A Voyage For Madmen Read online

  The original estimate for the cost of his boat was £7,000, which King felt he could afford. But the figure quickly rose to £10,000 and in order to defray some of this cost, he looked about for some sponsorship.

  It may be hard today, with the five-figure credit card balances that are so readily carried by banks, and the fantastic endorsement remuneration paid to athletes and adventurers, to imagine how difficult it would have been to raise £3,000 in England in the 1960s. Money was far tighter then: food rationing, a hangover from the Second World War, had still been in force only a decade earlier, and £3,000 would have been a good annual salary in Britain. Watch manufacturers, financial institutions, food and beverage companies were largely unacquainted with the notion of paying a man to go off and risk his life on an adventure in return for some stake in his fame. The rewards were dubious, unquantifiable, and what if he killed himself? Such feats had always been the province of the oddball, someone who hardly embodied a corporate identity. The media – CNN, sports magazines, cable TV programmes – that today so completely cover an around-the-world balloon trip, exploiting a Breitling watch sponsor-adventurer connection, simply didn’t exist thirty years ago. Coverage was usually a small newspaper report and perhaps a poorly written book. Sponsorship for extreme adventure was in its infancy, and mainly restricted to advances from newspapers – which usually got a good story if the adventurer lived or died – and book publishers. That is where Bill King went looking for his £3,000.

  It didn’t hurt that he actually resembled Francis Chichester: tall, wiry-thin, bookish, a vegetarian like Chichester, but 8 years younger. With a lifetime at sea behind him, and a sexy boat designed by a famous team, he appeared a serious and credible contender. The Daily Express and Sunday Express newspapers provided the £3,000 in return for exclusive rights to his story.

  Souters, of Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, an old and reputable boatbuilding firm noted for the excellence of its wooden boats, began construction of the yacht, which King named Galway Blazer II, before the end of 1967.

  In 1966, John Ridgway, a captain in the British Army’s Parachute Regiment, and regimental sergeant Chay Blyth rowed across the Atlantic in an open 20-foot-long dory.*

  The rigours of army parachute training and Arctic survival camps were too controlled for Ridgway. He craved a wilder, more dangerous, less protected experience, but he couldn’t imagine what that might be until he heard a radio interview with journalist David Johnstone, who was planning to row across the Atlantic. He immediately got in touch with Johnstone and asked if he could join him. When they met, Johnstone quickly became convinced that he didn’t want to spend much time in a small boat with the tough and assertive army captain. Ridgway then decided to mount his own rowing expedition, army-style, and was joined by volunteer Blyth. Though primarily excited by the simple idea of an epic row, Ridgway was well aware that by copying David Johnstone he had created a race between the two boats, and he wanted to be first.

  David Johnstone and another journalist, John Hoare, rowed away from the southern end of the Chesapeake Bay on 21 May. That placed them close to the eastbound currents of the Gulf Stream, which would be a significant boost across the Atlantic.

  Boat preparation and Ridgway’s brief spell of blood poisoning delayed the two soldiers. They finally left from Cape Cod on 4 June. For weeks, they made dispiritingly slow progress until they reached the strong eastbound current of the Gulf Stream. They found the voyage and the blistering repetitiveness of rowing a monumental bore, but they were good partners, with different, complementary strengths, and they shared a perverse, soldierly satisfaction with their self-imposed hardship. They reached the Aran island of Inishmore off the coast of Galway, Ireland, after ninety-two days at sea.

  Johnstone and Hoare were never seen again. A hurricane crossed their path on 4 September. Their waterlogged boat, containing Johnstone’s diaries, was found in the middle of the Atlantic on 14 October.

  Ridgway and Blyth might simply have had better luck (a critical but ungovernable factor in all adventures at sea, large and small) than the journalists, but it must have helped that they approached and carried out their epic row like a military mission. Certainly they proved themselves to be tough and determined men.

