Solitaire Spirit: Three Times Around the World Single-Handed (10 page)

I waited for daylight before easing through the breakwater where, after anchoring on mud flats, an American Customs launch came over and gave me the good news that I would have enough money to pass through the Canal. It would cost only £30, half of which was a deposit and would be returned later. That was not my only piece of luck: I also received my first letter from Rome who, as an ex-merchant seaman, knew I had to pass through the Canal. I had reported all my blunders and how
Solitaire
kept getting me out of trouble, to which Rome replied that, despite so many mistakes, at least I was making them only once. I wrote back immediately... omitting to mention the reef in Grenada!

To arrange our transit I moved
Solitaire
into the Colon Yacht Club, one which does not encourage you to linger as they double their prices every three days to make room for new arrivals. You can stay on the mud flats free of charge, but from there it is difficult to arrange for a pilot and crew.

The Colon Muggers must be the world's best and if you haven't been mugged by one of them, you haven't been mugged. Colon is in one of the few countries that runs schools for these gentlemen, with courses in drug trafficking, kidnapping, and plain everyday murder. After successfully completing their training, many graduates are exported to less well-endowed regions, such is the demand for their talents. I made their acquaintance soon after my arrival. Communication between them and the chaps in Grenada must have broken down or they would have been informed that I had already been nobbled and there was little left.

My partner in this drama, Terrell Adkisson, was not exactly my idea of a Texan, as I had been brought up watching John Wayne and Gary Cooper knock ten kinds of rice pudding out of the Indians. Needing fuel for my trip through the Canal, I was hitting the trail along the Old Pontoon when I heard a slow, drawn-out, ‘Hooooowdy.' I spun round, dropping my hand to my hip, then quickly removed it in case I conveyed the wrong impression. I was confronted by a scruffy individual wearing checked shirt, glasses and a pair of ex-army trousers four sizes too big. At first the stubble on his face and grey crew-cut hair suggested he was older than I. In fact he was younger, proving again that ageing is a deception practised on people after a long sea voyage and nights without sleep.

Terrell owned
Altair
, a new 28ft glassfibre Bermudan sloop, and had recently given up teaching mathematics in Texas to sail around the world with his 22-year-old nephew, Leo, a blond young man who had previously spent his spare time playing guitar in a pop group. Terrell needed petrol, or gas as he put it, so we started out on the first of our many adventures together to a garage only a mile away in the Colon district. I had enough money to buy 5 gallons of diesel; Terrell had his wallet in his back pocket. The garage attendant warned us to be careful, his darting, frightened eyes telling their own story.

Groups of men were watching us but it was ten o'clock in the morning, broad daylight, so why worry? Halfway back to the yacht club I turned to speak to Terrell and spotted three of the biggest men I've ever seen coming up behind us, with knives. I had dreamed of moments like this. I would push the women and children to one side, take a flying leap, legs drawn to manly chest to shoot out like two murderous pistons, taking the two nearest villains in the throat, killing them instantly. The third would be despatched with a karate chop to the head.

What I actually did was to shout a warning to Terrell and run in front of a line of oncoming traffic. A screeching of brakes... I bounced off a car, the fuel can turning into a tiger that wanted to go walkies. It bolted across the intersection, dragging me with it, to
get clobbered by a truck coming the other way. When I staggered to my feet, Terrell had a man on each arm, with knives at his chest, while a third tore at Terrell's wallet.

I shouted as loudly as I could to let the men know I really meant it, ‘Hang on, I'm coming.'

There was a sound of ripping and Terrell stood in the main street minus trousers – and wallet. He started running after them, with me trying to stop him. If he caught up with them, they would surely kill him but, outdistanced, he abandoned the chase.

Terrell had lost a few travellers' cheques, no cash. Soon his sense of humour returned. ‘Just my luck to be arrested for indecent exposure,' he said, looking down at his fancy underpants. He was attacked a second time in Panama City, but this time Leo came up behind with a tin of peaches and started hammering the would-be mugger, who ran off. In Colon that could be described as a bad day at the office. It is inadvisable to linger long in Panama.

The 40-mile canal trip is straightforward enough, through pleasant lakes and waterways, with three locks at each end. You require a ship's pilot (normally an ex-Merchant Navy captain), four line handlers and four 100ft lengths of rope. The handlers adjust your lines to keep your craft in the centre of the dock as you rise and fall, for which you supply the food and grog for the day and their rail fare back. In 1976 that was just $1. Line handlers are not hard to come by. They reckon it's a nice day out.

I arrived at the Balboa Yacht Club on the Pacific side with precisely $3 so I sold my outboard for $200 to put me back in funds. Again I bought the cheapest food available: unmarked tins of corned beef that turned out to be mostly jelly, tins of tuna that looked and tasted like grey sand, a sack of rice alive with weevils, flour, baking powder and a large tin of treacle as a treat.

For my Pacific crossing (8,000 miles or so) I bought two charts. My first landfall would be Hiva Oa in the Marquesas Islands, a voyage of 3,500 miles or so. Navigation to date had been by dead reckoning with noon sights for latitude and radio direction finding; now I would be sailing into areas of reefs, few lighthouses
and fewer navigation aids. Accurate navigation would be essential so I would have to learn how to take sights for longitude. I managed to buy a 1976 Admiralty Almanac and a second-hand set of reduction tables, and for accurate timekeeping (one minute in error can put you 15 miles out of position) I helped antifoul another boat whose owner gave me a small portable receiver in payment. This one had short wave, enabling me to pick up the American station WWV which broadcasts time checks 24 hours a day. There was one small problem: the mirrors on my sextant had lost their silvering. A lady presented me with the mirror from her handbag. Cut to size, it made my sextant serviceable again. I made one major mistake when, trying to save money, I bought a gallon of cheap antifouling. As things worked out it would have been less expensive to have paid more for a better quality.

