Once Is Enough
Once Is Enough
Miles Smeeton
This timeless classic is an exciting true story of survival against all odds.‘There was a sudden sickening sense of disaster. I felt a great lurch and heel, and a thunder of sound filled my ears. I was conscious, in a terrified moment, of being driven into the front and side of my bunk with tremendous force. At the same time there was a tearing cracking sound, as if Tzu Hang was being ripped apart, and water burst solidly, raging into the cabin. There was darkness, black boards, and I fought wildly to get out, thinking Tzu Hang had already gone. Then suddenly I was standing again, waist deep in water, and floorboards and cushions, mattresses and books were sloshing in wild confusion round me.’Miles Smeeton and his wife Beryl sailed their 46-ft Bermuda ketch, Tzu Hang, in the wild seas of Cape Horn, following the tracks of the old sailing clippers through the world’s most notorious waters. This is an exciting true story of survival against all odds, but it is also a thoughtful book which provides hard-learned lessons for other intrepid sailors.As Nevil Shute writes in his foreword: ‘It has been left to Miles Smeeton to tell us in clear and simple language just where the limits of safety lie.’
Once Is Enough
Miles Smeeton
Foreword by Nevil Shute
TO BERYL
For she was cook and captain bold, And the mate of the Nancy brig
CONTENTS
Title Page (#uf607da50-434b-5316-87e6-08ef876a1ffa)
Dedication (#u10647f26-ff1b-5aad-a4f3-cb2a18b8d35f)
FOREWORD BY NEVIL SHUTE
1 PREPARATIONS IN MELBOURNE
2 FALSE START
3 THROUGH THE BASS STRAIT
4 ACROSS THE SOUTH TASMAN
5 INTO THE SOUTHERN OCEAN
6 THE WAY OF A SHIP
7 THIS IS SURVIVAL TRAINING!
8 RECOVERY
9 THE TREK NORTH
10 FIRST DAYS IN CHILE
11 REPAIRS IN TALCAHUANO
12 STILL IN TALCAHUANO
13 TO CORONEL AGAIN
14 NOT AGAIN!
15 THERE’S A WIND FROM THE SOUTH
EPILOGUE
APPENDIX: MANAGEMENT IN HEAVY WEATHER
POSTSCRIPT
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher
MAPS
Drawn by K. C. Jordan
Melbourne and environs (#ulink_6e6e24a3-361e-5cf3-baf8-32c9f3c99a5a)
Melbourne to Seal Rocks (#ulink_1a06675f-1c93-524c-b2f3-1ce6bb9f1a74)
Through the Bass Strait (#ulink_429e32fc-896f-5d76-8372-fb2ac191828a)
Across the South Tasman (#ulink_a9d5ef82-7338-5902-9cc1-0d5d20444c4e)
January 6–24 (#litres_trial_promo)
January 24–February 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
February 12–March 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
March 6 to Arauco Bay (#litres_trial_promo)
Arauco Bay to Talcahuano (#litres_trial_promo)
December 26 to Valparaiso (#litres_trial_promo)
DRAWINGS
Drawn by the author
Accommodation plans (#ulink_c9e88d05-aa30-577c-a06f-d4fc99d33bbd)
The first jury-rig (#litres_trial_promo)
The galley and broken doorpost (#litres_trial_promo)
The first accident (#litres_trial_promo)
The forecabin and the powder-tin (#litres_trial_promo)
The final jury-rig (#litres_trial_promo)
Rolled over (#litres_trial_promo)
Under the jury (#litres_trial_promo)
‘Pitchpoling’ diagram (#litres_trial_promo)
Tzu Hang’s lines (#litres_trial_promo)
Foreword BY NEVIL SHUTE (#u7839aa9a-8415-5170-b15d-45854b6f83f7)
SOME years ago I had an afternoon to spare in Vancouver, so I went down to the yacht harbour to see what sort of vessels Canadian yachtsmen use. There I found Tzu Hang moored alongside a pontoon, slightly weather-beaten, sporting baggywrinkle on her runners, and wearing the red ensign. As I inspected her Miles Smeeton came up from below and invited me on board. That was my first meeting with this remarkable man; I did not meet his more remarkable wife till some time later.
The Smeetons had bought Tzu Hang in England a year or so previously and they had sailed her out from England across the Atlantic and through the Panama Canal to Vancouver with their eleven-year-old daughter as the third member of the crew. Before buying this considerable ship they had never sailed a boat or cruised in any yacht. They made one trip in her to Holland and then set out across the Atlantic for the West Indies. Navigation was child’s play to them; seamanship they picked up as they went along. With only two adults on board they had to keep watch and watch, but did not seem to find it unduly tiring. They made their landfalls accurately, passed the Panama, reached out a thousand miles into the Pacific before they could lie a course for Vancouver, and they arrived without incident. I asked if they had had any trouble on the way. Miles told me that they had been hove to for three days in the Atlantic; the only trouble that they had in that three days was in keeping their small daughter at her lessons. They made her do three hours school work each morning, all the way.
When I began yacht cruising after the First World War it was regarded as an axiom amongst yachtsmen that a small sailing vessel, properly handled, is safe in any deep-water sea. I think that Claude Worth, the father of modern yachting, may have been partly responsible for this idea, and it may well be true for the waters in which he sailed. A small yacht, we said, will ride easily over and amongst great waves if she is hove to or allowed to drift broadside under bare poles; you have only to watch a seagull riding out a storm upon the water, we said. Perhaps we failed to notice that the seagull spreads its wings now and again to get out of trouble; perhaps we were seldom caught out in winds of force 7 or 8 and much too busy then to observe the habits of seabirds, which probably had too much sense to be there anyway.
From time to time our complacent sense of security was just a little ruffled. Erling Tambs, in Teddy, was overwhelmed in some way by the sea when running in the Atlantic; his account was not very clear and it was easy for us to assume that he had been carrying too much sail, had been pooped and broached to. The lesson to us seemed obvious; heave to in good time or lie to a sea-anchor, perhaps by the stern if the ship was suitable. Captain Voss, sailing with two friends in a seven tonner in the China Sea, was turned completely upside down so that the cabin stove broke loose and left its imprint on the deckhead above, on the cabin ceiling. But that was a long way away; all sorts of things happen in China. … Captain Slocum was lost in the Atlantic without trace after sailing single-handed round the world—but anything could have happened to him.
It has been left to Miles Smeeton in this book to tell us in clear and simple language just where the limits of safety lie. We now know with certainty that the seagull parallel was wrong. A small yacht, well found, well equipped, and beautifully handled, can be overwhelmed by the sea when running under bare poles dragging a warp, or when lying sideways to the sea hove to under bare poles. The Smeetons have proved it, twice. Twice these amazing people saved their waterlogged, dismasted ship by their sheer competence and sailed her safely in to port, greatly assisted on the first occasion by John Guzzwell. With equal competence they have now produced this lucid and well-written book to tell us all about it.
At the risk of offending the author I must stress the fact that these are most unusual people, lest more ordinary yachtsmen should be tempted to follow them down towards Cape Horn— ‘After all, they proved that one can get away with it, didn’t they?’ Nobody reading this account can fail to realise how excellently they had prepared, equipped, and provisioned their ship for the long voyage from Australia down in to the Roaring Forties. One can say, perhaps, that she was overmasted for that particular trip. But vessels cannot be rigged solely for going round the Horn; she had also to sail through the doldrums of the Equator on her way back to England. I visited the ship in Melbourne before she sailed; she was rugged and tough and functional to the last degree, as were the people in her.
Quite a number of yachtsmen have now sailed round the world with their wives, for the most part running downwind in the Trades in the lower, more generous latitudes. How many of the wives, I wonder, could take a sextant sight from the desperately unsteady cockpit of a small yacht at sea, work out the position line with the massed figures of the tables dancing before one’s eyes, and plot it on the chart? Beryl Smeeton can do this with such accuracy that it was common practice on this yacht for anyone who was unoccupied to take the sight and for anybody else to work out the position line; their competence was equal. What can one say of a woman who, catapulted from the cockpit of a somersaulting ship into the sea and recovered on board with a broken collarbone and a deep scalp cut, worked manually like a man with her broken bone and did not wash the blood from her hair and forehead for three weeks, judging that injuries left severely alone heal themselves best? What can one say of a woman working as a carpenter to repair the gaping holes in the doghouse while the dismasted ship lurches and slithers in enormous seas, who refuses to nail the boards in place but drills a hole for every wood screw and does the job as properly as a professional carpenter could have done it on dry land? These people are quite unusual, and all yachtsmen reading this book had better realise that fact. More ordinary people would undoubtedly have perished.
They had, I think, one gap in the great cloak of competence that wrapped them round; they thought too little of their engine. In a sailing yacht designed to cruise the oceans the auxiliary motor must always take a second place to the sails and gear, yet if the weight and complication of a motor is to be carried in a ship at all it would be better to have a good one, one that will work under extreme conditions. Tzu Hang had a petrol motor with the usual electric ignition; this motor, for the sake of the internal accommodation, as is common in week-end yachts, was buried deep down in the bilges under the doghouse deck in a position where it was practically impossible to start it by hand when immersion had killed the starter batteries. After each disaster when a motor would have been a help to the dismasted ship this motor was a useless nuisance to them; the ship would have been lighter and so safer with it overboard. They could have had a hand-starting diesel mounted up in a position where one could swing upon the handle with both hands, driving the propeller-shaft by belts or chains. Accommodation might have suffered slightly, but the motor would have worked as soon as they had drained the water from the crankcase and refilled with oil. In so functional a vessel as Tzu Hang I think the motor was unworthy of the rest of her.
The Smeetons and Tzu Hang are back in British waters now; I doubt if they will stay there. A few days ago I got a letter from Miles Smeeton. In part it reads:
We sailed on the 10th for the Firth of Forth, almost with mechanics and shipwrights still on board. Had two days to Hartlepool where we put in on account of a storm warning—and then off for the Forth and bang into a north-westerly gale. We were hove to for three days but Tzu Hang behaved beautifully and kept her decks dry and re-established our confidence.
So they go on their way again across the seas. In this admirably written book they have done a good job for yachting. All yachtsmen should read it and be grateful to the valiant people who have dared to chart the limits of their sport.
CHAPTER ONE (#u7839aa9a-8415-5170-b15d-45854b6f83f7)
PREPARATIONS IN MELBOURNE (#u7839aa9a-8415-5170-b15d-45854b6f83f7)
THE crowd still thronged the Spencer Street bridge when Clio and I came back from the Olympic Games. They were leaning on the parapet and looking at the Royal Yacht, as they had done ever since her arrival in Melbourne. They were in holiday mood, looking for the best angle for their cameras, and full of enthusiasm and pawky Australian humour. Just across the bridge in a shop window a notice had been posted: ‘English spik here,’ it said; and on the door of the funeral parlour, a little further up the street, there was a card saying briefly that any Olympic visitors were welcome.
Looking down river from the bridge, we could see how it wound its way between wharves, warehouses, and docks, its course marked by high cranes and the masts of ships, until in its last mile it curved between low flat banks to its outlet in Port Philip Bay. In front of us Britannia’s beautiful tall bow reached over the bridge, and beyond her, on the other side of the river, an Australian ship was moored. Immediately opposite Britannia, and tied up to the south wharf, there was another yacht, also flying the British flag, for she was registered in England, although her home was now in Canada. She was very small compared to her royal neighbour, but she also intended to sail in a few days for England, and by the same route, south of New Zealand and south of Cape Horn. She was called Tzu Hang, and she was ours.
Beyond the Britannia, and parallel to and across the river from Tzu Hang, ran Flinders Street, with its ships’ chandlers, whose shops Beryl visited every day with a preoccupied air and carrying long lists in her hand. Behind Flinders Street, the land sloped up to Collins Street, with its banks and clubs and prosperous good-looking buildings, and to the low hills on which the city of Melbourne is built. Not so long ago the river here used to be full of sailing ships, and Clio and I would have seen a forest of masts and spars; but now there were only two, Tzu Hang and a big yacht down from Sydney, which was tied up in front of us.
‘Look at that idiot cat. She isn’t half giving those sails a go,’ someone said, calling the attention of his friend to Tzu Hang, and when we looked across we saw Pwe, the Siamese cat, sharpening her claws on the cover of the mainsail. The sail-cover was put on not so much for looks as to protect the sail from the cat. As we watched we saw a man climb down on to the deck of the yacht, carrying one of the plastic bottles which we used for topping up the water tanks, and Beryl appeared in the hatch and took the bottle from him.
‘I wonder who that is?’ I said. ‘It’s not John.’
‘Oh, it’s just someone she’s roped in,’ said Clio irreverently of her mother. ‘She’s always roping someone in to work. Come on.’
She ran on now across the wharf to where Tzu Hang was lying. Although she was only fifteen she was already fully grown in height, tall and slim. She leant out from the edge of the wharf, unaware of her best clothes, and caught hold of the shrouds, and then swung on to the ratlines, and dropped down on to the deck. She wouldn’t be with us on this next trip. She had been with us on all our previous trips; from England to Canada, and three years later from Canada to New Zealand, and then across to Australia, and now she had to go to England to school. We were going to follow in Tzu Hang as quickly as possible. She was not the first member of the crew to leave the ship, because her small brown dog, who had also been with us on all our travels, had already been sent off home from Sydney. He was travelling in luxury now in a cargo ship, spending most of the time in the bunk of one of the apprentices. We hoped to be back in time to receive him when he came out of quarantine.
To replace these two members of the crew we now had John. We had first met him in San Francisco, where we found that he also was bound for New Zealand, and like us had sailed down from Victoria in British Columbia. He was sailing single-handed in his little Laurent Giles-designed yacht, Trekka, which he had built himself, with great skill, in Victoria. We planned our trip across the Pacific together, and for a year now we had seen much of each other. When the two yachts lay together at the various anchorages and ports we made, John used to come on board for meals, and he would put on weight in port and take it off again as quickly during his single-handed passages. When he heard that Clio was going back to school, and that we would like to have a shot at the Horn if we could find a suitable crew to come with us, he said that he’d lay up Trekka in New Zealand, and come along with us. Nowhere could we have found a better companion.
Before climbing down from the wharf on to Tzu Hang’s deck, I had a good look at her, but I could see nothing that wanted doing now. She had been fully fitted out in Sydney, and spruced up again on her arrival in Melbourne, and she had had a good testing on her way down. She is a 46-foot ketch, 36 feet on the water line, 11 foot 6 inch beam and drawing 7 feet. She has a canoe stem and a marked sheer, and her bowsprit follows the line of the sheer so that it has a delicate upward lift, and she seems to be sniffing the breeze and eager to be off. The truck of her mainmast is 51 feet above the deck, and her mizzen 35 feet and she carries 915 square feet of sail. She is flush decked, with a small doghouse, 5½ by 5½ feet, separated by a bridge-deck from her self-draining cockpit, which is only 34 by 34 inches. She was built of teak in Hong Kong, copper fastened and with a lead keel of just over seven tons, in 1938, and she was shipped home in 1939. We bought her from her first owner in 1951, and sailed her back to Canada.
I let myself down on to the deck by way of the shrouds and went below, and I found Beryl and Clio sitting together in the main cabin opposite a stranger, an Australian and, I supposed, the man who had been helping her with the water.
‘Hullo,’ she said to me. ‘Here you are. This is my husband. I’m afraid I didn’t quite get your name——’
He introduced himself. ‘How d’you do,’ he said. ‘I just came down here to take a snap of the Britannia from the wharf here——’
‘And Beryl put you to work,’ I interrupted.
‘Too right she did, and I’ve been working here ever since. I tell her that there’s many a firm here would snap her up, for labour management you know. She’s been telling me about your trip. Sounds very interesting. I wish I could come with you.’
‘As long as it’s not too interesting.’
‘It might be at that. It can be quite tough even round here. I do a bit of sailing here. Tasman race, but crewing, not my own boat. Which way are you going?’
‘Well we thought we’d go straight across and through the Banks Strait, and then right down south of New Zealand, and then across keeping just about north of the limit of icebergs or floating ice. We’d go south of the Snares here and north of the Auckland Islands, and south of the Antipodes Islands.’ I showed him the route on a weather chart.
‘It’s a long way south,’ he said. ‘Have any other yachts been that way?’
‘Well one or two have been round the Horn, or through the Straits of Magellan, but I think they’ve all been up to Auckland first, so that our route will be a good bit further south than the others.’
‘Well I’d still like to come along, but anyway I’ll not say goodbye now, because I’m going to pick you all up in my car on Wednesday and drive you to the airport. I hear you are off to school in England,’ he said, turning to Clio, ‘I wonder how you’ll like that after all this sailing.’
The tea was made and the kettle was hissing pleasantly on the galley stove, but he wouldn’t stay. ‘The first time I’ve ever known an Australian refuse a cup of tea,’ I remarked, but he said that he’d have tea with us on Wednesday, and off he went.
‘What a nice chap!’ I said to Beryl. ‘How did you pick him up? Good show fixing a lift to the airport.’
‘Oh, he just came along and asked if he could give me a hand. He’s brought gallons of water. And when I told him that Clio was leaving on Wednesday, he said that he’d been longing to give someone a lift as an Olympic gesture, and that we were the first non-Australian visitors that he’d been able to pick up. I don’t think that he’s taken a photo of the Britannia yet.’
We sat down to tea. ‘You really ought to have been at the Games,’ Clio said, ‘it was such fun.’
‘I don’t think that I’d ’ve enjoyed them very much. Besides they look so like the school sports to me, and you know I hate school sports. I think the umpires are the best part. They look so funny all dressed up in their little blazers, and they go trooping after each other in single file, looking exactly like a string of cormorants, and when they sit on those steps one on top of each other, they look even more like cormorants, sitting on a rock. Anyway Pwe and I have enjoyed ourselves, and I’ve made a new rack for the saucepan lid.’
Beryl’s carpentry suffers from her preference for using up an old piece of wood rather than throwing it away, but all the same she is a very enthusiastic and determined carpenter, and was always making something about the ship. The cat was sitting on her lap, her eyes closed and her ears pricked, and her tail lashing gently at the mention of her name. Her eyes opened now, a deep clear blue, as the ship stirred and someone stepped down on to the deck.
‘Here’s someone who always knows when tea’s ready,’ said Clio as John came down below. He was tall and fair, and filled most of the cabin door, so that Beryl had to squeeze past him to get to the kettle.
‘What do you think of my saucepan rack?’ she asked, pointing it out to him.
John is a carpenter, or rather an artist in carpentry. He looked at it, and then patted her on the shoulder. She looked quite small beside him. ‘Pretty good,’ he said, and I saw that she was pleased with the praise from the expert.
The remaining days before Clio left went all too quickly, and almost before we knew it we were standing disconsolate on the airport, watching an aircraft climbing away from the end of the runway.
‘She was better than me, when I left my Mum in South Africa,’ John said, ‘I couldn’t see for tears and fell down the gangway.’ And after a moment’s thought he said, ‘Still she didn’t really know what she was doing, did she? She kissed me too.’
‘I think she had a pretty good idea,’ Beryl said, and we all laughed.
Later, when we were back in Tzu Hang, I said to Beryl, ‘Do you think she’ll be worried?’
‘Worried about what?’
‘Oh, about us and Tzu Hang, you know, when she’s not there.’
‘No, I don’t think so. As a matter of fact I asked her and she said she wouldn’t be.’
‘Good heavens. Why on earth not?’
‘Don’t be so silly. You don’t want her to worry, do you? She said that she reckoned that Tzu Hang would look after us.’
‘I hope she does.’
‘Who? Clio or Tzu Hang?’
‘Clio—or rather, both.’
In the wharf shed on the south wharf there was a small room with a telephone, which we were allowed to use. This was Beryl’s operations office, and she sat there in blue jeans and a checked shirt, ordering immense quantities of stores to be delivered to the ship. When they arrived, she and John filmed each other staggering along the wharf carrying big cartons of food. John was hoping to make a complete record of the trip with his ciné camera. In the afternoons she went up to a friend’s house, where she treated the eggs that we were taking with us by plunging them into boiling water for five seconds, and then into cold. It was the first time that we had tried this method of preserving eggs, and by the time we had eaten the last one it was over two months old. It still tasted good to me.
Soon after the Games were over Britannia left, and, as Melbourne began to reassume her workaday clothes for the few days left before Christmas, the smoke from workshops, tugs, and launches came drifting up the river, smudging the white sail-covers and making black marks on the deck. For the last few days we moved into the entrance to a little yard at the end of the wharf, as our berth was required for the dredgers, which were coming up from Port Phillip Heads. We were separated from the rest of the wharf by some high iron palings, so that casual onlookers no longer came to stand above us, and this seclusion was most appreciated by Pwe, who now spent some of the day, as well as of the night, ashore. Some shrubs grew along the palings, and there she assiduously hunted sparrows, but the Melbourne sparrows were too smart for her. Fortunately no quarantine officials found her—though there are few ships’ cats who don’t take a turn ashore when they get the opportunity, and no one is very fussy about them, as long as they are not mentioned.