  The two soldiers were treated to a spell of fame. They appeared on television, gave talks everywhere, and were entertained by the queen at a Buckingham Palace cocktail party. Ridgway was thrilled to meet his sovereign, on whom he had once had a worshipful crush, but he felt uneasy in the role of celebrity. Wined and dined, giving slide shows, meeting the rich and famous, he gained almost thirty pounds, and he felt adrift and lost in the social whirl. What he had done, the Atlantic crossing, was, he now found, reward enough in itself. He yearned for more action, something hard and real to take him away from the excess of good food and the glamour that he knew was fleeting and unreal. Chichester’s voyage suggested the antidote: ‘The one thing left untried was a single-handed voyage from Britain right round the world and back to Britain without calling at any port.’

  Ridgway began thinking about a nonstop solo circumnavigation – but to begin two years later, in 1969. The 29-year-old army officer had some sailing experience, but none of it single-handed, and he wanted first to compete in the 1968 OSTAR race. That race, he felt, would be a good trial run for a circumnavigation, which he would embark on the following year.

  In June 1967 he met David Sanders of Westerly Marine, the builder of the Westerly 30, a production fibreglass cruising yacht. A bilge-keeler – it had two shallow fin keels on its bottom instead of a single deep one – the Westerly was a compromise of design that traded speed and stability for access to shallow waters. It was a good boat for small families cruising Britain’s coastline who might also want to poke up inland creeks and rivers, where twin keels have the advantage of making the boat rest evenly upright when dried out at low tide. But Sanders was eager to have his boat tested in deep-sea conditions, in which he believed it would perform well. The prestigious OSTAR would provide the perfect sea trial. He lent Ridgway the company’s demonstration model to practice sailing alone and offered to underwrite with other sponsors, the cost of a new Westerly 30 for the race if Ridgway found the boat satisfactory.

  One of the stipulations made by the OSTAR organisers was that each entrant must have completed a 500-mile nonstop solo passage at sea to qualify. In late July, Ridgway sailed the loaned Westerly from Plymouth, Devon, to the Fastnet Rock off the southern coast of Ireland and back. The 6-day passage went well, giving him a taste of bad weather and the confidence that he could manage the Atlantic alone. When he returned, he told Sanders he was satisfied with the boat and wanted the new Westerly 30, beefed up by its builders, to be ready for the race the following year.

  But no amount of strengthening could compensate for the Westerly 30’s inherent unsuitability for an Atlantic crossing, let alone, if Ridgway was to pursue his goal of a solo circumnavigation, the tsunami seas of the Southern Ocean. It was the most mistaken of all possible choices available to a man with some sea experience and limitless advice if he sought it. But he had rowed across the Atlantic in a 20-foot dory, and there were few people who would presume to tell such a man what he could not do.

  2

  BERNARD MOITESSIER WAS BORN IN HANOI in 1925, when Vietnam was still called French Indochina. He grew up in Saigon, the privileged son of a French colonial businessman, but he also learned to speak Vietnamese and absorbed a native sensibility of the East. A result of these two conflicting influences was a yin and yang of worldly ambition and ascetic mysticism that warred in him all his life.

  His idyllic childhood world was smashed when the Japanese invaded Vietnam in 1940. Moitessier and his family were briefly interned. After the Japanese pulled out at the end of the Second World War, he served in a gunboat with French national forces fighting against the Viet Minh communists for control of Indochina. This was the beginning of what became the wider war in Vietnam.

  Then, at 27, he sailed away
. His homeland overrun with an intensifying war, a brother and close friends dead, Moitessier bought a crude native boat, which he named Marie Thérèse, and sailed slowly westwards across the Gulf of Siam and the Bay of Bengal. His navigation skill was in its infancy, and he ran aground on the Chagos Bank in the middle of the Indian Ocean, losing his boat. He spent three years in Mauritius, where, with help and donations, he built a ketch, Marie Thérèse II. He sailed on as far as the Caribbean, where he was shipwrecked a second time, again with the total loss of his new boat.

