A Voyage For Madmen (5 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Quick!' he shouted to Françoise. ‘Take the helm for two seconds.'

He grabbed his Opinel, the little wooden-handled French pocket knife with a steel blade that keeps a wonderful edge, climbed out on deck, and quickly cut away all five trailing lines.

Back at the helm, he immediately noticed the change. Gone was
Joshua
's sluggishness. No longer a sitting duck to be pounded and swept by the great seas, she now raced away before them. He ran the boat downwind as before, but as each wave approached, he gave the wheel a slight turn at the last minute and took the wave at an angle of 15 to 20 degrees. The wind hit her side, heeled her over, and off she flew, planing across the surface of each wave. The speed gave her rudder greater control and she responded instantly to the helm when the wave was past as Moitessier brought her stern into the wind again. The enormous waves, their apparent force reduced by
Joshua
's speeding away from them, now rolled harmlessly beneath her quarter.

The storm lasted six days and six nights. Bernard Moitessier steered through more heavy weather, and learned more about handling it, in those six days than most sailors do in a lifetime: a compression of experience that turned him into a master mariner in a single week; a man who had spent a short eternity at the furthest reach of all sailors' fears.

Four months later, the Moitessiers dropped anchor in Alicante, Spain, their first stop, 14,216 miles from Tahiti. Without intending to, trying simply to get home fast because they missed the kids, they had made the longest nonstop voyage in a yacht to date – a world record, and by way of the dreaded Horn.

Moitessier very quickly wrote another book, his second, about their voyage,
Cap Horn à la voile
(titled in English:
Cape Horn: The Logical Route)
, which was published in time for France's premier boat show, the Salon Nautique. It became a huge best-seller. In France, where long-distance sailors enjoy the sort of movie star celebrity known only to sports figures like David Beckham today in Great Britain, Moitessier became a national hero. Awards were heaped on him. In England, the ‘Moitessier method' was discussed at a
Yachting World
forum on heavy-weather tactics, where it was pronounced ‘rather startling'. By the end of 1966 he was world-famous.

And very unhappy. He felt he had dashed off his book too fast, rushing it to coincide with and augment the glory of the Salon Nautique. He felt, he wrote later, that in so doing he had committed a crime. Moitessier experienced nothing in moderation. His books are written with an ingenuous, exuberant lack of restraint (and editing), full of a sensual exultation of sea. When he was up, he was way up. But when he was down …

October ('67) was devastating. Wrapped in total silence, sucked down by a huge inner emptiness, I sank into the abyss … I felt madness burrowing into my guts like some hideous beast. I found myself wondering what last thoughts come to someone who has swallowed a lethal dose of poison.

This goes beyond remorse for skimping on a book. It seems more likely that following his epic voyage and starburst of fame and glory, he was experiencing a pronounced bipolar slump.

He got himself out of it with a typically intense swing back into the stratosphere.

I must have been on the point of suicide when … in one blinding flash … I saw how I could redeem myself. Since I had been a traitor by knocking off my book, what I had to do was write another one to erase the first and lift the curse weighing on my soul.

A fresh, brand-new book about a new journey … a gigantic passage….

Drunk with joy, full of life, I was flying among the stars now. Together, my heart and hands held the only solution, and it was so luminous, so obvious, so enormous, too, that it became transcendent: a non-stop sail around the world! … And this time I was setting out for the battle of my life alone.

He doesn't mention Chichester. But his blinding flash seems to have come around the end of 1967. Chichester had sailed home that May.

W
INTER IS A DISMAL SEASON
for sailors in England. The weather offshore is bad, even dangerous, and the misty coastal glim has become impenetrable and uninviting. Boats are cold and damp and under wraps in their mud berths or puddled boatyards. But in January the gloom is pierced by the arrival of the annual London Boat Show. Boaters, boatbuilders, yacht designers, ship chandlers, brokers, and sailing journalists from all over the country come in out of the rain and look at new boats and hardware. They finger the new rain gear, talk about anchor chain, and try to find some aspect of it all that might appeal to their wives and girlfriends. And they pore through cruising guides to Brittany, or the Bahamas, or anywhere a boat can sail to. So it is also the season of their dreams.

One of these dreams, that January 1968, was epic, Ulyssean, and talk of it passed through the yachting community like contagion. Everybody now knew what the next great voyage must be: a nonstop solo circumnavigation. So when it was rumoured at the boat show that Bernard Moitessier was preparing for another voyage, the shape of it was easily guessed at. The details of Bill King's
Galway Blazer II
, then under construction, were released to the newspapers during the boat show, and his
intentions became known to all. And there was talk of others making similar plans.

John Ridgway, reading of Bill King's proposed voyage, made a ‘military appreciation of the situation' and decided to advance his plans by a year. He would forgo the transatlantic race, which he had looked on as good experience for a circumnavigation, and concentrate wholly on the bigger voyage. His literary agent immediately contacted
The People
newspaper, which had sponsored his transatlantic row, and they agreed to back his circumnavigation. In order to get a jump on King and his bigger, faster boat, which wouldn't be completed until July or August, Ridgway determined to depart on 1 June. This date would mean reaching the Southern Ocean sometime in September, rather too early for comfort, at the beginning of the southern spring, but would put him off Cape Horn in January – midsummer – the safest time for a passage south of the stormy cape.

The
Sunday Times
, which had sponsored Francis Chichester and reaped a bonanza with that story, was very keen to get itself linked with one of the nonstop circumnavigators. The paper dispatched Murray Sayle, the reporter who had covered the Chichester story, to assess the growing pool of possible contenders for this last great sailing ‘first'.

He liked ‘Tahiti Bill' Howell, a 42-year-old Australian who had spent years sailing through the South Pacific supporting himself as a cruising dentist. Howell came with an admirable CV: he had sailed the 24-foot
Wanderer II
, a famous yacht once belonging to the venerable English sailor Eric Hiscock, from England to Tahiti with one crew, and from there single-handed to British Columbia by way of Hawaii. He had sailed a 30-footer to sixth place in the 1964 OSTAR. Now he had a 40-foot catamaran,
Golden Cockerel
, capable of sailing much faster than any monohull. He was planning on racing his cat across the Atlantic in that summer's third OSTAR, then immediately turning left once he was across the finish line and heading south for his nonstop circumnavigation.