We had one or two visitors in our new berth, and one of them was a tall elderly man, in a town suit, and a black hat, but one glance was enough to see that he was no city man. He was a sailor, and he knew a great deal not only of sail but also of the Southern Ocean. ‘Well,’ he said when he left, ‘Good luck to you. I think you’re going to need all of it, and I must say that I’d like to see another 7 feet off those masts.’
We thought that all small ship passages, at any rate long passages, had an element of luck about them—so is there about most things that are worth doing. But if we had thought that it was just a question of luck whether we would arrive or not, we wouldn’t have attempted the passage. We were most certainly not in search of sensation, and we believed that we had a ship and a crew that were capable of making the passage under normal conditions. We knew of course that we might meet with bad luck in all kinds of ways, but as long as we were prepared, as far as was possible, for anything that might turn up, there seemed to be no reason why we should not overcome it.
‘What on earth do you want a year’s supply of stores on board for?’ someone asked Beryl.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘there is always the possibility that we might get dismasted, and then heaven knows where we might end up, and anyway the passage would take much longer than we had expected. We could probably make do for water, but I like to be sure that we have all the food we need.’
Australia was a good place to buy all kinds of tinned food, and besides tinned food we had potatoes, onions, and two sides of bacon, as well as plenty of oranges; and after the oranges were finished, we had tinned orange-juice or grapefruit-juice in almost unlimited quantity.
Although there is plenty of stowage space on Tzu Hang, we were so well stocked that Beryl began to think of creating more by getting rid of Blue Bear. Blue Bear had become a ship’s mascot, and John and I wouldn’t hear of it. He had been given to Clio when we first left England. He was a blue teddy bear, inappropriate and too big, but no artifice of ours could persuade Clio to part with him. When we were crossing the Bay of Biscay, and beating down against a south-westerly wind, with Tzu Hang close-hauled and sailing herself, Blue Bear, in oilskin and sou’wester, was lashed to the wheel. Through the doghouse windows we had seen a steamer come away from her course and steam up alongside to investigate. The captain came out of his cabin without his jacket, dressed in trousers and braces, to peer through his glasses, and others of the crew lined the rail. Blue Bear was obviously the centre of all interest, and when they drew away they seemed still to be discussing the composition of the crew.
He had sailed with us on every trip, lolling in one of the bunks, often with the cat and dog keeping him company, and now I found a more austere berth for him on the shelf in the forepeak, where he could still keep his eye on what went on.
There was one major difficulty to overcome before we left, and that was to get John to have his impacted wisdom tooth pulled out.
‘Not likely,’ said John. ‘He said he’d have to dig it out, and anyway it’s not hurting.’
‘But you must have it done, it might blow up on the trip.’
‘Not me. I don’t want to have a tooth dug.’
‘But John,’ Beryl said, ‘you sail all the way from Canada in that tiny boat, and now you won’t have a tooth out. I do believe you’re frightened.’
‘Too true,’ he said, with his usual disarming frankness, but in the end he agreed. After all there was a very pretty girl there to hold his hand. When we came back from a visit to Tasmania it was out, and John had a swollen jaw and a smug look.
Next morning I went to the Customs Office to arrange for clearance. I got into the lift and pressed the button for the appropriate floor. The lift started up and then came to a shuddering halt half way up. I tried to peer through the grille, but I was right between two floors. I thought that if I waited for long enough someone was sure to want the lift and I should be discovered without the indignity of bawling for help. After about ten minutes I heard an angry voice from below shouting, ‘You up there: what are you doing in the lift?’
‘I’m stuck!’ I shouted indignantly.
‘Well, stand in the middle, then.’
I stood in the middle, and the lift began to climb creakily upwards again. A few minutes later I was shaking hands with the Customs Officer, with my clearance in my pocket for the following day.
‘I’ll let the Customs launch know,’ he said, ‘and they’ll meet you at the mouth of the river and give you a check up as you go. I remember the last chap we cleared for Montevideo was that Irishman, Conor O’Brien, some thirty years ago. He had a ship with a funny name.’
‘Saoirse.’
‘Yes, that’s right. He had a beard and a yachting cap. He was a rum chap, but he was a real sailor,’ and he looked at me doubtfully.
I hoped that I might be half as good, but I knew that he couldn’t have had so good a crew.
CHAPTER TWO (#u7839aa9a-8415-5170-b15d-45854b6f83f7)
FALSE START (#u7839aa9a-8415-5170-b15d-45854b6f83f7)
A TUG whistled down the river. Beryl sat up in her bunk as if this was the signal that she had been waiting for. She pulled a jersey over her pyjamas and went aft to the galley. I lay in my bunk. I thought that it would be the last time for days and days that I would lie in my bunk with the ship still.
John was also in his bunk, a quarter-berth that he had made in New Zealand, aft of the galley and doghouse. He had separated it from the rest of the cramped stowage space below the bridge-deck by a plywood partition running fore-and-aft from the cockpit to the bulkhead on the starboard side. Whenever I tried to get into this berth through an oval hole cut in the partition, in order to get to the stowage space aft of the cockpit, I stuck, either with my head in and my stern out, or my stern in and my head out. John used to go in stern first like a wart-hog going into its burrow. Although he was bigger than I, but not taller, he did everything with an effortless grace, and could even get in and out of his berth with no apparent difficulty. It was snug inside and removed from the rest of the ship. It was his quarter—a small piece of privacy which was never invaded.
I knew exactly what was going on in the galley, without looking aft through the ship to where Beryl was sitting in the cook’s seat behind the dresser and sink and beside the stoves: an oil stove and a primus on gimbals, so that they swung either way and remained steady when the ship pitched and rolled. There was an occasional rattle and clink, well-known noises which I could interpret from days of practice at sea, and then came the sudden welcome hiss of the primus burner and the sound of the primus pump. Soon the porridge was on the stove and Beryl came back to the forecabin to finish her dressing. I put on some clothes and went on deck by way of the forehatch.
It was a sparkling summer day, with a light wind blowing up the Yarra River. A little further down, a big cargo ship was docking. The tug, whose whistle had stirred us to movement, was pushing the steamer’s stern in to the wharf. ‘Today is the day,’ I thought, ‘today is the day.’ And then I remembered that Pwe had not yet returned from her night out. I called her, and she answered from the shrubs by the railing. She came trotting out, explaining as only a Siamese can, about being caught out by the daylight, and about the sparrows being so wary. When she got near to the edge of the wharf, she lay down and rolled, waiting for me to come and get her. I stepped on shore and picked her up, and Beryl called ‘Breakfast’ from the hatch.
That wonderful call to breakfast! I do not know whether it is because of its association with porridge and bacon and eggs, but her voice always sounds as young and exciting as ever it did, and the day seemed young and exciting too. It was an exciting day. It was the twenty-second of December, and we were starting off to England.
Our first job after breakfast was to move round to a water point on the main wharf, where we could top up our tanks. If a hose was not available we used 2-gallon plastic bottles. When we bought Tzu Hang, she had only one tank of 20 gallons, so that we had to fit in other tanks where we could. We put one under each bunk in the forecabin, one in the bathroom, one under the existing tank in the galley, and one in the after compartment, opposite John’s berth. It was the best we could do, and it is not a bad principle to have water well divided. It is easier to check consumption, and all is not lost if a tap is knocked on and not noticed.
We carried about 150 gallons of water in these six tanks. We found that half a gallon a day per person, at sea, was a fair allowance. When we washed, we washed in salt water, and whenever possible we used salt water for cooking. Water was never rationed, but we did not waste it, and now we reckoned that we had at least a three-months’ supply, and a little extra for washing if necessary.
Before we had set out on our first trip I had had a letter from Kevin O’Riordan, who had sailed across the Atlantic with Humphrey Barton in Vertue XXXV. He wrote, ‘You will be perfectly all right provided that you have a buoyant boat, plenty of water, and don’t mind being alone for weeks and weeks.’ It seemed that all three conditions were fulfilled.
The last days before leaving on a long trip are always a rush. The whole crew spin like dancing dervishes, the list of things undone seems to grow longer instead of shorter, and everything whirls faster and faster to the climax, the moment between preparation and departure, between planning and putting into effect, the climax when a starter button is pressed, and the engine starts … or doesn’t.
I always hate this moment as I’m a bad engineer, and I feel that some imp of fortune is going to decide whether we shall be permitted to cast off, or whether we shall become the harrowed and querulous prey of a thousand mechanical doubts and remain tied to the wharf that we want to leave. ‘Please, engine, please start,’ I beg of it in private, but on this occasion everything went well.
Beryl jumped into the cockpit and took the wheel. She put the engine astern, and we began to back out from the dock into the Yarra River. As the stream caught our deep keel it swung the stern round until we were facing upstream, Beryl then put the engine ahead and we moved slowly across to the water point on the wharf. John had walked across to catch our lines. Ever since he had joined us in New Zealand, he had taken every opportunity to work on Tzu Hang, making some improvement or other. Now, as she came out into the stream, he was able to look at her from a distance for perhaps the last time for many a long day. She looked fit for the sea in every way. The boom gallows could be improved; perhaps he would be able to fix it before he left the ship.
As soon as we had made fast, we began topping up the tank in use with the plastic bottles. Last of all, we filled the four bottles and stowed them below. Pwe was eager for a last run ashore, but the distance from the deck to the top of the wharf was too much for her. A tall young girl, about ten years old, with a mop of dark hair, was standing on the wharf with her father, looking down at the yacht. When she saw the cat, her eyes, which were as blue as the cat’s, went round with wonder. She looked as if, more than anything else in the world, she wanted to stroke it. I climbed on to the wharf with Pwe, and held her out to her. She was too shy to speak. She stroked the cat’s dark head, and longed after her when I handed her down again to Beryl.
It was time to be moving now. Beryl was at the wheel, John was ready to cast off the bowline, and the young girl’s father was hoping to be asked to cast off the stern-line.
‘All right, let go,’ I called to John, and ‘Would you mind casting off?’ to the eager father.
John jumped on board and, helped by the stream, Tzu Hang swung out into the river and pointed her head for the sea.
Half way down to the river mouth we were met by the Customs launch. ‘Thought that we’d come up and give you a tow,’ they shouted as they came alongside. One of the Customs Officers came on board, and they passed us a towline.
‘What can you do?’
‘Eight knots,’ we answered, knowing something of Australian enthusiasm. In no time Tzu Hang’s bow was climbing out of the water and she was foaming along, doing at least twelve knots behind the powerful launch. Every now and then she would take a sheer and, before Beryl could correct it, the towrope would tighten across the bobstay, setting the bowsprit shrouds twanging. We were soon out of the river and opposite Williamstown. We had our clearance, and the launch came alongside again to take off the Customs Officer.
‘Goodbye,’ they shouted. ‘Good luck, come again.’
The launch curved away as they waved, ensign fluttering and brass-work shining. They seemed so typical of the Australians that we had met, friendly, efficient, and enthusiastic.
We set all sail and, close-hauled, went slowly down across the bay in the sunshine. The land and houses disappeared, the hills at the southern end of the bay were lost in haze. Here and there a few trees appeared, like a mirage on the horizon. For the rest of the day we sailed slowly across the big land-locked bay, until evening brought the lights winking out on the shore, and the channel buoys began to flash the way to the Heads. We dropped anchor off Dromana, waiting as so many sailing ships had done before, for the ebb tide to take us down early next morning to the Heads, so that we could pass through them at slack water.
Port Phillip Heads are a narrow gap, only a few hundred yards across, through which all the vast area of Port Phillip Bay pours out its waters during the ebb tide, and through which the sea comes boiling and bubbling on the flood. If the wind is against the ebb, the passage can be very dangerous. It was slack water at the Heads at ten-thirty so that we didn’t have to get up early. That night Tzu Hang swung quietly to her anchor, as motionless as if she was still at the wharf in the Yarra River. The tide chattered busily along her planking during the night, first out to sea, and then into the bay, and then out to sea again. And in the last hour of this tide we hauled in our anchor, started the engine, and motored down the misty channel.
The buoys came up out of the murk one after the other, and we checked their numbers against the chart. The mist cleared and we could see the Heads, and as soon as we were on the right bearing we turned to run out. As we passed the signal station at Point Lonsdale we saw the signal for the tides change from the last quarter to the first quarter; it was exactly slack water and there was no ripple on the surface. On the port hand there was the black and red rusting hull of a steamer wrecked on the shoals, and ahead the sails of two yachts. As soon as we were through we stopped the engine and got up sail ourselves, but the wind was very light from the south and we made very slow progress on the port tack.
By the evening we were becalmed and the mainsail was flapping about as we rolled. We handed all sail. About midnight there was a slight breeze again and I hoisted the main. As I did so, the boom dropped out of the gooseneck, and I found that the bronze fitting on the boom had fractured. The gooseneck was frozen with rust and the bronze fitting had been bending, but, as we were close-hauled, we had not noticed it. Now it had broken and, as we were still within easy reach of a port, it was just as well to have it repaired. We should have checked and oiled the goosenecks before leaving. We turned in for the rest of the night, and early next morning set off for Westernport, a few miles down the coast and up a long arm of the sea.
The wind strengthened and we ran up the long channel against the tide, followed by the two yachts that we had seen leave the Heads before us. We tied up to a wharf at a small harbour called Cowes, leaving an anchor out to hold us off the wharf if the wind shifted. This caused great distress to the captain of a steam ferry which brought holiday-makers over to Cowes. Although he hadn’t asked me to move it, he came up to me complaining angrily, as if I had already refused. I was only too anxious to move it when I found that there was a chance of the ferry fouling the line. We walked up through the village, a steep little hill, and there was a cold fresh wind blowing, which made the cotton frocks and the shirtsleeves of the Christmas visitors look out of season. At the top we found a garage and were able to get the boom fitting repaired, but it was late when we got back to the ship and, as the wind was blowing strongly down the narrow channel, we decided to leave on the tide next morning.
We had just started dinner, when there was a loud crash against the bow, and something started to scrape down the side of the ship.
‘Heavens, what on earth’s that?’ said Beryl.
‘Sounds as if we’ve got a visitor.’
We all scrambled up on deck as quickly as possible, including Pwe, who hates being left absolutely alone below. One of the yachts which had been tied up ahead of us had broken its stern-line and had swung round, putting its bowsprit through the pilings of the wharf, and breaking it off. We fended her off Tzu Hang, and while I jumped on board to look for another line, John climbed up on the wharf to get her bowline. He towed her back to her position, and we made her fast again with the best of a bad lot of line that I found in the cockpit. The wind was really blowing up and it looked as if we might have to move away from the wharf.
We settled down to dinner again, but it was a dreary Christmas Eve without Clio. Last Christmas there had been an inappropriate tree in the boat and decorations and presents and all the litter of Christmas. And now, not only were we missing the person who had made it all necessary, but we ought to have been at sea and not stuck in Westernport. John had an innate understanding of people’s feelings and the good sense not to intrude upon them. He was neither unnaturally hearty nor over-sympathetic. In fact he was just himself. When Beryl offered him some brandy butter to go with his plum pudding, he said rather gloomily, ‘Brandy butter, made with margarine and rum.’ We all began to feel better.
Before the plum pudding was finished, there was another bump against the bow, and we found that the same yacht had joined us again. The owners arrived while we were disentangling her. They hoisted the mainsail and sailed her round into the sheltered water behind the angle of the pier, where they anchored. An hour later Tzu Hang began to bump against the pilings. It was raining and as black as a night can be. The lights shone on a wet deserted wharf, and the sounds of a dance band came across from the hotel.
We untangled ourselves from the network of lines and hawsers, and pushed off into the night, groping for a nine-fathom patch, with Beryl trying to take the bearings of the wharf lights on the compass and John swinging the lead-line. We could not go where the other yacht had gone as there was insufficient water, and in the end we dropped the anchor in twelve fathoms, with forty fathoms of chain, and hoped that we’d be able to get it up again in the morning.
All Christmas Day the wind blew strongly down the channel, and we stayed at anchor, very busy making everything still more secure for the journey ahead, and it was not until Boxing Day morning that we set about getting the anchor in again, in time to sail with the tide. For some time we couldn’t break it out, but at last it came away, covered with thick blue clay. We unshackled it and let the chain go into the chain locker, after marking the end, and we lashed the anchor down, and fixed a ventilator over the chain navel. We expected to be well battened down for much of the way, and hoped that the ventilator would give us sufficient fresh air in the forecabin.
Meanwhile we were motoring up the channel, and in spite of a very rough short sea, with the wind against the tide, we were making good progress. By midday we were passing the lighthouse at the entrance to the loch, and we could see little coloured specks of holiday visitors all along the cliff-top. We kept under power until we were far enough out to clear Seal Rocks on the port tack, on our course for the south.
‘I wonder how many rocks there are in the world called “Seal Rocks”?’ said John.
‘Let’s hope the next “Seal Rocks” will be called “Los Lobos”,’ said Beryl, ‘that’s what they call them in South America.’
We went up and down, up and down, crunch and splash, crunch and splash, but gradually we drew clear, and then we switched off the engine. We would test it from time to time, but we would use it next, or so we hoped, to enter Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands, 6,700 sea-miles away. Up went the staysail, and Tzu Hang began to sail. Next the main and then the storm-jib, and we lay over and hissed away to the south. We cleared Seal Rocks easily, and Tzu Hang felt like a horse held in at the beginning of a long race; she seemed to snatch at her bridle, the foam flecks flying; I felt her great reserve of strength and power; she flung the wave tops behind her like fences. ‘Let us go, let us go,’ she seemed to say. Who could doubt that she would bring us safely home?
Beryl was at the wheel. She was wearing a yellow oilskin jumper with a hood attached and yellow oilskin trousers, and they were wet and shining with spray and from a brief shower that had passed over us; a wisp of wet hair escaped from under the hood and clung to her cheek, which was flushed with the wind, and she was radiant with delight at being off on the long trip at last. From now on she would not worry or think very much about her daughter. For the time being all her energies and thoughts would be directed to the ship and the two of us. Now that we were off she could neither write to nor hear from England, nor could she bring any further influence to bear on Clio’s future, but she knew that she, more than anyone, could make this trip a success and she was going to do it.
John and I were both wearing green plastic oilskins and trousers of a strong material which we had found in New Zealand. They were called tractor suits and had stainless steel press buttons which never failed us. They had a short cape just to give a double thickness over the shoulders, but when on watch at night and in the higher latitudes, we usually wore the coats over our yellow oilskin jumpers, so that we had the advantage of the oilskin hood. John almost invariably wore a British Columbian Indian sweater, knitted from raw wool, and a knitted hat of the same material, with a round bobble on top; and I wore a red knitted sock. Both of them could be pulled down over the ears, and were often worn like this, in spite of the moronic look that they gave us. For many days to come we were not going to think very seriously about looks.
After setting the mainsail and storm-jib, John and I came aft to where Beryl had already set the mizzen, and we swigged it up a few inches. Then John took the wheel, for it was his watch. Beryl went down below, to lie in her bunk and get some rest before tea. I went below also to check the course on the chart and make the entries in the log, and from the cockpit came a great burst of song: ‘Stand up and fight boy, when you hear the bell,’ the words came wind-torn into the cabin. We were going to hear a lot about that bell when the going was good.
CHAPTER THREE (#u7839aa9a-8415-5170-b15d-45854b6f83f7)
THROUGH THE BASS STRAIT (#u7839aa9a-8415-5170-b15d-45854b6f83f7)
ON my way below, I sat for a moment on the bridge-deck, the short deck which holds the mizzenmast, between the doghouse entrance and the cockpit. I put my hands on the after end of the sliding hatch, and then slipped down, taking my weight on my hands. All the same, I arrived with a bang below. This was the normal way of going down when we were in good spirits or in a hurry. At other times we would turn sideways and use the vertical steps on either side of the door in the bulkhead which led into John’s compartment.
The small area which I had arrived in with a thump was the centre of the ship’s activities below decks. It was 5½ by 5½ feet square, excluding portions of it which extended to the sides of the ship, underneath the deck on each side of the doghouse. It was covered by the doghouse, a low roof raised 1½ feet above the deck, in which was the sliding hatch, by which I had just come below. As we were running fast now, with the wind on the beam, I closed the hatch by sliding it back over my head, so that no spray would come in. In order to close it completely, I would have to close two small doors, but this portion of the hatch was normally left open, unless there was a strong following wind blowing coldly into the cabin.