  Brought ashore in Trinidad, Moitessier briefly and desperately considered building a boat out of scrap wood and newspaper painted with pitch, but instead took the advice of the Norwegian consul in Trinidad, an old Cape Horner, who told him, ‘If you stay in the Antilles you will always be poor. Go to Europe where people are rich.’ The consul found him a seaman’s berth aboard a small tanker, and Moitessier worked his way to Hamburg and finally to France. From these early and inauspicious adventures, he wrote a book called, appropriately, Vagabond des mers du sud (the English title more prosaically hinted at his ultimate destinations: Sailing to the Reefs).

  The book was a best-seller in France. Moitessier was lionised by the yachting community; he got married and passed through that magical and mysterious looking glass that comes with fame and success, on the far side of which people come to you unbidden and ask if they can give you what you want. French yacht designer Jean Knocker offered to draw up the plans for Moitessier’s next boat for free. Then, businessman and amateur yachtsman Jean Fricaud offered to build the new boat out of steel in his boiler factory for the cost of the steel plate. Knocker was a designer of repute, and after twice piling his boats up on reefs, Moitessier liked the idea of boilerplate construction.

  The new boat was 39 feet long, ketch-rigged, with a long bowsprit. Today it would appear conservative and old-fashioned, but when launched in 1961 it represented the ideal ocean-crossing, live-aboard cruising yacht, for which it would still prove efficient and more than adequate. Moitessier christened his yacht Joshua, after Slocum, the old sea captain who had sailed alone around the world. The tough hull was crudely fitted out: telephone poles for masts, phone-company galvanised-wire rigging. But she was as strong as an icebreaker. After two seasons sailing Joshua out of Marseilles as a sailing school boat, Moitessier and his wife, Françoise, sailed for Polynesia. They crossed the Atlantic to the Caribbean and reached the Pacific through the Panama Canal.

  Joshua proved to be an ideal blue-water vessel. Her crude but strong rig, heavy displacement, long keel, and hull shape enabled her to be driven hard, yet easily steered by wind vane, and her motion was sea-kindly and comfortable.

  Françoise had three children by a previous marriage who had stayed behind in France at school and with her parents. Bernard and Françoise had told the kids they’d return as soon as possible, but from Polynesia this meant continuing on westwards around the world by normal trade wind cruising routes, another year of sailing before reaching France by way of the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. By the time they reached Tahiti, however, Françoise was missing her children badly and Moitessier had come up with another, much faster route home. He proposed sailing Joshua south to the Southern Ocean, turning east along the clipper ship route, and hurtling home to Europe, nonstop, though the Roaring Forties by way of Cape Horn. It would take four months instead of a year. Provided a yacht was strong and sound, which they both believed Joshua to be, it was, Moitessier told his wife, a logical and reasonable route. Although he warned her of the conditions they could encounter, Françoise could have had no idea what they were facing. Nor, as it turned out, had Moitessier.

  They sailed from Tahiti on 23 November 1965. It was a voyage that would make small-boat history. On 13 December, at 44 degrees south, in the loneliest wastes of the Southern Ocean, the barometer began a steep fall and the wind started to blow hard from the northwest. By 6 a.m. the next morning, they were running downwind under bare poles (all sail stowed) before a whole gale – winds of 40 to 50 knots. The barometer was still falling, the wind still rising. The wind vane steering gear had become overpowered, no longer able to keep Joshua’s stern to the wind and sea, so it had been disconnected and the vane stored below; steering was now by hand, and would continue so as long as the storm lasted.

