reporter from the
Sunday Mirror
, and a
Mirror
photographer, to give him a hand on one of the most perilous sections of his entire voyage: the English Channel, which is so congested with shipping that traffic through the Strait of Dover is monitored on radar screens by controllers just as it is at airports.
Suhaili
was bound for her final port of departure, Falmouth, Cornwall, the most westerly harbour of any size in southern England, a traditional port of departure in the age of sail because of its easy access to the open Atlantic. A pretty town tucked inside the wide mouth of the river Fal, protected from all weather by the sheltering arms of green hills, Falmouth has a long association with ships and the sea. It's a good place to do last-minute work on a boat and an auspicious port of departure.

Knox-Johnston and his crew reached Falmouth on 9 June. There they spent five more chaotic days in port attending to a mass of final details.

He sailed on 14 June (a week after Chay Blyth), giving further evidence of how far his normalcy deviated from centre: it was a Friday. This was a remarkable flouting of a seaman's superstition. Luck is an acknowledged but unquantifiable factor at sea; Knox-Johnston clearly believed in making his own. He was ready, the weather was fair, his boat was slow, and he didn't want to waste a single day, so he sailed.

‘Rifle-and-Bible Seaman Sails' reported the
Sunday Times
, noting that just before he left Falmouth, his churchwarden father handed him 100 rounds of .303 ammunition for the rifle he carried aboard, and the port chaplain had taken him into town to replace the bible Knox-Johnston had left at home.
Suhaili
was still ‘a bit of a bog inside', Knox-Johnston told the reporter, who wrote that the boat's crude outrigger wind vanes gave it a ‘wallowing, trawler appearance'. But a canny harbour
official, wittingly or otherwise perceiving
Suhaili
's Nordic antecedents, observed that she was ‘a real old ice-breaking boat. If she hit England, I'd be concerned for England.'

Launches carrying the press and his family followed
Suhaili
for a few miles beyond Falmouth before turning back. The wind was light and from the northeast, and the boat crept slowly southwest away from land. During Knox-Johnston's first night at sea, as he sailed among the shipping funnelling into the English Channel, he dozed in the cockpit clutching a flare, ready to alter course and alert ships to his presence.

His first week at sea proved disappointing. The wind remained light and the heavily burdened
Suhaili
made daily runs of 77, 80, 52, 38, 62, 87, and 100 miles. But Ridgway and Blyth, far less experienced sailors than Knox-Johnston, had the same weather and their mileages were even less. Though none of the three knew it at the time, Knox-Johnston began to gain on them.

On Sunday 30 June the
Sunday Times
carried a full page covering its Golden Globe race. It announced a new competitor: Royal Navy Lieutenant Commander Nigel Tetley, 45, also unsponsored, who planned to sail in September aboard the trimaran that he and his wife used as their home.

The article briefly described all the competitors and their boats. And it quoted Sir Francis Chichester's hope that every entrant in the race should have a proper briefing on equipment, provisions, and the conditions that would likely be encountered: ‘We can't stop anyone who is determined to set out, but we can make sure he knows what the game is all about.'

This might have been a good idea, but neither Sir Francis, nor any representative of the Golden Globe race briefed or advised the men who set out. The
Sunday Times
simply sent its reporters to cover what the sailors said or did, and camera boats to jockey for position among its competitors. Yet the
newspaper didn't hesitate to admonish those whom it felt showed a want of instruction.

Three sailors have already left England ill-advisedly – most seasoned yachtsmen agree a June start is almost bound to spell ugly weather in the Southern Ocean … All three [Ridgway, Blyth, Knox-Johnston] are young men.

The canniest sailors – Howell, Commander Bill King, the former submarine ace, Loïck Fougeron and Bernard Moitessier, the dry, calm French single-handers – will all leave during July and August to ensure the best possible weather conditions … Commander Nigel Tetley … will be [an] end-of-the-season starter. And there is one mystery competitor – Donald Crowhurst, a 35-year-old manufacturer of navigational equipment, who will reveal nothing about his new ketch for fear that other yachtsmen might copy some of its ‘revolutionary' ideas. He … and Tetley are [both] experienced sailors; it seems that the younger, rasher men have started first.