I looked back through the small open doorway at the singer of Carmen Jones still in full voice, and shouted to him to stream the log. He turned to let the patent log, which was coiled ready in the stern, over the side into the water.
The doghouse was lit by two windows in each side and by two heavy ports let into its front. The ports were partially obscured by the transom of the dinghy, which was lashed down on the deck, upside down, in front of them.
While I was taking off my wet oilskin jacket, I was standing on the small space immediately above the engine. The deck here lifted up, so that I could get at the engine, or at least get at the top of the engine, when I wanted to work on it. As it had just been running, the teak deck above it was still quite warm, and the cat was making the most of it at my feet. In Canada, where we used the yacht frequently for getting to and from the island on which we lived, the cat was quite accustomed to the sound of the motor, and would sit on the engine cover, this removable piece of deck, while we were moving under power. Now that we used the engine so rarely, she would never stay below while it was running, and protested loudly to everyone about its use, and the discomforts of a deck passage. Directly it stopped, she always went below and sat on the warm cover.
Immediately in front of me and between the two ports in front of the doghouse, were the ship’s clock and the barometer. They could both be seen from the cockpit, and the man on watch could see the minutes dragging slowly towards the time of his relief. The barometer was dropping slightly and I set it. Behind me was the opening which led into the after compartment, John’s place, which he shared with various water tanks, fuel tanks, a large number of eggs, a 4-gallon tin of sand for the cat, four 2-gallon plastic bottles, and his own tool-box and numerous other articles, all lashed down and well secured. The well of the cockpit formed the back of this compartment, and John’s berth was partitioned off on the starboard side. In order to get some light into this part of the ship, there were two dead-lights in the deck and in the front of the cockpit well there was a window. From down below, if I looked aft, I could see the helmsman’s legs through this window, and when the hatch was closed and the washboards in place, it was sometimes reassuring after a heavy sea, to look aft and see a pair of legs there, solid and unmoved.
At my feet, and in front of me, there were two steps leading to the level of the main cabin, and below the clock and the barometer there was a short handrail, which we used when stepping down into the cabin. On each side, below the doghouse windows, there was another handrail, for use when moving in the doghouse. Because of the constant and often violent motion, we found these handrails most useful, and as necessary as the straps in the London Underground.
On each side of where I was standing there were two bins, the tops of which formed the bottom steps, when coming below by the more sedate method, or when going on deck. They also made two seats, where we sat for meals at sea, conveniently close to the cook and the galley. If it was very calm, or in port, we used the cabin table for meals, but if we were keeping watch and steering, it was better to use these seats, as we could shout to the helmsman, and pass him his food at the same time as those off watch were having theirs. In rough weather the helmsman would usually prefer to wait until he could be relieved for his meal.
When I stood on these two steps, with my legs straddled, and my head out of the sliding hatch, I could just see comfortably over the doghouse, with the minimum exposure. The position reminded me of the days when I used to peer out of the turret of a Sherman tank, also hoping to avoid exposure. When ducking over a steep sea there was also a certain similarity in the motion.
In front of these two seats, on the port side, was the chart table, and on the starboard side, the galley. The chart table was a large one, and under it were shelves and racks for charts, and at one end of it, against the side of the ship, there was a bookshelf for the navigational books in use. Dividers and rulers were kept in canvas bands against the bulkhead, above the table, and the sextants were in a locker just below the hatch.
The galley, on my right as I looked down into the cabin, was lined with stainless steel below and behind the two stoves. Beside them there was the cook’s seat, also known as the electric chair, because the two engine batteries were below it. It faced forwards and had a curved seat, with two arms, so that the cook was held firmly in place, whatever the antics of the ship. In front of this seat was the dresser and sink, and 2 feet above the dresser, and up to the deckhead, were two shelves full of good things, such as tea, cocoa, chocolate, and sugar, and other loot for the night watches. Above the stoves were racks for saucepans and plates, and numerous mugs and cups, of a motley shape and design, hung from cup-hooks beneath them.
I hung up my coat in the oilskin locker, in front of the chart table, and then turned to the chart and laid a course down past Wilson Promontory, past Rodonda Island and the Curtis group, and up to the entrance of the Banks Strait, the southern passage through the islands, which lie between Australia and the north coast of Tasmania.
All that afternoon we made great progress, as if Tzu Hang was as pleased as we were to be on her way at last. The low coast to port went flying past, and in a few hours we had covered the same distance that it took two days to put behind us on our way up to Melbourne. We were under storm-jib, staysail, full main, and mizzen, and waltzing along with the sun abeam, a cold wind, sunshine, and squalls. I took over from John for the second afternoon watch from three to six. When I came up to relieve him, after making the entries in the log, he went forward to try and sweat the jib and main up a bit further. He could never leave the deck without trying to improve the set of the sails, and always the first thing that he did after coming on deck was to try and get their luffs a little tauter.
John had already fastened the wheel in approximately the right position, so that I was able to go forward and give him a hand. After working the heads of the sails up an inch or so, we coiled the ends of the halliards and hooked them up on the belaying pins on the mast. Then he went below to take off his oilskins, and I returned to the cockpit.
With the sea abeam Tzu Hang was going very comfortably, but every now and then a splash of spray came over the side of the ship, so that the decks were wet. None of us was ever content with the adjustment that the previous watch had put on the wheel, so I now turned my attention to try and improve the setting that John had spent most of his watch in achieving. With the wind on the beam Tzu Hang will not sail herself except under certain combinations of sail, and this was not one of them. On each side of the wheel, attached to the gunwale, is a piece of elastic shock cord, in turn fastened to a short piece of line with a loop in the end. These loops can be dropped over the spokes of the wheel, so that it is held in the right position but still allowed a certain amount of play. The wheel had been fixed in the position to counteract Tzu Hang’s tendency, under this rig, to turn up into the wind. When she is under a balanced rig, she can be left alone for hours and hours, and sometimes for days, but when artificial means are used to keep her on her course, she usually requires watching, and occasional corrections.
John appeared again in the hatchway, his arms resting on the step of the hatch. He was the carpenter, and was in charge of all maintenance, repair, and improvements, to the hull and fittings. Beryl was the mate and sailmaker, and was responsible for fitting out and provisioning the ship, and the repair of the sails. I was the skipper and navigator, and also the rigger; so that our duties were well divided. We were all adequate navigators, and often John would work out a longitude from my sight, or I would work out a position line from Beryl’s.
In addition to her other duties, Beryl was also the cook, and John and I tried to recompense her in some way for her labours by being the washers-up. We sometimes offered in a half-hearted way to do something about the cooking, but she really did not trust us with the stoves, and often when something went wrong with them, we were suspect, either for having pricked them too much or not enough, during the night watch. We also took one extra three-hour watch each, so that Beryl could be free for meals and get a good sleep in the afternoon. John and I took three three-hour watches, and Beryl two, making twenty-four hours in all. Our watches always came at the same time, so that we were able to get accustomed to the hours. Beryl had the twelve to three watch at night, and always said that she preferred it, although most sailors think that it is the worst one. Even when watch-keeping was not necessary, whoever would normally have been on duty was responsible for the running of the ship. We knew automatically who had to turn out to stop a rattle or correct a course.
Now as John looked aft from the shelter of the doghouse, his eyes wandered over what he could see of the ship, he was always in search of something that he might do to improve her. Although she wasn’t his, he made himself part of her, and she always came first with him. Generations of his family had followed the sea, the hard sea of Cornish fishermen and Grimsby trawlermen. Salt water was in his veins, and I sometimes wondered whether he wasn’t sired in it.
He looked behind him at the clock. ‘What does the log say?’ he asked.
‘Fourteen miles.’
‘Good lass; seven knots. I streamed it two hours ago. Keep it up.’
‘Are you going to turn in?’
‘No, it’s nearly tea-time. Those pills are good. I don’t feel a thing.’
‘Nor do I, but I’m going to have another tonight for luck.’
‘Directly I get a chance, if it isn’t too rough, I might take these doors away and put in washboards. They let too much wind in. What do you think?’
‘Too much water too, sometimes. Is Beryl asleep?’
‘No, here she comes. My, my!’
Beryl appeared in the hatch opening. She is inclined to let herself go over useful sea-going dresses, and I saw that she had already decided that it was cold enough for the ‘Southern Ocean Cruising Rig’, a combination woollen suit made up in the McLeod tartan, with a built-in belt, and a sliding hatch behind. It was practical, warm, and bright; bright yellow and black.
‘How are we doing?’ she asked now, that many times repeated question. I told her and she went down to make tea, and John went with her. I watched a squall dragging over the sea towards us and wondered whether it would hit us or pass behind. A few shearwaters were swinging low over the waves, but I could see no albatrosses. John stood up again and passed me a mug of tea and a slice of fruit cake. I thought that everything was very good, and best of all the fact that we were really off and laying the miles behind us. I imagined the string of dots, the daily positions, growing across the chart. 6,700 miles to Port Stanley: 67 perhaps, 67 little crosses, before we arrived. We might be there in time to send a cable for Clio’s birthday. Sometimes the crosses would lie close together on the chart, and sometimes they would stretch out across it, reaching for the harbour on the other side, but the time, I knew, would pass quickly as we settled down to our sea-going routine, and cups of tea would follow cups of tea, at about this time, on each succeeding day.
The cat arrived suddenly on the bridge-deck. When any of us came on deck, we came up slowly and deliberately, taking careful hold of first the edge of the hatch and then the shrouds, but the cat used to arrive with a single spring from the chart table, so that she seemed to fall from nowhere, as light as a windblown leaf, on to the deck. The preliminaries seen from below were not so graceful. She would stand on the chart table swaying to the roll, and craning her neck as if she hoped to see where she might land, and trying to make up her mind to jump. The backstage view of her shaggy little backside, as it disappeared over the step of the hatch, couldn’t compare with the arrival of the ballerina as seen from the stalls in the cockpit. She stayed with me for a moment or two, but it was too cold and rough for cats, and she returned below again.
John relieved me at six. He had had his supper and I had mine as soon as I got below. We tried to have all our meals by daylight, in order to save kerosene, and when we were keeping watch we were always ready to turn in when we could, so that the day consisted of watch-keeping, eating, and sleeping, with only a little reading before we fell asleep. As soon as washing-up was done, I opened my stretcher cot on the port side of the main cabin, and unrolled my sleeping bag and climbed in. The bunk on the other side was full of twice-baked bread, which we found didn’t go mouldy, as long as it was kept in the open. We had sixty loaves.
If the bread did go bad, we had a stove in the main cabin for baking, and also for heating: a blue enamel coal- or wood-burning stove, with a good oven, but only under certain conditions could we persuade it to burn at sea without smoking.
I lay in my bunk now and tried to sleep. The water was rushing past the planking at my ear, a sweet trickling, talking sound. Soon I heard Beryl getting out the navigation lights. She lit them, waited for them to warm up, and then handed them up to John. Probably we would use them only on this night, as from now we would be off the traffic routes. Last she lit the stern light and John tied it up on the mizzen-boom gallows, a white hurricane light which never seemed to blow out, and which showed up better than the red and the green. We did not shield it from forward for this reason.
Pwe came into my bunk and sat right up by my face, her whiskers tickling my cheek, and purring loudly. She was really glad to be at sea again. It was a life that she knew and enjoyed. I think that she felt she was mistress of the ship and the people in it. One of us was always petting her or playing with her, and she seemed to think that we were hers to do what she wanted. Beryl thought that John and I teased her too much, but from the scars on my hand and sometimes my nose, I seemed to be the one who suffered. She got John once when he was teasing her, and he cut her dead for a week, and though she gradually won him back, she never used her claws on him again.
At about a quarter to nine I swung myself out of my berth and lowered my feet on to the seat below it. Then reached across to the brass pipe in the centre of the cabin, which holds the sliding table. When not in use, the table is slid up and fastened close under the deckhead, out of the way, and the pipe is used to grab on to when one is moving in the cabin. Holding on to the edge of my berth and the brass pipe, I stepped down and made my way aft. There was an oil-light burning in the cabin and another oil-light in the forecabin, where Beryl was sleeping. Both were turned down and dim, but they were there in case of some emergency.
When I looked out of the hatch, I could see John hunched over the wheel. Behind him the stern light flickered and flared, and outlined his broad figure, enlarged by an extra jersey under his oilskins. Tzu Hang seemed to be going at a tremendous pace, and the night looked very dark and wild. ‘How are we doing?’ I shouted up to him.
‘Doing well,’ he shouted back, ‘fifty-six miles on the log. Pretty cold. No hurry.’
‘Any lights?’
‘Yes, you can see Glennie Island light just abeam, and Wilson Promontory ahead, only the loom of Wilson Promontory though.’
‘What are the bearings?’
John checked the bearings by looking over the compass, and I marked our rough position on the chart. We were just beginning to cross the Bass Strait. I pulled on my oilskin jumper and my oilskin trousers, and then my coat and my red sock over my head, and climbed up on deck. I sat down beside John until my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness.
‘I think that the wind is down a bit,’ he said.
‘Oh. I thought that it was blowing a little harder. All right. I can take her now.’
John stood up and stretched, then he stepped out of the cockpit and on to the deck, holding on to the shrouds and looking round him. After a time, he stepped carefully across to the hatch and disappeared below. For a time I could see his shadow moving against the lamplit wall of the doghouse, and then it disappeared and after a few minutes, I felt sure, he was asleep.
The night seemed very dark and although it was midsummer, I began to feel cold. I began to wonder why I could not see Rodonda Island. I peered under the boom but saw only universal blackness. There wasn’t a star to be seen and there was no moon. Only low overcast sky and rain. I walked carefully up the deck, leaning inwards and holding on to the handrail on the doghouse, and then the handrail on the bottom of the dinghy until I could cross over to the shrouds. From there I stepped across to the staysail boom and ran my hand along this to the forestay. Looking behind the jib, I could see Rodonda quite clearly, a dark round rock of an island, and perhaps a mile away. All was well. An hour passed, and I sat in the cockpit and listened to the rush of Tzu Hang and the occasional spatter of spray, and I watched the dark outline of her sail against the sky. I wondered when we should see Curtis Island. After that there would be no more land until the morning. The black waves came swinging like walls out of the night and disappeared again, and sometimes they hissed quietly as they came, showing a thin white line in the darkness, or a phosphorescent glow. There was no malice in them.
I sat in the cockpit and thought of nothing in particular. I thought of Beryl in the forecabin and wondered if she was sleeping and thought that this watch was like all watches and that it was going slowly. Soon there was only an hour to go, and I went below to make myself some tea, but I kept looking aft to watch the occasional flash of a light so that I could check the course, and several times I had to climb up on deck to correct it.
I woke up Beryl and she was awake at once, and when I was back in the cockpit, I could see her shadow moving as I had seen John’s below. She came and sat beside me and I felt a warm flood of companionship between us. ‘The wind is up, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘No, I think it’s down now.’
I checked the log, leaning aft and flashing a torch on it. There were seventy-eight miles on the log in eleven hours, and the wind looked like holding. Beryl settled down with her hand on the wheel. She wouldn’t move until she woke John at three, sitting patiently and alert at the wheel, and quite untroubled by any need for the various devices that John and I would employ to pass the time.
I turned in but could not sleep until we had seen Curtis Island. After a time, I came to the hatch again. Beryl was just as I had left her an hour before.
‘Want anything?’
‘No thank you.’
‘Seen anything?’
‘No. Sometimes I think that I see something to port, but I couldn’t be sure. Now I can’t see anything. Can’t you sleep?’
‘No, I just want to see Curtis Island. There’s a creak. Have you heard it?’
‘Yes, isn’t it annoying? I heard a creak. I thought that it must be the mast.’
Tzu Hang never creaks in a sea, and this new noise, together with the possibility that we were being set further towards the west than I had allowed for, and consequently nearer to Curtis Island, had kept me awake. Once the noise had been noticed, it seemed to grow louder and more persistent, like a rat gnawing at a wall board. I began to imagine that Tzu Hang had been strained during the bashing we had given her, on our way up to Melbourne. I moved about, listening anxiously, as if I was a new and nervous father trying to discover in the middle of the night whether his offspring was really only sleeping.
Under the doghouse the noise sounded louder, and I noticed a new mug swinging on its cup-hook. I steadied it and the noise stopped immediately. It was only a rough bit of pottery in the handle, grating on the hook. I suppose it went on, but we never noticed it again. The noises of a ship blend into a tune so well known that it is never heard. Anything new strikes a discordant note which seems to vibrate through the ship as horribly as reveille to the soldier. We are often asked how we know, if we are all asleep below, if anything goes wrong, but any little change in the ship’s rhythm, any slight sound, and least flap of a sail or the lift of a boom, and whoever is nominally on duty awakes immediately.
I heard Beryl call. ‘Now I can see something,’ she said.
I looked out of the hatch. The sky had cleared slightly, and dark against a dark sky, but clearly visible, was Curtis Island. Perhaps it was a good three miles away, but it looked much closer. I went below and fell asleep immediately and stayed asleep until I felt someone shaking me by the leg. It was John and it was also daylight. I felt as if I had dropped off for a few minutes only and quite indignant at having to get up so soon.
When I went aft to put on my oilskins, I looked out of the hatch. It was a grey morning and there were plenty of whitecaps still showing. Tzu Hang seemed to be going as well as ever. John was leaning over the after end of the cockpit, cleaning the face of the log.
‘What have we done?’
‘117. Pretty good. I think that the wind has dropped slightly, but she’s still going well.’
As soon as I was ready, I climbed up the ladder and then made that familiar movement to the cockpit, one hand to the mast, one hand to the shroud, as I stepped aft. It is as well that these movements should become automatic, because they have to be carried out on black nights, with a wildly moving deck, and spray flying; when there is no room for mistakes. A great mountaineer once said that only fools and children jump on mountains, and he might have added Gurkhas, going down hill. The same applies to small ships.
For once John was content to go below without fiddling with the sails. If he was quick he would get an hour and a half before breakfast. His eyes looked slightly red on the rims, and I knew that he would be asleep in a moment. But no trump of doom, no clarion call to heaven, would bring him out of his box-like berth quicker than Beryl’s call to breakfast.
I always disliked the nine to twelve watch in the evening. Between washing up after supper and the beginning of the watch, I was too wide awake to sleep, but half way through the watch I became involved in a desperate struggle to avoid it. The morning watch was far better. I was usually well rested after six comparatively undisturbed hours in my bunk, and the wonderful prospect of breakfast in an hour and a half made pleasant the worst of mornings. From seven onwards Beryl would be about and I would be able to talk to her as she appeared from time to time in the hatchway.
Until then there were many things to see and think about. First the weather portents, the barometer, the wind, the sky and the clouds, and the sea. Then the set of the sails and a quick look round for any loose ends of rope, or signs of chafe. Then a check on our position, and a search for land if we happened to be near it. Then a check on the birds that might be visible about the ship. I was always trying to recognise a companion of the day before, and often found one.
By the time all this was done Beryl appeared at the hatch. I showed her Pyramid Rock, a jagged tooth sticking abruptly out of the sea on the port quarter.
‘Can you see Flinders?’
‘No, not yet; I’m not sure, maybe there is something … still poor visibility.’
She had plaited her hair and tied it over her head. It didn’t look very elegant, but at sea we had to put up with it. She passed me the cat’s earth, in the blue plastic basin, to empty over the side. As I handed it back, I heard the primus hissing.
A moment later Pwe arrived on the deck herself, put her paws on the cockpit coaming, just aft of the doghouse, and looked at the weather. She decided that it was too wet to keep to the deck and went below again. Here she did all that was possible to interfere with the cooking, protesting her hunger in a loud voice, and jumping on to Beryl’s back, if she got the chance, in order to explain her need more lucidly.
I heard Beryl call that breakfast was ready and, without any delay, John appeared and handed me a bowl of porridge with milk and brown sugar. If Tzu Hang had been sailing herself he would have stayed in bed, and I would have handed him his food into his berth. Now he sat down on the step at the foot of the ladder and Beryl, who almost always does two things at once, sat in the cook’s chair and read, and at the same time fried bacon and eggs. From time to time she gave the cat a piece of fried bacon rind from the pan, and Pwe would pat it about the deck with her paw, till it was cool enough for eating. If we were having cooked bacon, Pwe would not dream of eating the rind unless it was cooked also. After bacon and eggs came burnt toast and home-made marmalade. Burnt toast is the hallmark of Beryl’s wonderful breakfasts, as inseparable from them as her book is from her, when she is cooking.