  Moitessier knew, he thought, exactly what to do under such conditions. Before leaving Tahiti he had met and spoken with American sailor William Albert Robinson, who had run his 70-foot brigantine Varua under bare poles through these same seas, in what he had described as the ‘ultimate storm’ in his book To the Great Southern Sea. Robinson had followed the accepted storm technique of dragging lines towed astern with anchors or ballast attached to them to slow the yacht down as it runs before wind and seas and prevent it from going so fast that it becomes unmanageable and broaches, possibly capsizing. The technique had worked for Robinson. Moitessier had read Robinson’s book, and another, Once Is Enough, Miles Smeeton’s thrilling (and even funny) account of his two separate and disastrous capsizes aboard his yacht Tzu Hang in the Southern Ocean west of Cape Horn. All small-boat sailors heading south into these seas (and many enthralled armchair adventurers) have read these two classics, profoundly hoping not to meet the same conditions and to learn what might possibly help them if they do. Smeeton too had towed lines, but that hadn’t prevented Tzu Hang from being hurtled forward to bury her nose in the sea when her stern was lifted by a giant wave that pitchpoled the yacht, snapping both masts off clean and ripping off the entire deckhouse, leaving a gaping hole in the yacht’s deck. Smeeton wondered, in his book, whether any precautions or techniques could have made a difference to the great sea that flipped Tzu Hang, but a sailor was conscientiously bound to follow procedure. (Under jury-rig, with a short mast made from floorboards, Tzu Hang limped into Valparaiso, where Smeeton and his singularly adventurous wife, Beryl, spent the better part of a year repairing their yacht. They sailed south for the Horn and again were rolled over in a storm, suffering the same damage.)

  Moitessier had prepared; he was all ready to slow Joshua down. He soon had five thick lines, between 16 and 55 fathoms (96 and 330 feet) long, trailing astern. Three lines were weighted by two or three 40-pound lumps of pig iron. A fourth line dragged a large net as a sea anchor, and the fifth trailed freely with nothing attached to it. This tremendous drag certainly slowed Joshua’s progress; breaking seas now swept over the decks and the boat appeared to be standing still or going backwards.

  Moitessier was steering from a small wheel inside the boat, beneath a turretlike hatch he had cobbled together in Tahiti from a steel washbasin and Perspex windows, which allowed him to look out but stay dry. He and Françoise had taken turns steering, but the lines astern had made the boat sluggish to respond and now only with difficulty and intense concentration could he alone keep the boat on course – the ‘course’, in this extreme, being to keep Joshua’s pointed stern, its least vulnerable aspect, dead before the enormous breaking waves. They could no longer move around inside the boat except by crawling and gripping on to handholds. Moitessier clung to the wheel at his perch, Françoise burrowed into their bunk. Food, except for what was easily grabbed in one hand, was out of the question.

  Another entire day and night wore by and morning came again; the barometer continued to drop to a rare low and the storm intensified. The waves grew nightmarishly large, as high between trough and crest as eight-storey buildings, sweeping faster over the sea and carrying the boat unstoppably with them, until Moitessier believed that despite all his preparation and reading and techniques, Joshua was on the point of being overwhelmed.

  The awful truth now hit him: Joshua might be the perfect cruising boat for trade wind seas, but she was fatally out of place in the Southern Ocean, in the storm in which she now found herself. Disaster, inescapable, loomed.

  But Moitessier’s mind recoiled at the conclusion that Joshua could not make it where other boats – good boats but no better, he finally believed, than his o
wn – had come through. At this desperate moment, when he felt his boat to be on the point of foundering, he thought of another boat, another book, another sailor: the Argentine Vito Dumas, who had sailed alone around the world in 1942–3 aboard a double-ended ketch, Lehg II, a yacht with a shape very like Joshua’s, but at 31 feet long, considerably smaller. Dumas’s book, Alone Through the Roaring Forties, is another in the pantheon of must-read classics that deal with Southern Ocean sailing, and Moitessier remembered that Dumas claimed to have carried at least a small staysail while running before the wind in all weather – in the worst of weathers – clearly therefore running at speed, not slowing down, in conditions such as these.

  Then a wave caught Joshua, not directly astern, but partly slewed around at an angle, and despite all the lines and weight dragging in the water, she was carried forward at fantastic speed. Yet instead of plunging down and burying her bows in the wave’s trough, the wind heeled Joshua over on her side, so that she planed like a water ski along the surface of the breaking wave. The wave passed harmlessly beneath the boat, and Moitessier had discovered Vito Dumas’s secret.