These typical breakfasts were provided for us day after day for fifty days all across that great Southern Ocean. Perhaps never before had such good breakfasts been eaten so regularly for so long in those particular waters.
After breakfast we could see Flinders Island indistinctly, and soon we began to try to pick out the entrance to the Banks Strait. After a time we could make out a small mark on the horizon ahead which took form gradually. A lighthouse, a black lighthouse instead of a white one, as described in the pilot book, but a lighthouse all the same, on a low flat island. It was Goose Island, and as we rounded it we entered the Banks Strait.
Then came another marvellous day of sailing. Forsyth Island to port and the green Tasmanian Coast away to starboard, and the boom as wide as could be in order to let us get round Swan Island. There was white water showing everywhere as we squeezed past. By noon, when we reset the log, we had done 163 miles. By four o’clock in the afternoon, we had to haul down the mizzen and shortly afterwards we handed the main, running under the two headsails, whereupon the wind began to ease, as it so often does in the evening, and we set the main again.
The Sydney-Hobart race had started on the same day as we did, and we had wondered at one time whether we would have to pass through them. We heard in the evening, on the radio, that the leaders were not yet into the Bass Strait, and were meeting with light winds only. We were lucky to be on the top side of a depression which would, with any luck, carry us most of the way across the Tasman Sea.
By midnight when Beryl relieved me, the wind was right aft with an awkward sea running. It was necessary to steer all the time, and we had rigged preventer guys so that the boom would not smash over if Tzu Hang gybed. As she rolled in the steep following sea, the boom would try to lift against the preventer guy, and sometimes the leach of the sail would give a flap, which set the helmsman to spinning the wheel frantically. There was no need to worry with either Beryl or John at the wheel.
All through the dark and windy night, as the white wave tops marched in luminous procession past the ship, bright green bars of phosphorescence shone suddenly out of the night and fell astern, glowing like emeralds between the black breasts of the waves. They were beacons for Tzu Hang pointing her way to the south.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_d167e1f5-a67a-5826-914f-72124056cd8b)
ACROSS THE SOUTH TASMAN (#ulink_d167e1f5-a67a-5826-914f-72124056cd8b)
NEXT morning Tzu Hang was still racing along, with the wind a little too far aft for comfort. The glass was low, and the wind’s grey horsemen, the low rain clouds, came riding up from behind throwing a lash of rain across us as they passed, while the albatrosses ranged like greyhounds in front of them, across the downland of the sea. Wherever we looked we would see somewhere the sudden tilt of an albatross’s wing, as it turned to sweep down and along the moving valley of the sea.
Perhaps I was thinking of albatrosses, but at any rate I wasn’t paying sufficient attention to the steering, and allowed Tzu Hang to slew as a wave passed, so that there was a sudden wump as the boom went over in a gybe. The preventer guy had parted and the boom came over with a bang against the backstay, but the initial shock had already been taken by the preventer guy, and no damage was done, except to my reputation with the rest of the crew. I started to haul in on the main-sheet but before I was finished, Tzu Hang rolled and the boom gybed back again.
Two faces appeared almost immediately at the hatch opening. Neither of them said anything, but I said, ‘I think that we’ll have the main down now and set the twins.’ When it was all finished John said, ‘Thank God it was you and not me.’ The thought of the accidental gybe stayed with him all the day, and seemed to give him ill-suppressed satisfaction, and in the evening he said, ‘You know, I haven’t really felt right since I let Tzu Hang gybe on that rough night going into Auckland, and now thank goodness you’ve done one.’
‘Not one, two, and only a few seconds between. You’ll never beat that.’
‘No, thank goodness. I really feel fine about it now.’
Beryl looked rather smug. I think that she was the most careful helmsman of the three of us.
Tzu Hang was rigged in those days with a topmast forestay from the top of her mast to her bowsprit, a jibstay which hauled out on a traveller on her bowsprit, and a forestay which went to a fitting on her bow. The twin staysails were set on separate twin forestays bolted through a deck-beam half way between the bow and the mainmast, and on booms from a mast fitting 5 feet above the deck. When they were not required, these twin forestays were fastened out of the way of the staysail boom to the pinrails near the shrouds.
When we were running under twin staysails, the sheets from the booms led back to a block, and then to the tiller, so that Tzu Hang steered herself. It usually took us about twenty minutes to change from fore-and-aft rig to running rig, from the time we went on deck to the time we went below, and we were always doing it. We had not yet changed the wheel for the tiller, and self-steering would not work with the wheel, but now there was no further danger of a gybe, and the ship could be left to herself for short periods. It was much easier on the helmsman, but the sail area was reduced and we were not going so fast.
Not going quite so fast, but very nearly, because at noon we had 153 miles on the log, and by three in the afternoon it was blowing force 7, and Tzu Hang was beginning to sit up on the wave tops and to rush forward on them in the most exhilarating way. One wave top climbed on board just in front of the cockpit and we seemed to be wrapped in the breaking crest. We handed the twin staysails and ran under bare poles until after tea, when we set the twins again.
For the next few days we were caught up in a relentless rhythm of the sea. The ship reeled and surged and swung away on her course; the glass rose slightly and fell again, as depression chased depression across the Tasman Sea; rain squall after rain squall followed short sunlight, and we climbed repeatedly on to wet decks for our three-hour watches and, sleepy and chilled, down again at the end of them. The glass stayed low, and everything below decks became damp and sodden. The shifts in the wind kept us busy with sail changes. For most of the time we were under twins, but when the wind came abeam, we dropped the weather staysail and took the pole out from the other, sheeting it home as a reaching sail. Then we set the storm-jib and mizzen, and that was all that we needed. When the wind was aft, and provided it was not too strong, we set the mizzen as well as the twins.
New Year’s Eve, five days out, 750 miles on the log, and a black wet night. We had Christmas pudding for dinner; the first of the six Christmas puddings that we had for celebrations, and which would mark the small achievements of our passage. John and I were always trying to get Beryl to produce them, but they were rigorously controlled. As I sat up in the rain in the night watch, I thought of the previous New Year’s Eve, which the three of us, and Clio, had spent high up on a mountain ridge in Maui. I thought of her in England and wondered how she was getting on, and thought also that however keen I was to make a quick passage back to join her, I would also like to have a break in this wet rushing movement. At twelve I went forward and shook Beryl: ‘Happy New Year!’
‘Oh, Happy New Year!’ she said, and was awake immediately. I had a wet towel round my neck, five days’ grizzled grey beard, and wet oilskins, and as I leant forward to give her a kiss, she felt warm and damp and smelt slightly musty.
Back in the cockpit another black rain squall was marching up from behind, dark and forbidding, and by the time Beryl joined me it was sluicing round us.
‘How are you feeling?’ I asked her.
‘Feeling fine; still I wouldn’t mind a change so that we could fix up the tiller for self-steering.’
‘Me too, everything’s so damned wet.’
Wet or no, it made no difference while the wind lasted. Sleep and feed and watch; too little sleep, enough food, and too much watch, but by the end of the first week, we were still just short of a thousand miles: four miles short. We were also rather further north than we had intended as a northerly current was setting us up and knocking some miles off the run as measured on the chart. On that last day we were close-hauled under jib, staysail, and mizzen and with the wind from the south, but for the first time since we left Westernport, Tzu Hang was sailing herself, and what a blessed change we all thought it was. We were all down below.
‘This is more like it,’ said John. ‘That was really too much like work.’
‘Good heavens, I thought that all you single-handers were gluttons for punishment. Beryl and I never do that sort of thing. It was only because you were there that we didn’t stop and take it easy for a time.’
‘No,’ said John, ‘I suppose that it’s the cold and the damp, and such a long spell of it, but I wouldn’t like to go on indefinitely with weather like that. If she’ll steer herself it’s another story.’
‘The glass is shooting up, so maybe we can fix the tiller tomorrow.’
We all slept a glorious and undisturbed sleep that night, and woke up to find that the sails were flapping uselessly. We took everything down while the porridge cooked, and after breakfast set about changing the wheel to the tiller. At first it seemed as if we would be unable to do so, as the wheel fitting was frozen hard on to the rudder-post, and we had to heat it with a blow torch before we could move it. Wheel, wheel-box and worm-gear we stowed right aft in the counter, and put the tiller on in its place. Tzu Hang looks rather better with a tiller, or perhaps it is just that a change is nice.
While we worked a seal played around us, popping his whiskery nose out of the oily sea, and looking like a bald-headed old man, peering over the morning paper; then he turned over on his back and waved a flipper across his chest as if he was fanning himself. After a time he went on his way. Perhaps he was bound for the Snares, but anyway he didn’t seem to be at all perturbed about his landfall.
While the seal played around us the albatrosses came visiting. They came gliding over the swell, apparently using the cushion of air, raised by the lift of the waves, to support them. There seemed to be no breeze at all, and from time to time they were forced to give a few slow strokes with their wings. They always seemed to look rather furtive and ashamed when they did so, as if they hoped that no other albatross had seen them. It was obviously something that they did not want talked about in the albatross club. They glided so close to the smooth water that sometimes an end wing feather would draw a skittering line across the surface as they turned. One after another they came up to the ship and thrusting their feet out in front of them, they tobogganed to a halt and as they settled down, they held their wings together high above their bodies, until they folded them one after the other, in a curious double fold, against their backs.
They paddled round the ship as we worked, coming close under the counter, and all the time Pwe pursued them on deck. She crouched under the rail and then raised her head, with her ears flattened sideways, so that she showed as little of herself as possible when she looked over. Then she crouched down and crawled along the deck until she thought that she was directly over one of the big birds, when she looked again. But she could get no further, and her jaw used to chatter with rage and frustration.
Sometimes the albatrosses used to dip their bills in the water and then snap them together with a popping sound. They reminded me of the senior members of a Services Club, tasting port. We never found out what they ate. They trifled with pieces of bread, but never swallowed them.
As soon as we had fitted the tiller, John turned his attention to the washboards, which he made from some spare teak that we had on board. He made a perspex window in the lower washboard so that we could look through to see how the helmsman was and if he needed anything. While he was doing this, Beryl was working on some caulking, stopping a slight leak in the deck, and I was greasing rigging-screws.
When John worked with wood, he seemed to caress it. The tools in his hands looked as if they carried out his wishes of their own volition, and even the wood seemed to submit without protest. His movements were so sure that any work he was doing appeared amazingly easy. When he marked wood with a pencil, he marked it with one straight line, and when he picked it up again after laying it aside, he knew exactly what his marks meant. Most wonderful of all, everything always seemed to fit. Now he rebated the two washboards so that they overlapped and made a windproof joint, and when he dropped them into position in their slots they fitted as if the join had been a straight saw-cut.
‘How on earth do you get things to fit the first time?’ I asked him.
‘I reckon that’s what you learn in five years’ apprenticeship,’ he replied.
He was sharpening his chisel on a stone with regular even strokes, the angle never varying. When he finished the light shone on one smooth face, and not on a number of facets, as it would have done if I had been doing it.
‘When I was doing my apprenticeship,’ he went on, ‘and finished my first job, I went to the foreman and asked him to pass it. It was a small cabinet and I was pretty proud of it. He came and looked at it, and then went away without saying anything, and came back in a few minutes with an axe and smashed it. Then he told me to make a proper one. I guess that makes you learn to do a thing properly. Still everyone can’t be a carpenter. You have to be the right type you know.’
He said this as if he was commiserating with me for being blind or a cripple, and he was hoping for some reaction on my part.
When John had been a youngster in Jersey, the Germans had moved in and, owing to some failure of an engine in a small boat, he and his mother and father were unable to get away. The whole family were then taken to Germany and held throughout the war as hostages. John’s father has been described to me as a sturdy and uncompromising Yorkshireman, and I’m sure that John is very much a chip of the old block, so that the Germans must often have regretted their selection. What with one thing and another, John did not have a great deal of opportunity for orthodox schooling, so that when he found himself back in Jersey, he decided to learn a trade. When he had finished his apprenticeship, he went to South Africa with his mother to her people, as there were only two of them then, and after a time he set off by himself to Canada, to work as a carpenter and to build his boat, and to sail her round the world if possible. We were lucky to meet him soon after the beginning of his journey.
If the first week was all that we had expected of the South Tasman, the next week, which was spent largely south of New Zealand, gave us all kinds of variety. After the day of rest and repair in the sun, we had a grey wet drizzling day, with the wind in the north-west and continuous rain. We fixed a plastic water-bottle to the foot of the mizzenmast, and fastened a sail-cover upside down under the mizzen boom. We caught two gallons of water, and on the strength of this I shaved, and decided never again to go unshaven for so long, if I could avoid it. My beard felt dirty. It probably was, and it tickled me when I tried to sleep. From then on John and I kept our whiskers more or less under control.
The next day was warm and sunny, with a light following wind. John was the photographer, and he had about 2,000 feet of 16 mm. film which he intended to shoot. Now he suggested that we should put the dinghy overboard and film Tzu Hang under her twins. There was little wind. Tzu Hang was rolling along very quietly, and there was no white water, only the long easy swell. There seemed no danger in putting the dinghy over, and if he got left behind we would put the headsails down and wait for him.
We had two dinghies on board, stowed one on top of the other, upside-down. The bottom of one was of moulded fibre-glass, light and fast and easy to handle. It has stood up to an immense amount of rough use for several years, and was easily pulled on board by one person. On top of this was a plywood pram, also light and seaworthy and with a high freeboard, so that it fitted down on the deck. Stowed upside-down it looked splendid and conformed to the lines of the doghouse. Moreover, it had two handrails running along its bilges. In the water and the right way up, it looked rather like a pale blue bath, but it was a great load-carrier and a good seaboat, and provided there was no head wind and a light load, it was easy to send through the water. John had carried an outboard engine on Trekka, and during the Pacific crossing, and in New Zealand, we had done some great trips with it and John’s outboard.
We undid the lashings and prised the boat off the fibre-glass dinghy, to which it was clinging like a limpet. Then we unfastened the life-line and dropped it over the side. John jumped in and we handed him his movie camera in a plastic bag. He took the oars and rowed away from the ship and as the wind had dropped altogether now, we saw that he could row faster than we were sailing. He rowed on ahead of us, working hard, and was soon far enough away to leave his oars in the rowlocks and start filming. Completely alone, in a pale blue bathlike boat, and on a vast and slowly heaving sea, he looked like something out of a nursery rhyme. An albatross landed beside him and pecked at an oar. Tzu Hang rolled slowly past him as he filmed, and when he was about a hundred yards behind her and had taken a shot as she went behind a swell, he rowed up after us. We all had a go then. It was a fascinating sight to watch the ship rolling slowly along in this big smooth swell. The motion, which we had become accustomed to, looked tremendous from the dinghy. She was showing a vast amount of copper paint as she rolled, and it was still very clean, with only a few goose-barnacles visible here and there. Nothing seems to be able to defeat goose-barnacles. I believe that they would grow on pure arsenic. When we were sailing up to Canada, the log-line became so fouled with them that we had to change it. We left the old line in the stern so that they would dry up and we could then rub them off, and the cat used to eat a few off the line every day. Above the copper there were some signs of green weed clinging to the bottom of the white paint, but otherwise Tzu Hang was looking quite yachty. She had had a complete refit in Sydney. As I was thinking about all this, she drew away from me and I had a sudden panic feeling of being deserted, and rowed as hard as I could after her. Although there was no wind, she seemed to be going quite quickly through the water.
Beryl got in the dinghy and rowed away as if she had spent her life on the open ocean in one, but when she was back on board, I understood exactly the feelings of an old hen foster mother, when the last of its ducklings is back again from the water and safely under its wing. Tzu Hang seemed to do so too.
Next day was Sunday and we were becalmed. We were busy with all kinds of work on the deck. John painted the washboards, I finished the rigging-screws, and Beryl was still hunting for and recaulking small deck and skylight leaks. It was warm on deck and not at all the weather that we expected so far south. It didn’t seem to go with this sea, which the great grain ships used to cross. I wondered how often, just in this bit of water where we were sitting in the sun, a square-rigged ship had flung past, down to her topsails, and wondering whether she was south of the Snares and north of the Auckland Islands. A number of sailing ships were wrecked on the Auckland Islands, and although there are 140 miles between them and the Snares, they are better behind than in front, when visibility is bad. We were approaching the dotted line on the chart, which is inscribed, ‘Icebergs and loose ice may be met with south of this line’.
We had lunch on deck. Lunch was always cold and consisted of twice-baked bread, which was holding up well, butter, cheese, jam, salami or sardines, fruit cake, and an orange. Sometimes we had soup, and we had orange juice or grapefruit juice to drink. We also had a large supply of onions which we ate raw with our cheese.
During the morning John had taken some shots of all the activities on deck, while Pwe spent her time hunting the albatrosses with her usual ineffective procedure. I remembered the reporter in Seattle who had telephoned me for a story, and who had said, ‘Say, Captain, will you tell me what you folks do all the time, just laze around and lounge about on deck?’
After lunch I upset the linseed oil over the newly painted washboards. John didn’t even say, ‘Some mothers have them,’ as he was heard to do when I pushed a screwdriver through my finger in Honolulu. He said, ‘I’ve got to paint them again anyway,’ and Beryl thought that it would do the deck good. It was quite obvious that everyone was determined that ‘crew trouble’ wouldn’t mar the trip. The washboards never did get painted again because this was the last of the paint-drying days.
Next day we had a wind from the north-east and we made sail after breakfast, under full sail and the Genoa. The sea was calm and there was the same long swell. Tzu Hang sailed along unattended all day. I did ‘laze around all day’, but Beryl and John must always be at something. John had persuaded Beryl to knit him a Fair Isle jersey, and they were now busy trying to work out the pattern.
Pwe was full of activity also. She kept dancing up to us sideways, her ears back and her body arched, daring us to do something. It was about this time that she invented her main game. Siamese cats are not very original in their ideas about games, and this was inevitably a mouse game. She would fly up into my berth, a canvas bunk on two poles, and then stare over the pole at her victim. If he did not respond she would complain vocally, but none of us could resist her. The game consisted of running a finger along under the canvas, while she pounced on it. There were two variations; one was to run a finger along the side of the pole, while she hid inside and tried to grab it by putting her arm over the pole, and the other was for her to sit at the end of the berth and await for a finger to appear from under the canvas. This was extremely tense work and as the finger approached the end of the berth, excitement grew to fever pitch with both participants. She never let it get the better of her, and although she always caught it, she only dabbed the finger with a paddy paw. After she had caught it, she would swagger away, like a boxer who has floored his opponent.
In the afternoon we heard a soft sigh come faintly through the hatch, and then another, and another, and knew that we had a school of porpoises with us. We went on deck and John filmed them, crisscrossing in front of the bow and breaking water together in threes and fours. Sometimes they would haul off to one side or the other, and one of them came leaping along almost continuously out of the water, and falling over on to his side at each jump. They stayed with us for some time, but eventually tired of the play, and dropped astern, lazily rolling a dorsal fin out of the water, before they went off on some other business. Pwe stood with her forefeet on the cockpit coaming to watch them, with her ears pricked and in a rather alarmed and elongated attitude. They are horrible animals, she thinks, and will never venture further on deck if they are about. We always love their visits, they are such merry creatures, and feel strangely gratified by their attentions, and sorry when they leave.
The blue whale also seems to be a friendly animal, and is the only whale that likes to accompany us. We have seen quite a lot of them, sometimes longer than Tzu Hang, and they have often steamed alongside, to the delirious excitement of Clio’s small brown dog.
We were now 200 miles south of the south-east corner of New Zealand, in longitude 170° east and latitude 50° 30´ south, and the wind was freshening from the north-east. On January 8, with the wind still blowing freshly from the same quarter, we were nearly down to 52° south. We could not make much headway against a roughish sea, and the starboard tack would take us back to New Zealand, while the port tack would take us further down towards the iceberg zone. I felt that there were enough hazards without going further south, where we risked the chance of meeting up with some ice, and I didn’t want to lose any sea that we had gained. So we hove to and waited for the weather to change. For the last two days of the second week we lay hove to. It was the dreariest period of the whole trip: cold, and grey, and uncomfortable.
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Miles Smeeton
This timeless classic is an exciting true story of survival against all odds.‘There was a sudden sickening sense of disaster. I felt a great lurch and heel, and a thunder of sound filled my ears. I was conscious, in a terrified moment, of being driven into the front and side of my bunk with tremendous force. At the same time there was a tearing cracking sound, as if Tzu Hang was being ripped apart, and water burst solidly, raging into the cabin. There was darkness, black boards, and I fought wildly to get out, thinking Tzu Hang had already gone. Then suddenly I was standing again, waist deep in water, and floorboards and cushions, mattresses and books were sloshing in wild confusion round me.’Miles Smeeton and his wife Beryl sailed their 46-ft Bermuda ketch, Tzu Hang, in the wild seas of Cape Horn, following the tracks of the old sailing clippers through the world’s most notorious waters. This is an exciting true story of survival against all odds, but it is also a thoughtful book which provides hard-learned lessons for other intrepid sailors.As Nevil Shute writes in his foreword: ‘It has been left to Miles Smeeton to tell us in clear and simple language just where the limits of safety lie.’
Once Is Enough
Miles Smeeton
Foreword by Nevil Shute
TO BERYL
For she was cook and captain bold, And the mate of the Nancy brig
CONTENTS
Title Page (#uf607da50-434b-5316-87e6-08ef876a1ffa)
Dedication (#u10647f26-ff1b-5aad-a4f3-cb2a18b8d35f)
FOREWORD BY NEVIL SHUTE
1 PREPARATIONS IN MELBOURNE
2 FALSE START
3 THROUGH THE BASS STRAIT
4 ACROSS THE SOUTH TASMAN
5 INTO THE SOUTHERN OCEAN
6 THE WAY OF A SHIP
7 THIS IS SURVIVAL TRAINING!
8 RECOVERY
9 THE TREK NORTH
10 FIRST DAYS IN CHILE
11 REPAIRS IN TALCAHUANO
12 STILL IN TALCAHUANO
13 TO CORONEL AGAIN
14 NOT AGAIN!
15 THERE’S A WIND FROM THE SOUTH
EPILOGUE
APPENDIX: MANAGEMENT IN HEAVY WEATHER
POSTSCRIPT
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher
MAPS
Drawn by K. C. Jordan
Melbourne and environs (#ulink_6e6e24a3-361e-5cf3-baf8-32c9f3c99a5a)
Melbourne to Seal Rocks (#ulink_1a06675f-1c93-524c-b2f3-1ce6bb9f1a74)
Through the Bass Strait (#ulink_429e32fc-896f-5d76-8372-fb2ac191828a)
Across the South Tasman (#ulink_a9d5ef82-7338-5902-9cc1-0d5d20444c4e)
January 6–24 (#litres_trial_promo)
January 24–February 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
February 12–March 6 (#litres_trial_promo)
March 6 to Arauco Bay (#litres_trial_promo)
Arauco Bay to Talcahuano (#litres_trial_promo)
December 26 to Valparaiso (#litres_trial_promo)
DRAWINGS
Drawn by the author
Accommodation plans (#ulink_c9e88d05-aa30-577c-a06f-d4fc99d33bbd)
The first jury-rig (#litres_trial_promo)
The galley and broken doorpost (#litres_trial_promo)
The first accident (#litres_trial_promo)
The forecabin and the powder-tin (#litres_trial_promo)
The final jury-rig (#litres_trial_promo)
Rolled over (#litres_trial_promo)
Under the jury (#litres_trial_promo)
‘Pitchpoling’ diagram (#litres_trial_promo)
Tzu Hang’s lines (#litres_trial_promo)
Foreword BY NEVIL SHUTE (#u7839aa9a-8415-5170-b15d-45854b6f83f7)
SOME years ago I had an afternoon to spare in Vancouver, so I went down to the yacht harbour to see what sort of vessels Canadian yachtsmen use. There I found Tzu Hang moored alongside a pontoon, slightly weather-beaten, sporting baggywrinkle on her runners, and wearing the red ensign. As I inspected her Miles Smeeton came up from below and invited me on board. That was my first meeting with this remarkable man; I did not meet his more remarkable wife till some time later.
The Smeetons had bought Tzu Hang in England a year or so previously and they had sailed her out from England across the Atlantic and through the Panama Canal to Vancouver with their eleven-year-old daughter as the third member of the crew. Before buying this considerable ship they had never sailed a boat or cruised in any yacht. They made one trip in her to Holland and then set out across the Atlantic for the West Indies. Navigation was child’s play to them; seamanship they picked up as they went along. With only two adults on board they had to keep watch and watch, but did not seem to find it unduly tiring. They made their landfalls accurately, passed the Panama, reached out a thousand miles into the Pacific before they could lie a course for Vancouver, and they arrived without incident. I asked if they had had any trouble on the way. Miles told me that they had been hove to for three days in the Atlantic; the only trouble that they had in that three days was in keeping their small daughter at her lessons. They made her do three hours school work each morning, all the way.
When I began yacht cruising after the First World War it was regarded as an axiom amongst yachtsmen that a small sailing vessel, properly handled, is safe in any deep-water sea. I think that Claude Worth, the father of modern yachting, may have been partly responsible for this idea, and it may well be true for the waters in which he sailed. A small yacht, we said, will ride easily over and amongst great waves if she is hove to or allowed to drift broadside under bare poles; you have only to watch a seagull riding out a storm upon the water, we said. Perhaps we failed to notice that the seagull spreads its wings now and again to get out of trouble; perhaps we were seldom caught out in winds of force 7 or 8 and much too busy then to observe the habits of seabirds, which probably had too much sense to be there anyway.
From time to time our complacent sense of security was just a little ruffled. Erling Tambs, in Teddy, was overwhelmed in some way by the sea when running in the Atlantic; his account was not very clear and it was easy for us to assume that he had been carrying too much sail, had been pooped and broached to. The lesson to us seemed obvious; heave to in good time or lie to a sea-anchor, perhaps by the stern if the ship was suitable. Captain Voss, sailing with two friends in a seven tonner in the China Sea, was turned completely upside down so that the cabin stove broke loose and left its imprint on the deckhead above, on the cabin ceiling. But that was a long way away; all sorts of things happen in China. … Captain Slocum was lost in the Atlantic without trace after sailing single-handed round the world—but anything could have happened to him.
It has been left to Miles Smeeton in this book to tell us in clear and simple language just where the limits of safety lie. We now know with certainty that the seagull parallel was wrong. A small yacht, well found, well equipped, and beautifully handled, can be overwhelmed by the sea when running under bare poles dragging a warp, or when lying sideways to the sea hove to under bare poles. The Smeetons have proved it, twice. Twice these amazing people saved their waterlogged, dismasted ship by their sheer competence and sailed her safely in to port, greatly assisted on the first occasion by John Guzzwell. With equal competence they have now produced this lucid and well-written book to tell us all about it.
At the risk of offending the author I must stress the fact that these are most unusual people, lest more ordinary yachtsmen should be tempted to follow them down towards Cape Horn— ‘After all, they proved that one can get away with it, didn’t they?’ Nobody reading this account can fail to realise how excellently they had prepared, equipped, and provisioned their ship for the long voyage from Australia down in to the Roaring Forties. One can say, perhaps, that she was overmasted for that particular trip. But vessels cannot be rigged solely for going round the Horn; she had also to sail through the doldrums of the Equator on her way back to England. I visited the ship in Melbourne before she sailed; she was rugged and tough and functional to the last degree, as were the people in her.
Quite a number of yachtsmen have now sailed round the world with their wives, for the most part running downwind in the Trades in the lower, more generous latitudes. How many of the wives, I wonder, could take a sextant sight from the desperately unsteady cockpit of a small yacht at sea, work out the position line with the massed figures of the tables dancing before one’s eyes, and plot it on the chart? Beryl Smeeton can do this with such accuracy that it was common practice on this yacht for anyone who was unoccupied to take the sight and for anybody else to work out the position line; their competence was equal. What can one say of a woman who, catapulted from the cockpit of a somersaulting ship into the sea and recovered on board with a broken collarbone and a deep scalp cut, worked manually like a man with her broken bone and did not wash the blood from her hair and forehead for three weeks, judging that injuries left severely alone heal themselves best? What can one say of a woman working as a carpenter to repair the gaping holes in the doghouse while the dismasted ship lurches and slithers in enormous seas, who refuses to nail the boards in place but drills a hole for every wood screw and does the job as properly as a professional carpenter could have done it on dry land? These people are quite unusual, and all yachtsmen reading this book had better realise that fact. More ordinary people would undoubtedly have perished.
They had, I think, one gap in the great cloak of competence that wrapped them round; they thought too little of their engine. In a sailing yacht designed to cruise the oceans the auxiliary motor must always take a second place to the sails and gear, yet if the weight and complication of a motor is to be carried in a ship at all it would be better to have a good one, one that will work under extreme conditions. Tzu Hang had a petrol motor with the usual electric ignition; this motor, for the sake of the internal accommodation, as is common in week-end yachts, was buried deep down in the bilges under the doghouse deck in a position where it was practically impossible to start it by hand when immersion had killed the starter batteries. After each disaster when a motor would have been a help to the dismasted ship this motor was a useless nuisance to them; the ship would have been lighter and so safer with it overboard. They could have had a hand-starting diesel mounted up in a position where one could swing upon the handle with both hands, driving the propeller-shaft by belts or chains. Accommodation might have suffered slightly, but the motor would have worked as soon as they had drained the water from the crankcase and refilled with oil. In so functional a vessel as Tzu Hang I think the motor was unworthy of the rest of her.
The Smeetons and Tzu Hang are back in British waters now; I doubt if they will stay there. A few days ago I got a letter from Miles Smeeton. In part it reads:
We sailed on the 10th for the Firth of Forth, almost with mechanics and shipwrights still on board. Had two days to Hartlepool where we put in on account of a storm warning—and then off for the Forth and bang into a north-westerly gale. We were hove to for three days but Tzu Hang behaved beautifully and kept her decks dry and re-established our confidence.
So they go on their way again across the seas. In this admirably written book they have done a good job for yachting. All yachtsmen should read it and be grateful to the valiant people who have dared to chart the limits of their sport.
CHAPTER ONE (#u7839aa9a-8415-5170-b15d-45854b6f83f7)
PREPARATIONS IN MELBOURNE (#u7839aa9a-8415-5170-b15d-45854b6f83f7)
THE crowd still thronged the Spencer Street bridge when Clio and I came back from the Olympic Games. They were leaning on the parapet and looking at the Royal Yacht, as they had done ever since her arrival in Melbourne. They were in holiday mood, looking for the best angle for their cameras, and full of enthusiasm and pawky Australian humour. Just across the bridge in a shop window a notice had been posted: ‘English spik here,’ it said; and on the door of the funeral parlour, a little further up the street, there was a card saying briefly that any Olympic visitors were welcome.
Looking down river from the bridge, we could see how it wound its way between wharves, warehouses, and docks, its course marked by high cranes and the masts of ships, until in its last mile it curved between low flat banks to its outlet in Port Philip Bay. In front of us Britannia’s beautiful tall bow reached over the bridge, and beyond her, on the other side of the river, an Australian ship was moored. Immediately opposite Britannia, and tied up to the south wharf, there was another yacht, also flying the British flag, for she was registered in England, although her home was now in Canada. She was very small compared to her royal neighbour, but she also intended to sail in a few days for England, and by the same route, south of New Zealand and south of Cape Horn. She was called Tzu Hang, and she was ours.
Beyond the Britannia, and parallel to and across the river from Tzu Hang, ran Flinders Street, with its ships’ chandlers, whose shops Beryl visited every day with a preoccupied air and carrying long lists in her hand. Behind Flinders Street, the land sloped up to Collins Street, with its banks and clubs and prosperous good-looking buildings, and to the low hills on which the city of Melbourne is built. Not so long ago the river here used to be full of sailing ships, and Clio and I would have seen a forest of masts and spars; but now there were only two, Tzu Hang and a big yacht down from Sydney, which was tied up in front of us.
‘Look at that idiot cat. She isn’t half giving those sails a go,’ someone said, calling the attention of his friend to Tzu Hang, and when we looked across we saw Pwe, the Siamese cat, sharpening her claws on the cover of the mainsail. The sail-cover was put on not so much for looks as to protect the sail from the cat. As we watched we saw a man climb down on to the deck of the yacht, carrying one of the plastic bottles which we used for topping up the water tanks, and Beryl appeared in the hatch and took the bottle from him.
‘I wonder who that is?’ I said. ‘It’s not John.’
‘Oh, it’s just someone she’s roped in,’ said Clio irreverently of her mother. ‘She’s always roping someone in to work. Come on.’
She ran on now across the wharf to where Tzu Hang was lying. Although she was only fifteen she was already fully grown in height, tall and slim. She leant out from the edge of the wharf, unaware of her best clothes, and caught hold of the shrouds, and then swung on to the ratlines, and dropped down on to the deck. She wouldn’t be with us on this next trip. She had been with us on all our previous trips; from England to Canada, and three years later from Canada to New Zealand, and then across to Australia, and now she had to go to England to school. We were going to follow in Tzu Hang as quickly as possible. She was not the first member of the crew to leave the ship, because her small brown dog, who had also been with us on all our travels, had already been sent off home from Sydney. He was travelling in luxury now in a cargo ship, spending most of the time in the bunk of one of the apprentices. We hoped to be back in time to receive him when he came out of quarantine.
To replace these two members of the crew we now had John. We had first met him in San Francisco, where we found that he also was bound for New Zealand, and like us had sailed down from Victoria in British Columbia. He was sailing single-handed in his little Laurent Giles-designed yacht, Trekka, which he had built himself, with great skill, in Victoria. We planned our trip across the Pacific together, and for a year now we had seen much of each other. When the two yachts lay together at the various anchorages and ports we made, John used to come on board for meals, and he would put on weight in port and take it off again as quickly during his single-handed passages. When he heard that Clio was going back to school, and that we would like to have a shot at the Horn if we could find a suitable crew to come with us, he said that he’d lay up Trekka in New Zealand, and come along with us. Nowhere could we have found a better companion.
Before climbing down from the wharf on to Tzu Hang’s deck, I had a good look at her, but I could see nothing that wanted doing now. She had been fully fitted out in Sydney, and spruced up again on her arrival in Melbourne, and she had had a good testing on her way down. She is a 46-foot ketch, 36 feet on the water line, 11 foot 6 inch beam and drawing 7 feet. She has a canoe stem and a marked sheer, and her bowsprit follows the line of the sheer so that it has a delicate upward lift, and she seems to be sniffing the breeze and eager to be off. The truck of her mainmast is 51 feet above the deck, and her mizzen 35 feet and she carries 915 square feet of sail. She is flush decked, with a small doghouse, 5½ by 5½ feet, separated by a bridge-deck from her self-draining cockpit, which is only 34 by 34 inches. She was built of teak in Hong Kong, copper fastened and with a lead keel of just over seven tons, in 1938, and she was shipped home in 1939. We bought her from her first owner in 1951, and sailed her back to Canada.
I let myself down on to the deck by way of the shrouds and went below, and I found Beryl and Clio sitting together in the main cabin opposite a stranger, an Australian and, I supposed, the man who had been helping her with the water.
‘Hullo,’ she said to me. ‘Here you are. This is my husband. I’m afraid I didn’t quite get your name——’
He introduced himself. ‘How d’you do,’ he said. ‘I just came down here to take a snap of the Britannia from the wharf here——’
‘And Beryl put you to work,’ I interrupted.
‘Too right she did, and I’ve been working here ever since. I tell her that there’s many a firm here would snap her up, for labour management you know. She’s been telling me about your trip. Sounds very interesting. I wish I could come with you.’
‘As long as it’s not too interesting.’
‘It might be at that. It can be quite tough even round here. I do a bit of sailing here. Tasman race, but crewing, not my own boat. Which way are you going?’
‘Well we thought we’d go straight across and through the Banks Strait, and then right down south of New Zealand, and then across keeping just about north of the limit of icebergs or floating ice. We’d go south of the Snares here and north of the Auckland Islands, and south of the Antipodes Islands.’ I showed him the route on a weather chart.
‘It’s a long way south,’ he said. ‘Have any other yachts been that way?’
‘Well one or two have been round the Horn, or through the Straits of Magellan, but I think they’ve all been up to Auckland first, so that our route will be a good bit further south than the others.’
‘Well I’d still like to come along, but anyway I’ll not say goodbye now, because I’m going to pick you all up in my car on Wednesday and drive you to the airport. I hear you are off to school in England,’ he said, turning to Clio, ‘I wonder how you’ll like that after all this sailing.’
The tea was made and the kettle was hissing pleasantly on the galley stove, but he wouldn’t stay. ‘The first time I’ve ever known an Australian refuse a cup of tea,’ I remarked, but he said that he’d have tea with us on Wednesday, and off he went.
‘What a nice chap!’ I said to Beryl. ‘How did you pick him up? Good show fixing a lift to the airport.’
‘Oh, he just came along and asked if he could give me a hand. He’s brought gallons of water. And when I told him that Clio was leaving on Wednesday, he said that he’d been longing to give someone a lift as an Olympic gesture, and that we were the first non-Australian visitors that he’d been able to pick up. I don’t think that he’s taken a photo of the Britannia yet.’
We sat down to tea. ‘You really ought to have been at the Games,’ Clio said, ‘it was such fun.’
‘I don’t think that I’d ’ve enjoyed them very much. Besides they look so like the school sports to me, and you know I hate school sports. I think the umpires are the best part. They look so funny all dressed up in their little blazers, and they go trooping after each other in single file, looking exactly like a string of cormorants, and when they sit on those steps one on top of each other, they look even more like cormorants, sitting on a rock. Anyway Pwe and I have enjoyed ourselves, and I’ve made a new rack for the saucepan lid.’
Beryl’s carpentry suffers from her preference for using up an old piece of wood rather than throwing it away, but all the same she is a very enthusiastic and determined carpenter, and was always making something about the ship. The cat was sitting on her lap, her eyes closed and her ears pricked, and her tail lashing gently at the mention of her name. Her eyes opened now, a deep clear blue, as the ship stirred and someone stepped down on to the deck.
‘Here’s someone who always knows when tea’s ready,’ said Clio as John came down below. He was tall and fair, and filled most of the cabin door, so that Beryl had to squeeze past him to get to the kettle.
‘What do you think of my saucepan rack?’ she asked, pointing it out to him.
John is a carpenter, or rather an artist in carpentry. He looked at it, and then patted her on the shoulder. She looked quite small beside him. ‘Pretty good,’ he said, and I saw that she was pleased with the praise from the expert.
The remaining days before Clio left went all too quickly, and almost before we knew it we were standing disconsolate on the airport, watching an aircraft climbing away from the end of the runway.
‘She was better than me, when I left my Mum in South Africa,’ John said, ‘I couldn’t see for tears and fell down the gangway.’ And after a moment’s thought he said, ‘Still she didn’t really know what she was doing, did she? She kissed me too.’
‘I think she had a pretty good idea,’ Beryl said, and we all laughed.
Later, when we were back in Tzu Hang, I said to Beryl, ‘Do you think she’ll be worried?’
‘Worried about what?’
‘Oh, about us and Tzu Hang, you know, when she’s not there.’
‘No, I don’t think so. As a matter of fact I asked her and she said she wouldn’t be.’
‘Good heavens. Why on earth not?’
‘Don’t be so silly. You don’t want her to worry, do you? She said that she reckoned that Tzu Hang would look after us.’
‘I hope she does.’
‘Who? Clio or Tzu Hang?’
‘Clio—or rather, both.’
In the wharf shed on the south wharf there was a small room with a telephone, which we were allowed to use. This was Beryl’s operations office, and she sat there in blue jeans and a checked shirt, ordering immense quantities of stores to be delivered to the ship. When they arrived, she and John filmed each other staggering along the wharf carrying big cartons of food. John was hoping to make a complete record of the trip with his ciné camera. In the afternoons she went up to a friend’s house, where she treated the eggs that we were taking with us by plunging them into boiling water for five seconds, and then into cold. It was the first time that we had tried this method of preserving eggs, and by the time we had eaten the last one it was over two months old. It still tasted good to me.
Soon after the Games were over Britannia left, and, as Melbourne began to reassume her workaday clothes for the few days left before Christmas, the smoke from workshops, tugs, and launches came drifting up the river, smudging the white sail-covers and making black marks on the deck. For the last few days we moved into the entrance to a little yard at the end of the wharf, as our berth was required for the dredgers, which were coming up from Port Phillip Heads. We were separated from the rest of the wharf by some high iron palings, so that casual onlookers no longer came to stand above us, and this seclusion was most appreciated by Pwe, who now spent some of the day, as well as of the night, ashore. Some shrubs grew along the palings, and there she assiduously hunted sparrows, but the Melbourne sparrows were too smart for her. Fortunately no quarantine officials found her—though there are few ships’ cats who don’t take a turn ashore when they get the opportunity, and no one is very fussy about them, as long as they are not mentioned.
We had one or two visitors in our new berth, and one of them was a tall elderly man, in a town suit, and a black hat, but one glance was enough to see that he was no city man. He was a sailor, and he knew a great deal not only of sail but also of the Southern Ocean. ‘Well,’ he said when he left, ‘Good luck to you. I think you’re going to need all of it, and I must say that I’d like to see another 7 feet off those masts.’
We thought that all small ship passages, at any rate long passages, had an element of luck about them—so is there about most things that are worth doing. But if we had thought that it was just a question of luck whether we would arrive or not, we wouldn’t have attempted the passage. We were most certainly not in search of sensation, and we believed that we had a ship and a crew that were capable of making the passage under normal conditions. We knew of course that we might meet with bad luck in all kinds of ways, but as long as we were prepared, as far as was possible, for anything that might turn up, there seemed to be no reason why we should not overcome it.
‘What on earth do you want a year’s supply of stores on board for?’ someone asked Beryl.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘there is always the possibility that we might get dismasted, and then heaven knows where we might end up, and anyway the passage would take much longer than we had expected. We could probably make do for water, but I like to be sure that we have all the food we need.’
Australia was a good place to buy all kinds of tinned food, and besides tinned food we had potatoes, onions, and two sides of bacon, as well as plenty of oranges; and after the oranges were finished, we had tinned orange-juice or grapefruit-juice in almost unlimited quantity.
Although there is plenty of stowage space on Tzu Hang, we were so well stocked that Beryl began to think of creating more by getting rid of Blue Bear. Blue Bear had become a ship’s mascot, and John and I wouldn’t hear of it. He had been given to Clio when we first left England. He was a blue teddy bear, inappropriate and too big, but no artifice of ours could persuade Clio to part with him. When we were crossing the Bay of Biscay, and beating down against a south-westerly wind, with Tzu Hang close-hauled and sailing herself, Blue Bear, in oilskin and sou’wester, was lashed to the wheel. Through the doghouse windows we had seen a steamer come away from her course and steam up alongside to investigate. The captain came out of his cabin without his jacket, dressed in trousers and braces, to peer through his glasses, and others of the crew lined the rail. Blue Bear was obviously the centre of all interest, and when they drew away they seemed still to be discussing the composition of the crew.
He had sailed with us on every trip, lolling in one of the bunks, often with the cat and dog keeping him company, and now I found a more austere berth for him on the shelf in the forepeak, where he could still keep his eye on what went on.
There was one major difficulty to overcome before we left, and that was to get John to have his impacted wisdom tooth pulled out.
‘Not likely,’ said John. ‘He said he’d have to dig it out, and anyway it’s not hurting.’
‘But you must have it done, it might blow up on the trip.’
‘Not me. I don’t want to have a tooth dug.’
‘But John,’ Beryl said, ‘you sail all the way from Canada in that tiny boat, and now you won’t have a tooth out. I do believe you’re frightened.’
‘Too true,’ he said, with his usual disarming frankness, but in the end he agreed. After all there was a very pretty girl there to hold his hand. When we came back from a visit to Tasmania it was out, and John had a swollen jaw and a smug look.
Next morning I went to the Customs Office to arrange for clearance. I got into the lift and pressed the button for the appropriate floor. The lift started up and then came to a shuddering halt half way up. I tried to peer through the grille, but I was right between two floors. I thought that if I waited for long enough someone was sure to want the lift and I should be discovered without the indignity of bawling for help. After about ten minutes I heard an angry voice from below shouting, ‘You up there: what are you doing in the lift?’
‘I’m stuck!’ I shouted indignantly.
‘Well, stand in the middle, then.’
I stood in the middle, and the lift began to climb creakily upwards again. A few minutes later I was shaking hands with the Customs Officer, with my clearance in my pocket for the following day.
‘I’ll let the Customs launch know,’ he said, ‘and they’ll meet you at the mouth of the river and give you a check up as you go. I remember the last chap we cleared for Montevideo was that Irishman, Conor O’Brien, some thirty years ago. He had a ship with a funny name.’
‘Saoirse.’
‘Yes, that’s right. He had a beard and a yachting cap. He was a rum chap, but he was a real sailor,’ and he looked at me doubtfully.
I hoped that I might be half as good, but I knew that he couldn’t have had so good a crew.
CHAPTER TWO (#u7839aa9a-8415-5170-b15d-45854b6f83f7)
FALSE START (#u7839aa9a-8415-5170-b15d-45854b6f83f7)
A TUG whistled down the river. Beryl sat up in her bunk as if this was the signal that she had been waiting for. She pulled a jersey over her pyjamas and went aft to the galley. I lay in my bunk. I thought that it would be the last time for days and days that I would lie in my bunk with the ship still.
John was also in his bunk, a quarter-berth that he had made in New Zealand, aft of the galley and doghouse. He had separated it from the rest of the cramped stowage space below the bridge-deck by a plywood partition running fore-and-aft from the cockpit to the bulkhead on the starboard side. Whenever I tried to get into this berth through an oval hole cut in the partition, in order to get to the stowage space aft of the cockpit, I stuck, either with my head in and my stern out, or my stern in and my head out. John used to go in stern first like a wart-hog going into its burrow. Although he was bigger than I, but not taller, he did everything with an effortless grace, and could even get in and out of his berth with no apparent difficulty. It was snug inside and removed from the rest of the ship. It was his quarter—a small piece of privacy which was never invaded.
I knew exactly what was going on in the galley, without looking aft through the ship to where Beryl was sitting in the cook’s seat behind the dresser and sink and beside the stoves: an oil stove and a primus on gimbals, so that they swung either way and remained steady when the ship pitched and rolled. There was an occasional rattle and clink, well-known noises which I could interpret from days of practice at sea, and then came the sudden welcome hiss of the primus burner and the sound of the primus pump. Soon the porridge was on the stove and Beryl came back to the forecabin to finish her dressing. I put on some clothes and went on deck by way of the forehatch.
It was a sparkling summer day, with a light wind blowing up the Yarra River. A little further down, a big cargo ship was docking. The tug, whose whistle had stirred us to movement, was pushing the steamer’s stern in to the wharf. ‘Today is the day,’ I thought, ‘today is the day.’ And then I remembered that Pwe had not yet returned from her night out. I called her, and she answered from the shrubs by the railing. She came trotting out, explaining as only a Siamese can, about being caught out by the daylight, and about the sparrows being so wary. When she got near to the edge of the wharf, she lay down and rolled, waiting for me to come and get her. I stepped on shore and picked her up, and Beryl called ‘Breakfast’ from the hatch.
That wonderful call to breakfast! I do not know whether it is because of its association with porridge and bacon and eggs, but her voice always sounds as young and exciting as ever it did, and the day seemed young and exciting too. It was an exciting day. It was the twenty-second of December, and we were starting off to England.
Our first job after breakfast was to move round to a water point on the main wharf, where we could top up our tanks. If a hose was not available we used 2-gallon plastic bottles. When we bought Tzu Hang, she had only one tank of 20 gallons, so that we had to fit in other tanks where we could. We put one under each bunk in the forecabin, one in the bathroom, one under the existing tank in the galley, and one in the after compartment, opposite John’s berth. It was the best we could do, and it is not a bad principle to have water well divided. It is easier to check consumption, and all is not lost if a tap is knocked on and not noticed.
We carried about 150 gallons of water in these six tanks. We found that half a gallon a day per person, at sea, was a fair allowance. When we washed, we washed in salt water, and whenever possible we used salt water for cooking. Water was never rationed, but we did not waste it, and now we reckoned that we had at least a three-months’ supply, and a little extra for washing if necessary.
Before we had set out on our first trip I had had a letter from Kevin O’Riordan, who had sailed across the Atlantic with Humphrey Barton in Vertue XXXV. He wrote, ‘You will be perfectly all right provided that you have a buoyant boat, plenty of water, and don’t mind being alone for weeks and weeks.’ It seemed that all three conditions were fulfilled.
The last days before leaving on a long trip are always a rush. The whole crew spin like dancing dervishes, the list of things undone seems to grow longer instead of shorter, and everything whirls faster and faster to the climax, the moment between preparation and departure, between planning and putting into effect, the climax when a starter button is pressed, and the engine starts … or doesn’t.
I always hate this moment as I’m a bad engineer, and I feel that some imp of fortune is going to decide whether we shall be permitted to cast off, or whether we shall become the harrowed and querulous prey of a thousand mechanical doubts and remain tied to the wharf that we want to leave. ‘Please, engine, please start,’ I beg of it in private, but on this occasion everything went well.
Beryl jumped into the cockpit and took the wheel. She put the engine astern, and we began to back out from the dock into the Yarra River. As the stream caught our deep keel it swung the stern round until we were facing upstream, Beryl then put the engine ahead and we moved slowly across to the water point on the wharf. John had walked across to catch our lines. Ever since he had joined us in New Zealand, he had taken every opportunity to work on Tzu Hang, making some improvement or other. Now, as she came out into the stream, he was able to look at her from a distance for perhaps the last time for many a long day. She looked fit for the sea in every way. The boom gallows could be improved; perhaps he would be able to fix it before he left the ship.
As soon as we had made fast, we began topping up the tank in use with the plastic bottles. Last of all, we filled the four bottles and stowed them below. Pwe was eager for a last run ashore, but the distance from the deck to the top of the wharf was too much for her. A tall young girl, about ten years old, with a mop of dark hair, was standing on the wharf with her father, looking down at the yacht. When she saw the cat, her eyes, which were as blue as the cat’s, went round with wonder. She looked as if, more than anything else in the world, she wanted to stroke it. I climbed on to the wharf with Pwe, and held her out to her. She was too shy to speak. She stroked the cat’s dark head, and longed after her when I handed her down again to Beryl.
It was time to be moving now. Beryl was at the wheel, John was ready to cast off the bowline, and the young girl’s father was hoping to be asked to cast off the stern-line.
‘All right, let go,’ I called to John, and ‘Would you mind casting off?’ to the eager father.
John jumped on board and, helped by the stream, Tzu Hang swung out into the river and pointed her head for the sea.
Half way down to the river mouth we were met by the Customs launch. ‘Thought that we’d come up and give you a tow,’ they shouted as they came alongside. One of the Customs Officers came on board, and they passed us a towline.
‘What can you do?’
‘Eight knots,’ we answered, knowing something of Australian enthusiasm. In no time Tzu Hang’s bow was climbing out of the water and she was foaming along, doing at least twelve knots behind the powerful launch. Every now and then she would take a sheer and, before Beryl could correct it, the towrope would tighten across the bobstay, setting the bowsprit shrouds twanging. We were soon out of the river and opposite Williamstown. We had our clearance, and the launch came alongside again to take off the Customs Officer.
‘Goodbye,’ they shouted. ‘Good luck, come again.’
The launch curved away as they waved, ensign fluttering and brass-work shining. They seemed so typical of the Australians that we had met, friendly, efficient, and enthusiastic.
We set all sail and, close-hauled, went slowly down across the bay in the sunshine. The land and houses disappeared, the hills at the southern end of the bay were lost in haze. Here and there a few trees appeared, like a mirage on the horizon. For the rest of the day we sailed slowly across the big land-locked bay, until evening brought the lights winking out on the shore, and the channel buoys began to flash the way to the Heads. We dropped anchor off Dromana, waiting as so many sailing ships had done before, for the ebb tide to take us down early next morning to the Heads, so that we could pass through them at slack water.
Port Phillip Heads are a narrow gap, only a few hundred yards across, through which all the vast area of Port Phillip Bay pours out its waters during the ebb tide, and through which the sea comes boiling and bubbling on the flood. If the wind is against the ebb, the passage can be very dangerous. It was slack water at the Heads at ten-thirty so that we didn’t have to get up early. That night Tzu Hang swung quietly to her anchor, as motionless as if she was still at the wharf in the Yarra River. The tide chattered busily along her planking during the night, first out to sea, and then into the bay, and then out to sea again. And in the last hour of this tide we hauled in our anchor, started the engine, and motored down the misty channel.
The buoys came up out of the murk one after the other, and we checked their numbers against the chart. The mist cleared and we could see the Heads, and as soon as we were on the right bearing we turned to run out. As we passed the signal station at Point Lonsdale we saw the signal for the tides change from the last quarter to the first quarter; it was exactly slack water and there was no ripple on the surface. On the port hand there was the black and red rusting hull of a steamer wrecked on the shoals, and ahead the sails of two yachts. As soon as we were through we stopped the engine and got up sail ourselves, but the wind was very light from the south and we made very slow progress on the port tack.
By the evening we were becalmed and the mainsail was flapping about as we rolled. We handed all sail. About midnight there was a slight breeze again and I hoisted the main. As I did so, the boom dropped out of the gooseneck, and I found that the bronze fitting on the boom had fractured. The gooseneck was frozen with rust and the bronze fitting had been bending, but, as we were close-hauled, we had not noticed it. Now it had broken and, as we were still within easy reach of a port, it was just as well to have it repaired. We should have checked and oiled the goosenecks before leaving. We turned in for the rest of the night, and early next morning set off for Westernport, a few miles down the coast and up a long arm of the sea.
The wind strengthened and we ran up the long channel against the tide, followed by the two yachts that we had seen leave the Heads before us. We tied up to a wharf at a small harbour called Cowes, leaving an anchor out to hold us off the wharf if the wind shifted. This caused great distress to the captain of a steam ferry which brought holiday-makers over to Cowes. Although he hadn’t asked me to move it, he came up to me complaining angrily, as if I had already refused. I was only too anxious to move it when I found that there was a chance of the ferry fouling the line. We walked up through the village, a steep little hill, and there was a cold fresh wind blowing, which made the cotton frocks and the shirtsleeves of the Christmas visitors look out of season. At the top we found a garage and were able to get the boom fitting repaired, but it was late when we got back to the ship and, as the wind was blowing strongly down the narrow channel, we decided to leave on the tide next morning.
We had just started dinner, when there was a loud crash against the bow, and something started to scrape down the side of the ship.
‘Heavens, what on earth’s that?’ said Beryl.
‘Sounds as if we’ve got a visitor.’
We all scrambled up on deck as quickly as possible, including Pwe, who hates being left absolutely alone below. One of the yachts which had been tied up ahead of us had broken its stern-line and had swung round, putting its bowsprit through the pilings of the wharf, and breaking it off. We fended her off Tzu Hang, and while I jumped on board to look for another line, John climbed up on the wharf to get her bowline. He towed her back to her position, and we made her fast again with the best of a bad lot of line that I found in the cockpit. The wind was really blowing up and it looked as if we might have to move away from the wharf.
We settled down to dinner again, but it was a dreary Christmas Eve without Clio. Last Christmas there had been an inappropriate tree in the boat and decorations and presents and all the litter of Christmas. And now, not only were we missing the person who had made it all necessary, but we ought to have been at sea and not stuck in Westernport. John had an innate understanding of people’s feelings and the good sense not to intrude upon them. He was neither unnaturally hearty nor over-sympathetic. In fact he was just himself. When Beryl offered him some brandy butter to go with his plum pudding, he said rather gloomily, ‘Brandy butter, made with margarine and rum.’ We all began to feel better.
Before the plum pudding was finished, there was another bump against the bow, and we found that the same yacht had joined us again. The owners arrived while we were disentangling her. They hoisted the mainsail and sailed her round into the sheltered water behind the angle of the pier, where they anchored. An hour later Tzu Hang began to bump against the pilings. It was raining and as black as a night can be. The lights shone on a wet deserted wharf, and the sounds of a dance band came across from the hotel.
We untangled ourselves from the network of lines and hawsers, and pushed off into the night, groping for a nine-fathom patch, with Beryl trying to take the bearings of the wharf lights on the compass and John swinging the lead-line. We could not go where the other yacht had gone as there was insufficient water, and in the end we dropped the anchor in twelve fathoms, with forty fathoms of chain, and hoped that we’d be able to get it up again in the morning.
All Christmas Day the wind blew strongly down the channel, and we stayed at anchor, very busy making everything still more secure for the journey ahead, and it was not until Boxing Day morning that we set about getting the anchor in again, in time to sail with the tide. For some time we couldn’t break it out, but at last it came away, covered with thick blue clay. We unshackled it and let the chain go into the chain locker, after marking the end, and we lashed the anchor down, and fixed a ventilator over the chain navel. We expected to be well battened down for much of the way, and hoped that the ventilator would give us sufficient fresh air in the forecabin.
Meanwhile we were motoring up the channel, and in spite of a very rough short sea, with the wind against the tide, we were making good progress. By midday we were passing the lighthouse at the entrance to the loch, and we could see little coloured specks of holiday visitors all along the cliff-top. We kept under power until we were far enough out to clear Seal Rocks on the port tack, on our course for the south.
‘I wonder how many rocks there are in the world called “Seal Rocks”?’ said John.
‘Let’s hope the next “Seal Rocks” will be called “Los Lobos”,’ said Beryl, ‘that’s what they call them in South America.’
We went up and down, up and down, crunch and splash, crunch and splash, but gradually we drew clear, and then we switched off the engine. We would test it from time to time, but we would use it next, or so we hoped, to enter Port Stanley in the Falkland Islands, 6,700 sea-miles away. Up went the staysail, and Tzu Hang began to sail. Next the main and then the storm-jib, and we lay over and hissed away to the south. We cleared Seal Rocks easily, and Tzu Hang felt like a horse held in at the beginning of a long race; she seemed to snatch at her bridle, the foam flecks flying; I felt her great reserve of strength and power; she flung the wave tops behind her like fences. ‘Let us go, let us go,’ she seemed to say. Who could doubt that she would bring us safely home?
Beryl was at the wheel. She was wearing a yellow oilskin jumper with a hood attached and yellow oilskin trousers, and they were wet and shining with spray and from a brief shower that had passed over us; a wisp of wet hair escaped from under the hood and clung to her cheek, which was flushed with the wind, and she was radiant with delight at being off on the long trip at last. From now on she would not worry or think very much about her daughter. For the time being all her energies and thoughts would be directed to the ship and the two of us. Now that we were off she could neither write to nor hear from England, nor could she bring any further influence to bear on Clio’s future, but she knew that she, more than anyone, could make this trip a success and she was going to do it.
John and I were both wearing green plastic oilskins and trousers of a strong material which we had found in New Zealand. They were called tractor suits and had stainless steel press buttons which never failed us. They had a short cape just to give a double thickness over the shoulders, but when on watch at night and in the higher latitudes, we usually wore the coats over our yellow oilskin jumpers, so that we had the advantage of the oilskin hood. John almost invariably wore a British Columbian Indian sweater, knitted from raw wool, and a knitted hat of the same material, with a round bobble on top; and I wore a red knitted sock. Both of them could be pulled down over the ears, and were often worn like this, in spite of the moronic look that they gave us. For many days to come we were not going to think very seriously about looks.
After setting the mainsail and storm-jib, John and I came aft to where Beryl had already set the mizzen, and we swigged it up a few inches. Then John took the wheel, for it was his watch. Beryl went down below, to lie in her bunk and get some rest before tea. I went below also to check the course on the chart and make the entries in the log, and from the cockpit came a great burst of song: ‘Stand up and fight boy, when you hear the bell,’ the words came wind-torn into the cabin. We were going to hear a lot about that bell when the going was good.
CHAPTER THREE (#u7839aa9a-8415-5170-b15d-45854b6f83f7)
THROUGH THE BASS STRAIT (#u7839aa9a-8415-5170-b15d-45854b6f83f7)
ON my way below, I sat for a moment on the bridge-deck, the short deck which holds the mizzenmast, between the doghouse entrance and the cockpit. I put my hands on the after end of the sliding hatch, and then slipped down, taking my weight on my hands. All the same, I arrived with a bang below. This was the normal way of going down when we were in good spirits or in a hurry. At other times we would turn sideways and use the vertical steps on either side of the door in the bulkhead which led into John’s compartment.
The small area which I had arrived in with a thump was the centre of the ship’s activities below decks. It was 5½ by 5½ feet square, excluding portions of it which extended to the sides of the ship, underneath the deck on each side of the doghouse. It was covered by the doghouse, a low roof raised 1½ feet above the deck, in which was the sliding hatch, by which I had just come below. As we were running fast now, with the wind on the beam, I closed the hatch by sliding it back over my head, so that no spray would come in. In order to close it completely, I would have to close two small doors, but this portion of the hatch was normally left open, unless there was a strong following wind blowing coldly into the cabin.
I looked back through the small open doorway at the singer of Carmen Jones still in full voice, and shouted to him to stream the log. He turned to let the patent log, which was coiled ready in the stern, over the side into the water.
The doghouse was lit by two windows in each side and by two heavy ports let into its front. The ports were partially obscured by the transom of the dinghy, which was lashed down on the deck, upside down, in front of them.
While I was taking off my wet oilskin jacket, I was standing on the small space immediately above the engine. The deck here lifted up, so that I could get at the engine, or at least get at the top of the engine, when I wanted to work on it. As it had just been running, the teak deck above it was still quite warm, and the cat was making the most of it at my feet. In Canada, where we used the yacht frequently for getting to and from the island on which we lived, the cat was quite accustomed to the sound of the motor, and would sit on the engine cover, this removable piece of deck, while we were moving under power. Now that we used the engine so rarely, she would never stay below while it was running, and protested loudly to everyone about its use, and the discomforts of a deck passage. Directly it stopped, she always went below and sat on the warm cover.
Immediately in front of me and between the two ports in front of the doghouse, were the ship’s clock and the barometer. They could both be seen from the cockpit, and the man on watch could see the minutes dragging slowly towards the time of his relief. The barometer was dropping slightly and I set it. Behind me was the opening which led into the after compartment, John’s place, which he shared with various water tanks, fuel tanks, a large number of eggs, a 4-gallon tin of sand for the cat, four 2-gallon plastic bottles, and his own tool-box and numerous other articles, all lashed down and well secured. The well of the cockpit formed the back of this compartment, and John’s berth was partitioned off on the starboard side. In order to get some light into this part of the ship, there were two dead-lights in the deck and in the front of the cockpit well there was a window. From down below, if I looked aft, I could see the helmsman’s legs through this window, and when the hatch was closed and the washboards in place, it was sometimes reassuring after a heavy sea, to look aft and see a pair of legs there, solid and unmoved.
At my feet, and in front of me, there were two steps leading to the level of the main cabin, and below the clock and the barometer there was a short handrail, which we used when stepping down into the cabin. On each side, below the doghouse windows, there was another handrail, for use when moving in the doghouse. Because of the constant and often violent motion, we found these handrails most useful, and as necessary as the straps in the London Underground.
On each side of where I was standing there were two bins, the tops of which formed the bottom steps, when coming below by the more sedate method, or when going on deck. They also made two seats, where we sat for meals at sea, conveniently close to the cook and the galley. If it was very calm, or in port, we used the cabin table for meals, but if we were keeping watch and steering, it was better to use these seats, as we could shout to the helmsman, and pass him his food at the same time as those off watch were having theirs. In rough weather the helmsman would usually prefer to wait until he could be relieved for his meal.
When I stood on these two steps, with my legs straddled, and my head out of the sliding hatch, I could just see comfortably over the doghouse, with the minimum exposure. The position reminded me of the days when I used to peer out of the turret of a Sherman tank, also hoping to avoid exposure. When ducking over a steep sea there was also a certain similarity in the motion.
In front of these two seats, on the port side, was the chart table, and on the starboard side, the galley. The chart table was a large one, and under it were shelves and racks for charts, and at one end of it, against the side of the ship, there was a bookshelf for the navigational books in use. Dividers and rulers were kept in canvas bands against the bulkhead, above the table, and the sextants were in a locker just below the hatch.
The galley, on my right as I looked down into the cabin, was lined with stainless steel below and behind the two stoves. Beside them there was the cook’s seat, also known as the electric chair, because the two engine batteries were below it. It faced forwards and had a curved seat, with two arms, so that the cook was held firmly in place, whatever the antics of the ship. In front of this seat was the dresser and sink, and 2 feet above the dresser, and up to the deckhead, were two shelves full of good things, such as tea, cocoa, chocolate, and sugar, and other loot for the night watches. Above the stoves were racks for saucepans and plates, and numerous mugs and cups, of a motley shape and design, hung from cup-hooks beneath them.
I hung up my coat in the oilskin locker, in front of the chart table, and then turned to the chart and laid a course down past Wilson Promontory, past Rodonda Island and the Curtis group, and up to the entrance of the Banks Strait, the southern passage through the islands, which lie between Australia and the north coast of Tasmania.
All that afternoon we made great progress, as if Tzu Hang was as pleased as we were to be on her way at last. The low coast to port went flying past, and in a few hours we had covered the same distance that it took two days to put behind us on our way up to Melbourne. We were under storm-jib, staysail, full main, and mizzen, and waltzing along with the sun abeam, a cold wind, sunshine, and squalls. I took over from John for the second afternoon watch from three to six. When I came up to relieve him, after making the entries in the log, he went forward to try and sweat the jib and main up a bit further. He could never leave the deck without trying to improve the set of the sails, and always the first thing that he did after coming on deck was to try and get their luffs a little tauter.
John had already fastened the wheel in approximately the right position, so that I was able to go forward and give him a hand. After working the heads of the sails up an inch or so, we coiled the ends of the halliards and hooked them up on the belaying pins on the mast. Then he went below to take off his oilskins, and I returned to the cockpit.
With the sea abeam Tzu Hang was going very comfortably, but every now and then a splash of spray came over the side of the ship, so that the decks were wet. None of us was ever content with the adjustment that the previous watch had put on the wheel, so I now turned my attention to try and improve the setting that John had spent most of his watch in achieving. With the wind on the beam Tzu Hang will not sail herself except under certain combinations of sail, and this was not one of them. On each side of the wheel, attached to the gunwale, is a piece of elastic shock cord, in turn fastened to a short piece of line with a loop in the end. These loops can be dropped over the spokes of the wheel, so that it is held in the right position but still allowed a certain amount of play. The wheel had been fixed in the position to counteract Tzu Hang’s tendency, under this rig, to turn up into the wind. When she is under a balanced rig, she can be left alone for hours and hours, and sometimes for days, but when artificial means are used to keep her on her course, she usually requires watching, and occasional corrections.
John appeared again in the hatchway, his arms resting on the step of the hatch. He was the carpenter, and was in charge of all maintenance, repair, and improvements, to the hull and fittings. Beryl was the mate and sailmaker, and was responsible for fitting out and provisioning the ship, and the repair of the sails. I was the skipper and navigator, and also the rigger; so that our duties were well divided. We were all adequate navigators, and often John would work out a longitude from my sight, or I would work out a position line from Beryl’s.
In addition to her other duties, Beryl was also the cook, and John and I tried to recompense her in some way for her labours by being the washers-up. We sometimes offered in a half-hearted way to do something about the cooking, but she really did not trust us with the stoves, and often when something went wrong with them, we were suspect, either for having pricked them too much or not enough, during the night watch. We also took one extra three-hour watch each, so that Beryl could be free for meals and get a good sleep in the afternoon. John and I took three three-hour watches, and Beryl two, making twenty-four hours in all. Our watches always came at the same time, so that we were able to get accustomed to the hours. Beryl had the twelve to three watch at night, and always said that she preferred it, although most sailors think that it is the worst one. Even when watch-keeping was not necessary, whoever would normally have been on duty was responsible for the running of the ship. We knew automatically who had to turn out to stop a rattle or correct a course.
Now as John looked aft from the shelter of the doghouse, his eyes wandered over what he could see of the ship, he was always in search of something that he might do to improve her. Although she wasn’t his, he made himself part of her, and she always came first with him. Generations of his family had followed the sea, the hard sea of Cornish fishermen and Grimsby trawlermen. Salt water was in his veins, and I sometimes wondered whether he wasn’t sired in it.
He looked behind him at the clock. ‘What does the log say?’ he asked.
‘Fourteen miles.’
‘Good lass; seven knots. I streamed it two hours ago. Keep it up.’
‘Are you going to turn in?’
‘No, it’s nearly tea-time. Those pills are good. I don’t feel a thing.’
‘Nor do I, but I’m going to have another tonight for luck.’
‘Directly I get a chance, if it isn’t too rough, I might take these doors away and put in washboards. They let too much wind in. What do you think?’
‘Too much water too, sometimes. Is Beryl asleep?’
‘No, here she comes. My, my!’
Beryl appeared in the hatch opening. She is inclined to let herself go over useful sea-going dresses, and I saw that she had already decided that it was cold enough for the ‘Southern Ocean Cruising Rig’, a combination woollen suit made up in the McLeod tartan, with a built-in belt, and a sliding hatch behind. It was practical, warm, and bright; bright yellow and black.
‘How are we doing?’ she asked now, that many times repeated question. I told her and she went down to make tea, and John went with her. I watched a squall dragging over the sea towards us and wondered whether it would hit us or pass behind. A few shearwaters were swinging low over the waves, but I could see no albatrosses. John stood up again and passed me a mug of tea and a slice of fruit cake. I thought that everything was very good, and best of all the fact that we were really off and laying the miles behind us. I imagined the string of dots, the daily positions, growing across the chart. 6,700 miles to Port Stanley: 67 perhaps, 67 little crosses, before we arrived. We might be there in time to send a cable for Clio’s birthday. Sometimes the crosses would lie close together on the chart, and sometimes they would stretch out across it, reaching for the harbour on the other side, but the time, I knew, would pass quickly as we settled down to our sea-going routine, and cups of tea would follow cups of tea, at about this time, on each succeeding day.
The cat arrived suddenly on the bridge-deck. When any of us came on deck, we came up slowly and deliberately, taking careful hold of first the edge of the hatch and then the shrouds, but the cat used to arrive with a single spring from the chart table, so that she seemed to fall from nowhere, as light as a windblown leaf, on to the deck. The preliminaries seen from below were not so graceful. She would stand on the chart table swaying to the roll, and craning her neck as if she hoped to see where she might land, and trying to make up her mind to jump. The backstage view of her shaggy little backside, as it disappeared over the step of the hatch, couldn’t compare with the arrival of the ballerina as seen from the stalls in the cockpit. She stayed with me for a moment or two, but it was too cold and rough for cats, and she returned below again.
John relieved me at six. He had had his supper and I had mine as soon as I got below. We tried to have all our meals by daylight, in order to save kerosene, and when we were keeping watch we were always ready to turn in when we could, so that the day consisted of watch-keeping, eating, and sleeping, with only a little reading before we fell asleep. As soon as washing-up was done, I opened my stretcher cot on the port side of the main cabin, and unrolled my sleeping bag and climbed in. The bunk on the other side was full of twice-baked bread, which we found didn’t go mouldy, as long as it was kept in the open. We had sixty loaves.
If the bread did go bad, we had a stove in the main cabin for baking, and also for heating: a blue enamel coal- or wood-burning stove, with a good oven, but only under certain conditions could we persuade it to burn at sea without smoking.
I lay in my bunk now and tried to sleep. The water was rushing past the planking at my ear, a sweet trickling, talking sound. Soon I heard Beryl getting out the navigation lights. She lit them, waited for them to warm up, and then handed them up to John. Probably we would use them only on this night, as from now we would be off the traffic routes. Last she lit the stern light and John tied it up on the mizzen-boom gallows, a white hurricane light which never seemed to blow out, and which showed up better than the red and the green. We did not shield it from forward for this reason.
Pwe came into my bunk and sat right up by my face, her whiskers tickling my cheek, and purring loudly. She was really glad to be at sea again. It was a life that she knew and enjoyed. I think that she felt she was mistress of the ship and the people in it. One of us was always petting her or playing with her, and she seemed to think that we were hers to do what she wanted. Beryl thought that John and I teased her too much, but from the scars on my hand and sometimes my nose, I seemed to be the one who suffered. She got John once when he was teasing her, and he cut her dead for a week, and though she gradually won him back, she never used her claws on him again.
At about a quarter to nine I swung myself out of my berth and lowered my feet on to the seat below it. Then reached across to the brass pipe in the centre of the cabin, which holds the sliding table. When not in use, the table is slid up and fastened close under the deckhead, out of the way, and the pipe is used to grab on to when one is moving in the cabin. Holding on to the edge of my berth and the brass pipe, I stepped down and made my way aft. There was an oil-light burning in the cabin and another oil-light in the forecabin, where Beryl was sleeping. Both were turned down and dim, but they were there in case of some emergency.
When I looked out of the hatch, I could see John hunched over the wheel. Behind him the stern light flickered and flared, and outlined his broad figure, enlarged by an extra jersey under his oilskins. Tzu Hang seemed to be going at a tremendous pace, and the night looked very dark and wild. ‘How are we doing?’ I shouted up to him.
‘Doing well,’ he shouted back, ‘fifty-six miles on the log. Pretty cold. No hurry.’
‘Any lights?’
‘Yes, you can see Glennie Island light just abeam, and Wilson Promontory ahead, only the loom of Wilson Promontory though.’
‘What are the bearings?’
John checked the bearings by looking over the compass, and I marked our rough position on the chart. We were just beginning to cross the Bass Strait. I pulled on my oilskin jumper and my oilskin trousers, and then my coat and my red sock over my head, and climbed up on deck. I sat down beside John until my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness.
‘I think that the wind is down a bit,’ he said.
‘Oh. I thought that it was blowing a little harder. All right. I can take her now.’
John stood up and stretched, then he stepped out of the cockpit and on to the deck, holding on to the shrouds and looking round him. After a time, he stepped carefully across to the hatch and disappeared below. For a time I could see his shadow moving against the lamplit wall of the doghouse, and then it disappeared and after a few minutes, I felt sure, he was asleep.
The night seemed very dark and although it was midsummer, I began to feel cold. I began to wonder why I could not see Rodonda Island. I peered under the boom but saw only universal blackness. There wasn’t a star to be seen and there was no moon. Only low overcast sky and rain. I walked carefully up the deck, leaning inwards and holding on to the handrail on the doghouse, and then the handrail on the bottom of the dinghy until I could cross over to the shrouds. From there I stepped across to the staysail boom and ran my hand along this to the forestay. Looking behind the jib, I could see Rodonda quite clearly, a dark round rock of an island, and perhaps a mile away. All was well. An hour passed, and I sat in the cockpit and listened to the rush of Tzu Hang and the occasional spatter of spray, and I watched the dark outline of her sail against the sky. I wondered when we should see Curtis Island. After that there would be no more land until the morning. The black waves came swinging like walls out of the night and disappeared again, and sometimes they hissed quietly as they came, showing a thin white line in the darkness, or a phosphorescent glow. There was no malice in them.
I sat in the cockpit and thought of nothing in particular. I thought of Beryl in the forecabin and wondered if she was sleeping and thought that this watch was like all watches and that it was going slowly. Soon there was only an hour to go, and I went below to make myself some tea, but I kept looking aft to watch the occasional flash of a light so that I could check the course, and several times I had to climb up on deck to correct it.
I woke up Beryl and she was awake at once, and when I was back in the cockpit, I could see her shadow moving as I had seen John’s below. She came and sat beside me and I felt a warm flood of companionship between us. ‘The wind is up, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘No, I think it’s down now.’
I checked the log, leaning aft and flashing a torch on it. There were seventy-eight miles on the log in eleven hours, and the wind looked like holding. Beryl settled down with her hand on the wheel. She wouldn’t move until she woke John at three, sitting patiently and alert at the wheel, and quite untroubled by any need for the various devices that John and I would employ to pass the time.
I turned in but could not sleep until we had seen Curtis Island. After a time, I came to the hatch again. Beryl was just as I had left her an hour before.
‘Want anything?’
‘No thank you.’
‘Seen anything?’
‘No. Sometimes I think that I see something to port, but I couldn’t be sure. Now I can’t see anything. Can’t you sleep?’
‘No, I just want to see Curtis Island. There’s a creak. Have you heard it?’
‘Yes, isn’t it annoying? I heard a creak. I thought that it must be the mast.’
Tzu Hang never creaks in a sea, and this new noise, together with the possibility that we were being set further towards the west than I had allowed for, and consequently nearer to Curtis Island, had kept me awake. Once the noise had been noticed, it seemed to grow louder and more persistent, like a rat gnawing at a wall board. I began to imagine that Tzu Hang had been strained during the bashing we had given her, on our way up to Melbourne. I moved about, listening anxiously, as if I was a new and nervous father trying to discover in the middle of the night whether his offspring was really only sleeping.
Under the doghouse the noise sounded louder, and I noticed a new mug swinging on its cup-hook. I steadied it and the noise stopped immediately. It was only a rough bit of pottery in the handle, grating on the hook. I suppose it went on, but we never noticed it again. The noises of a ship blend into a tune so well known that it is never heard. Anything new strikes a discordant note which seems to vibrate through the ship as horribly as reveille to the soldier. We are often asked how we know, if we are all asleep below, if anything goes wrong, but any little change in the ship’s rhythm, any slight sound, and least flap of a sail or the lift of a boom, and whoever is nominally on duty awakes immediately.
I heard Beryl call. ‘Now I can see something,’ she said.
I looked out of the hatch. The sky had cleared slightly, and dark against a dark sky, but clearly visible, was Curtis Island. Perhaps it was a good three miles away, but it looked much closer. I went below and fell asleep immediately and stayed asleep until I felt someone shaking me by the leg. It was John and it was also daylight. I felt as if I had dropped off for a few minutes only and quite indignant at having to get up so soon.
When I went aft to put on my oilskins, I looked out of the hatch. It was a grey morning and there were plenty of whitecaps still showing. Tzu Hang seemed to be going as well as ever. John was leaning over the after end of the cockpit, cleaning the face of the log.
‘What have we done?’
‘117. Pretty good. I think that the wind has dropped slightly, but she’s still going well.’
As soon as I was ready, I climbed up the ladder and then made that familiar movement to the cockpit, one hand to the mast, one hand to the shroud, as I stepped aft. It is as well that these movements should become automatic, because they have to be carried out on black nights, with a wildly moving deck, and spray flying; when there is no room for mistakes. A great mountaineer once said that only fools and children jump on mountains, and he might have added Gurkhas, going down hill. The same applies to small ships.
For once John was content to go below without fiddling with the sails. If he was quick he would get an hour and a half before breakfast. His eyes looked slightly red on the rims, and I knew that he would be asleep in a moment. But no trump of doom, no clarion call to heaven, would bring him out of his box-like berth quicker than Beryl’s call to breakfast.
I always disliked the nine to twelve watch in the evening. Between washing up after supper and the beginning of the watch, I was too wide awake to sleep, but half way through the watch I became involved in a desperate struggle to avoid it. The morning watch was far better. I was usually well rested after six comparatively undisturbed hours in my bunk, and the wonderful prospect of breakfast in an hour and a half made pleasant the worst of mornings. From seven onwards Beryl would be about and I would be able to talk to her as she appeared from time to time in the hatchway.
Until then there were many things to see and think about. First the weather portents, the barometer, the wind, the sky and the clouds, and the sea. Then the set of the sails and a quick look round for any loose ends of rope, or signs of chafe. Then a check on our position, and a search for land if we happened to be near it. Then a check on the birds that might be visible about the ship. I was always trying to recognise a companion of the day before, and often found one.
By the time all this was done Beryl appeared at the hatch. I showed her Pyramid Rock, a jagged tooth sticking abruptly out of the sea on the port quarter.
‘Can you see Flinders?’
‘No, not yet; I’m not sure, maybe there is something … still poor visibility.’
She had plaited her hair and tied it over her head. It didn’t look very elegant, but at sea we had to put up with it. She passed me the cat’s earth, in the blue plastic basin, to empty over the side. As I handed it back, I heard the primus hissing.
A moment later Pwe arrived on the deck herself, put her paws on the cockpit coaming, just aft of the doghouse, and looked at the weather. She decided that it was too wet to keep to the deck and went below again. Here she did all that was possible to interfere with the cooking, protesting her hunger in a loud voice, and jumping on to Beryl’s back, if she got the chance, in order to explain her need more lucidly.
I heard Beryl call that breakfast was ready and, without any delay, John appeared and handed me a bowl of porridge with milk and brown sugar. If Tzu Hang had been sailing herself he would have stayed in bed, and I would have handed him his food into his berth. Now he sat down on the step at the foot of the ladder and Beryl, who almost always does two things at once, sat in the cook’s chair and read, and at the same time fried bacon and eggs. From time to time she gave the cat a piece of fried bacon rind from the pan, and Pwe would pat it about the deck with her paw, till it was cool enough for eating. If we were having cooked bacon, Pwe would not dream of eating the rind unless it was cooked also. After bacon and eggs came burnt toast and home-made marmalade. Burnt toast is the hallmark of Beryl’s wonderful breakfasts, as inseparable from them as her book is from her, when she is cooking.
These typical breakfasts were provided for us day after day for fifty days all across that great Southern Ocean. Perhaps never before had such good breakfasts been eaten so regularly for so long in those particular waters.
After breakfast we could see Flinders Island indistinctly, and soon we began to try to pick out the entrance to the Banks Strait. After a time we could make out a small mark on the horizon ahead which took form gradually. A lighthouse, a black lighthouse instead of a white one, as described in the pilot book, but a lighthouse all the same, on a low flat island. It was Goose Island, and as we rounded it we entered the Banks Strait.
Then came another marvellous day of sailing. Forsyth Island to port and the green Tasmanian Coast away to starboard, and the boom as wide as could be in order to let us get round Swan Island. There was white water showing everywhere as we squeezed past. By noon, when we reset the log, we had done 163 miles. By four o’clock in the afternoon, we had to haul down the mizzen and shortly afterwards we handed the main, running under the two headsails, whereupon the wind began to ease, as it so often does in the evening, and we set the main again.
The Sydney-Hobart race had started on the same day as we did, and we had wondered at one time whether we would have to pass through them. We heard in the evening, on the radio, that the leaders were not yet into the Bass Strait, and were meeting with light winds only. We were lucky to be on the top side of a depression which would, with any luck, carry us most of the way across the Tasman Sea.
By midnight when Beryl relieved me, the wind was right aft with an awkward sea running. It was necessary to steer all the time, and we had rigged preventer guys so that the boom would not smash over if Tzu Hang gybed. As she rolled in the steep following sea, the boom would try to lift against the preventer guy, and sometimes the leach of the sail would give a flap, which set the helmsman to spinning the wheel frantically. There was no need to worry with either Beryl or John at the wheel.
All through the dark and windy night, as the white wave tops marched in luminous procession past the ship, bright green bars of phosphorescence shone suddenly out of the night and fell astern, glowing like emeralds between the black breasts of the waves. They were beacons for Tzu Hang pointing her way to the south.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_d167e1f5-a67a-5826-914f-72124056cd8b)
ACROSS THE SOUTH TASMAN (#ulink_d167e1f5-a67a-5826-914f-72124056cd8b)
NEXT morning Tzu Hang was still racing along, with the wind a little too far aft for comfort. The glass was low, and the wind’s grey horsemen, the low rain clouds, came riding up from behind throwing a lash of rain across us as they passed, while the albatrosses ranged like greyhounds in front of them, across the downland of the sea. Wherever we looked we would see somewhere the sudden tilt of an albatross’s wing, as it turned to sweep down and along the moving valley of the sea.
Perhaps I was thinking of albatrosses, but at any rate I wasn’t paying sufficient attention to the steering, and allowed Tzu Hang to slew as a wave passed, so that there was a sudden wump as the boom went over in a gybe. The preventer guy had parted and the boom came over with a bang against the backstay, but the initial shock had already been taken by the preventer guy, and no damage was done, except to my reputation with the rest of the crew. I started to haul in on the main-sheet but before I was finished, Tzu Hang rolled and the boom gybed back again.
Two faces appeared almost immediately at the hatch opening. Neither of them said anything, but I said, ‘I think that we’ll have the main down now and set the twins.’ When it was all finished John said, ‘Thank God it was you and not me.’ The thought of the accidental gybe stayed with him all the day, and seemed to give him ill-suppressed satisfaction, and in the evening he said, ‘You know, I haven’t really felt right since I let Tzu Hang gybe on that rough night going into Auckland, and now thank goodness you’ve done one.’
‘Not one, two, and only a few seconds between. You’ll never beat that.’
‘No, thank goodness. I really feel fine about it now.’
Beryl looked rather smug. I think that she was the most careful helmsman of the three of us.
Tzu Hang was rigged in those days with a topmast forestay from the top of her mast to her bowsprit, a jibstay which hauled out on a traveller on her bowsprit, and a forestay which went to a fitting on her bow. The twin staysails were set on separate twin forestays bolted through a deck-beam half way between the bow and the mainmast, and on booms from a mast fitting 5 feet above the deck. When they were not required, these twin forestays were fastened out of the way of the staysail boom to the pinrails near the shrouds.
When we were running under twin staysails, the sheets from the booms led back to a block, and then to the tiller, so that Tzu Hang steered herself. It usually took us about twenty minutes to change from fore-and-aft rig to running rig, from the time we went on deck to the time we went below, and we were always doing it. We had not yet changed the wheel for the tiller, and self-steering would not work with the wheel, but now there was no further danger of a gybe, and the ship could be left to herself for short periods. It was much easier on the helmsman, but the sail area was reduced and we were not going so fast.
Not going quite so fast, but very nearly, because at noon we had 153 miles on the log, and by three in the afternoon it was blowing force 7, and Tzu Hang was beginning to sit up on the wave tops and to rush forward on them in the most exhilarating way. One wave top climbed on board just in front of the cockpit and we seemed to be wrapped in the breaking crest. We handed the twin staysails and ran under bare poles until after tea, when we set the twins again.
For the next few days we were caught up in a relentless rhythm of the sea. The ship reeled and surged and swung away on her course; the glass rose slightly and fell again, as depression chased depression across the Tasman Sea; rain squall after rain squall followed short sunlight, and we climbed repeatedly on to wet decks for our three-hour watches and, sleepy and chilled, down again at the end of them. The glass stayed low, and everything below decks became damp and sodden. The shifts in the wind kept us busy with sail changes. For most of the time we were under twins, but when the wind came abeam, we dropped the weather staysail and took the pole out from the other, sheeting it home as a reaching sail. Then we set the storm-jib and mizzen, and that was all that we needed. When the wind was aft, and provided it was not too strong, we set the mizzen as well as the twins.
New Year’s Eve, five days out, 750 miles on the log, and a black wet night. We had Christmas pudding for dinner; the first of the six Christmas puddings that we had for celebrations, and which would mark the small achievements of our passage. John and I were always trying to get Beryl to produce them, but they were rigorously controlled. As I sat up in the rain in the night watch, I thought of the previous New Year’s Eve, which the three of us, and Clio, had spent high up on a mountain ridge in Maui. I thought of her in England and wondered how she was getting on, and thought also that however keen I was to make a quick passage back to join her, I would also like to have a break in this wet rushing movement. At twelve I went forward and shook Beryl: ‘Happy New Year!’
‘Oh, Happy New Year!’ she said, and was awake immediately. I had a wet towel round my neck, five days’ grizzled grey beard, and wet oilskins, and as I leant forward to give her a kiss, she felt warm and damp and smelt slightly musty.
Back in the cockpit another black rain squall was marching up from behind, dark and forbidding, and by the time Beryl joined me it was sluicing round us.
‘How are you feeling?’ I asked her.
‘Feeling fine; still I wouldn’t mind a change so that we could fix up the tiller for self-steering.’
‘Me too, everything’s so damned wet.’
Wet or no, it made no difference while the wind lasted. Sleep and feed and watch; too little sleep, enough food, and too much watch, but by the end of the first week, we were still just short of a thousand miles: four miles short. We were also rather further north than we had intended as a northerly current was setting us up and knocking some miles off the run as measured on the chart. On that last day we were close-hauled under jib, staysail, and mizzen and with the wind from the south, but for the first time since we left Westernport, Tzu Hang was sailing herself, and what a blessed change we all thought it was. We were all down below.
‘This is more like it,’ said John. ‘That was really too much like work.’
‘Good heavens, I thought that all you single-handers were gluttons for punishment. Beryl and I never do that sort of thing. It was only because you were there that we didn’t stop and take it easy for a time.’
‘No,’ said John, ‘I suppose that it’s the cold and the damp, and such a long spell of it, but I wouldn’t like to go on indefinitely with weather like that. If she’ll steer herself it’s another story.’
‘The glass is shooting up, so maybe we can fix the tiller tomorrow.’
We all slept a glorious and undisturbed sleep that night, and woke up to find that the sails were flapping uselessly. We took everything down while the porridge cooked, and after breakfast set about changing the wheel to the tiller. At first it seemed as if we would be unable to do so, as the wheel fitting was frozen hard on to the rudder-post, and we had to heat it with a blow torch before we could move it. Wheel, wheel-box and worm-gear we stowed right aft in the counter, and put the tiller on in its place. Tzu Hang looks rather better with a tiller, or perhaps it is just that a change is nice.
While we worked a seal played around us, popping his whiskery nose out of the oily sea, and looking like a bald-headed old man, peering over the morning paper; then he turned over on his back and waved a flipper across his chest as if he was fanning himself. After a time he went on his way. Perhaps he was bound for the Snares, but anyway he didn’t seem to be at all perturbed about his landfall.
While the seal played around us the albatrosses came visiting. They came gliding over the swell, apparently using the cushion of air, raised by the lift of the waves, to support them. There seemed to be no breeze at all, and from time to time they were forced to give a few slow strokes with their wings. They always seemed to look rather furtive and ashamed when they did so, as if they hoped that no other albatross had seen them. It was obviously something that they did not want talked about in the albatross club. They glided so close to the smooth water that sometimes an end wing feather would draw a skittering line across the surface as they turned. One after another they came up to the ship and thrusting their feet out in front of them, they tobogganed to a halt and as they settled down, they held their wings together high above their bodies, until they folded them one after the other, in a curious double fold, against their backs.
They paddled round the ship as we worked, coming close under the counter, and all the time Pwe pursued them on deck. She crouched under the rail and then raised her head, with her ears flattened sideways, so that she showed as little of herself as possible when she looked over. Then she crouched down and crawled along the deck until she thought that she was directly over one of the big birds, when she looked again. But she could get no further, and her jaw used to chatter with rage and frustration.
Sometimes the albatrosses used to dip their bills in the water and then snap them together with a popping sound. They reminded me of the senior members of a Services Club, tasting port. We never found out what they ate. They trifled with pieces of bread, but never swallowed them.
As soon as we had fitted the tiller, John turned his attention to the washboards, which he made from some spare teak that we had on board. He made a perspex window in the lower washboard so that we could look through to see how the helmsman was and if he needed anything. While he was doing this, Beryl was working on some caulking, stopping a slight leak in the deck, and I was greasing rigging-screws.
When John worked with wood, he seemed to caress it. The tools in his hands looked as if they carried out his wishes of their own volition, and even the wood seemed to submit without protest. His movements were so sure that any work he was doing appeared amazingly easy. When he marked wood with a pencil, he marked it with one straight line, and when he picked it up again after laying it aside, he knew exactly what his marks meant. Most wonderful of all, everything always seemed to fit. Now he rebated the two washboards so that they overlapped and made a windproof joint, and when he dropped them into position in their slots they fitted as if the join had been a straight saw-cut.
‘How on earth do you get things to fit the first time?’ I asked him.
‘I reckon that’s what you learn in five years’ apprenticeship,’ he replied.
He was sharpening his chisel on a stone with regular even strokes, the angle never varying. When he finished the light shone on one smooth face, and not on a number of facets, as it would have done if I had been doing it.
‘When I was doing my apprenticeship,’ he went on, ‘and finished my first job, I went to the foreman and asked him to pass it. It was a small cabinet and I was pretty proud of it. He came and looked at it, and then went away without saying anything, and came back in a few minutes with an axe and smashed it. Then he told me to make a proper one. I guess that makes you learn to do a thing properly. Still everyone can’t be a carpenter. You have to be the right type you know.’
He said this as if he was commiserating with me for being blind or a cripple, and he was hoping for some reaction on my part.
When John had been a youngster in Jersey, the Germans had moved in and, owing to some failure of an engine in a small boat, he and his mother and father were unable to get away. The whole family were then taken to Germany and held throughout the war as hostages. John’s father has been described to me as a sturdy and uncompromising Yorkshireman, and I’m sure that John is very much a chip of the old block, so that the Germans must often have regretted their selection. What with one thing and another, John did not have a great deal of opportunity for orthodox schooling, so that when he found himself back in Jersey, he decided to learn a trade. When he had finished his apprenticeship, he went to South Africa with his mother to her people, as there were only two of them then, and after a time he set off by himself to Canada, to work as a carpenter and to build his boat, and to sail her round the world if possible. We were lucky to meet him soon after the beginning of his journey.
If the first week was all that we had expected of the South Tasman, the next week, which was spent largely south of New Zealand, gave us all kinds of variety. After the day of rest and repair in the sun, we had a grey wet drizzling day, with the wind in the north-west and continuous rain. We fixed a plastic water-bottle to the foot of the mizzenmast, and fastened a sail-cover upside down under the mizzen boom. We caught two gallons of water, and on the strength of this I shaved, and decided never again to go unshaven for so long, if I could avoid it. My beard felt dirty. It probably was, and it tickled me when I tried to sleep. From then on John and I kept our whiskers more or less under control.
The next day was warm and sunny, with a light following wind. John was the photographer, and he had about 2,000 feet of 16 mm. film which he intended to shoot. Now he suggested that we should put the dinghy overboard and film Tzu Hang under her twins. There was little wind. Tzu Hang was rolling along very quietly, and there was no white water, only the long easy swell. There seemed no danger in putting the dinghy over, and if he got left behind we would put the headsails down and wait for him.
We had two dinghies on board, stowed one on top of the other, upside-down. The bottom of one was of moulded fibre-glass, light and fast and easy to handle. It has stood up to an immense amount of rough use for several years, and was easily pulled on board by one person. On top of this was a plywood pram, also light and seaworthy and with a high freeboard, so that it fitted down on the deck. Stowed upside-down it looked splendid and conformed to the lines of the doghouse. Moreover, it had two handrails running along its bilges. In the water and the right way up, it looked rather like a pale blue bath, but it was a great load-carrier and a good seaboat, and provided there was no head wind and a light load, it was easy to send through the water. John had carried an outboard engine on Trekka, and during the Pacific crossing, and in New Zealand, we had done some great trips with it and John’s outboard.
We undid the lashings and prised the boat off the fibre-glass dinghy, to which it was clinging like a limpet. Then we unfastened the life-line and dropped it over the side. John jumped in and we handed him his movie camera in a plastic bag. He took the oars and rowed away from the ship and as the wind had dropped altogether now, we saw that he could row faster than we were sailing. He rowed on ahead of us, working hard, and was soon far enough away to leave his oars in the rowlocks and start filming. Completely alone, in a pale blue bathlike boat, and on a vast and slowly heaving sea, he looked like something out of a nursery rhyme. An albatross landed beside him and pecked at an oar. Tzu Hang rolled slowly past him as he filmed, and when he was about a hundred yards behind her and had taken a shot as she went behind a swell, he rowed up after us. We all had a go then. It was a fascinating sight to watch the ship rolling slowly along in this big smooth swell. The motion, which we had become accustomed to, looked tremendous from the dinghy. She was showing a vast amount of copper paint as she rolled, and it was still very clean, with only a few goose-barnacles visible here and there. Nothing seems to be able to defeat goose-barnacles. I believe that they would grow on pure arsenic. When we were sailing up to Canada, the log-line became so fouled with them that we had to change it. We left the old line in the stern so that they would dry up and we could then rub them off, and the cat used to eat a few off the line every day. Above the copper there were some signs of green weed clinging to the bottom of the white paint, but otherwise Tzu Hang was looking quite yachty. She had had a complete refit in Sydney. As I was thinking about all this, she drew away from me and I had a sudden panic feeling of being deserted, and rowed as hard as I could after her. Although there was no wind, she seemed to be going quite quickly through the water.
Beryl got in the dinghy and rowed away as if she had spent her life on the open ocean in one, but when she was back on board, I understood exactly the feelings of an old hen foster mother, when the last of its ducklings is back again from the water and safely under its wing. Tzu Hang seemed to do so too.
Next day was Sunday and we were becalmed. We were busy with all kinds of work on the deck. John painted the washboards, I finished the rigging-screws, and Beryl was still hunting for and recaulking small deck and skylight leaks. It was warm on deck and not at all the weather that we expected so far south. It didn’t seem to go with this sea, which the great grain ships used to cross. I wondered how often, just in this bit of water where we were sitting in the sun, a square-rigged ship had flung past, down to her topsails, and wondering whether she was south of the Snares and north of the Auckland Islands. A number of sailing ships were wrecked on the Auckland Islands, and although there are 140 miles between them and the Snares, they are better behind than in front, when visibility is bad. We were approaching the dotted line on the chart, which is inscribed, ‘Icebergs and loose ice may be met with south of this line’.
We had lunch on deck. Lunch was always cold and consisted of twice-baked bread, which was holding up well, butter, cheese, jam, salami or sardines, fruit cake, and an orange. Sometimes we had soup, and we had orange juice or grapefruit juice to drink. We also had a large supply of onions which we ate raw with our cheese.
During the morning John had taken some shots of all the activities on deck, while Pwe spent her time hunting the albatrosses with her usual ineffective procedure. I remembered the reporter in Seattle who had telephoned me for a story, and who had said, ‘Say, Captain, will you tell me what you folks do all the time, just laze around and lounge about on deck?’
After lunch I upset the linseed oil over the newly painted washboards. John didn’t even say, ‘Some mothers have them,’ as he was heard to do when I pushed a screwdriver through my finger in Honolulu. He said, ‘I’ve got to paint them again anyway,’ and Beryl thought that it would do the deck good. It was quite obvious that everyone was determined that ‘crew trouble’ wouldn’t mar the trip. The washboards never did get painted again because this was the last of the paint-drying days.
Next day we had a wind from the north-east and we made sail after breakfast, under full sail and the Genoa. The sea was calm and there was the same long swell. Tzu Hang sailed along unattended all day. I did ‘laze around all day’, but Beryl and John must always be at something. John had persuaded Beryl to knit him a Fair Isle jersey, and they were now busy trying to work out the pattern.
Pwe was full of activity also. She kept dancing up to us sideways, her ears back and her body arched, daring us to do something. It was about this time that she invented her main game. Siamese cats are not very original in their ideas about games, and this was inevitably a mouse game. She would fly up into my berth, a canvas bunk on two poles, and then stare over the pole at her victim. If he did not respond she would complain vocally, but none of us could resist her. The game consisted of running a finger along under the canvas, while she pounced on it. There were two variations; one was to run a finger along the side of the pole, while she hid inside and tried to grab it by putting her arm over the pole, and the other was for her to sit at the end of the berth and await for a finger to appear from under the canvas. This was extremely tense work and as the finger approached the end of the berth, excitement grew to fever pitch with both participants. She never let it get the better of her, and although she always caught it, she only dabbed the finger with a paddy paw. After she had caught it, she would swagger away, like a boxer who has floored his opponent.
In the afternoon we heard a soft sigh come faintly through the hatch, and then another, and another, and knew that we had a school of porpoises with us. We went on deck and John filmed them, crisscrossing in front of the bow and breaking water together in threes and fours. Sometimes they would haul off to one side or the other, and one of them came leaping along almost continuously out of the water, and falling over on to his side at each jump. They stayed with us for some time, but eventually tired of the play, and dropped astern, lazily rolling a dorsal fin out of the water, before they went off on some other business. Pwe stood with her forefeet on the cockpit coaming to watch them, with her ears pricked and in a rather alarmed and elongated attitude. They are horrible animals, she thinks, and will never venture further on deck if they are about. We always love their visits, they are such merry creatures, and feel strangely gratified by their attentions, and sorry when they leave.
The blue whale also seems to be a friendly animal, and is the only whale that likes to accompany us. We have seen quite a lot of them, sometimes longer than Tzu Hang, and they have often steamed alongside, to the delirious excitement of Clio’s small brown dog.
We were now 200 miles south of the south-east corner of New Zealand, in longitude 170° east and latitude 50° 30´ south, and the wind was freshening from the north-east. On January 8, with the wind still blowing freshly from the same quarter, we were nearly down to 52° south. We could not make much headway against a roughish sea, and the starboard tack would take us back to New Zealand, while the port tack would take us further down towards the iceberg zone. I felt that there were enough hazards without going further south, where we risked the chance of meeting up with some ice, and I didn’t want to lose any sea that we had gained. So we hove to and waited for the weather to change. For the last two days of the second week we lay hove to. It was the dreariest period of the whole trip: cold, and grey, and uncomfortable.
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Miles Smeeton
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Биографии и мемуары
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 17.04.2024
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О книге: This timeless classic is an exciting true story of survival against all odds.‘There was a sudden sickening sense of disaster. I felt a great lurch and heel, and a thunder of sound filled my ears. I was conscious, in a terrified moment, of being driven into the front and side of my bunk with tremendous force. At the same time there was a tearing cracking sound, as if Tzu Hang was being ripped apart, and water burst solidly, raging into the cabin. There was darkness, black boards, and I fought wildly to get out, thinking Tzu Hang had already gone. Then suddenly I was standing again, waist deep in water, and floorboards and cushions, mattresses and books were sloshing in wild confusion round me.’Miles Smeeton and his wife Beryl sailed their 46-ft Bermuda ketch, Tzu Hang, in the wild seas of Cape Horn, following the tracks of the old sailing clippers through the world’s most notorious waters. This is an exciting true story of survival against all odds, but it is also a thoughtful book which provides hard-learned lessons for other intrepid sailors.As Nevil Shute writes in his foreword: ‘It has been left to Miles Smeeton to tell us in clear and simple language just where the limits of safety lie.’