My custom ashore was to sit on the edge of a group of cruising people, listening to their tales of the sea, trying to pick up tips.
Solitaire
, the only craft I knew anything about, had now carried me 7,000 miles or more, but I still had not picked up much sailing terminology: talk of schooners, ketches or heavy weather sailing and I was lost. I tried to fade into the background with the odd ‘Hear, hear' and ‘Dashed good show', trying to pretend I was one of them.

On one such occasion I was with a crowd at the Balboa Yacht Club discussing the particularly bad weather at that time of year in the Caribbean. One American had lost his trimaran. He and his crew, over-tired on the trip from Grenada, had tried to come through the breakwater at night, missed the lights and hit it, but managed to get off before it sank. A Canadian family had tried for ten days to sail in the other direction but after a fierce battle had given up and retraced their steps through the Canal. Another five boats were hoping for an easterly passage, meanwhile waiting for the seas to die down. A Frenchman had ripped the floor out of his yacht to cover the cockpit and give protection from breaking waves. I thoroughly enjoyed their talk: you could virtually taste the salt on your lips.

‘Leslie, you've come through the Caribbean from Grenada single-handed,' someone commented.

‘Er, yes.' A mass of weather-beaten faces turn towards me.

‘How bad was it in your opinion?'

‘Pretty bad,' I replied.

‘Yes, but how bad?' the voice insisted.

I didn't want to tell them I spent my time below, reading, while
Solitaire
and the self-steering did the work. I couldn't talk about wind speed as I had no wind indicator and I would not know a 20ft breaking wave from a 10ft, yet I desperately wanted to be accepted by these adventurers. I came out with the incident that made me put in my hatchboards. ‘Well, my carpets got wet.'

There was a deathly silence.

I escaped next morning to the island of Taboga, 6 miles away in the Pacific. Terrell and I had heard of a wartime landing barge on the beach there, against which it was possible to tie alongside, wait for the tide to ebb and then antifoul the hull.
Altair
was done on one day, and
Solitaire
the next. Not too keen on the idea, my boat started acting like a spoilt child on bath night until I tied her up, when she settled. I made a better job of the wound in her side and then applied my cheap antifouling which went on like weak whitewash.
Solitaire
deserved better, but with only $60 left in the kitty I had little choice. At least we would be sharing discomforts, I thought, remembering my jellied corned beef and gritty tuna!

Terrell and Leo sailed a week ahead of us, as there were a few jobs still to do on
Solitaire
. I was sorry to see them go, but we would catch up later. I felt like I was living in Germany, when a knock on the door could mean a call from your local friendly Gestapo, inviting you to sample the delights of a lovely prison camp. Only now, in Taboga, it would be the army or police searching your yacht for drugs.

They paid a visit the day before I left, bringing a dinghy I was supposed to have left on the beach, one I knew belonged to a nearby yacht whose mast had been broken coming through the Panama. A young man with a large Dalmatian dog was looking
after the parent boat while its owner was away. As I towed the dinghy over to tie it on the yacht's stern, I could see the dog running on the beach. Later I heard the full story. The young man had taken it ashore for a walk, the army had tried to shoot it and the boy had put his arms round it for protection. He was now in hospital, half his hand blown away.

I sailed for Hiva Oa on Thursday, February 26th, 1976, and for two days
Solitaire
made good time in light winds, gliding along effortlessly on her clean bottom. Conscious of my earlier mistakes I spent hours in
Solitaire
's cockpit, listening to WWV for time checks while I took sights for longitude which, in the early days of the voyage, I could easily confirm. As the days passed I began to feel more at home at sea than on land.
Solitaire
's constant movement and my spartan diet kept me slim and fit. As I am blessed with ginger hair and freckles, the sun enjoyed itself colouring my skin anything from brilliant red to deep purple. It was a surprise to find it browning me as well.

No webbed feet or gills yet, but I was metamorphosing into marine life. For instance, storms and calms are treated differently by sea animals. To land life, a storm is a personal attack, knocking down a man's chimneys, flattening his crops, whereas calms go unnoticed. Sea life, however, accepts storms that may sink ships but are not malicious, and realises that the patient ocean recognises no flags, is not vindictive and, far from finding pleasure in rolling you over, does not even notice you. But a calm is a personal attack and in early days could mean back-breaking weeks in a longboat, towing a square-rigger while searching for life-giving winds, half the crew dying of thirst or hunger.

Solitaire
hit her first long calm east of the Galapagos Islands. After the early days at sea progress had slowed with runs of only 30 or 40 miles a day, periods without wind, the self-steering on a knife edge. Now she was about to spend four days in an ocean of thick blue oil below a sky whose solitary, unmoving cloud would retain its shape and position hour after hour, leering down on our discomfort. We carried no burgee at the mast top to indicate
wind direction but on our backstays bore long, red tell-tales which became skirts covering the most beautiful legs in the world, legs that made Betty Grable's look like matchsticks. They would lift slightly, showing trim ankles and then, seeing they had my interest, drop teasingly.

Just over the horizon was a Giant bathing in this lake of oil, his movements causing a long swell that swayed
Solitaire
monotonously from side to side. I grew to hate him and the Leering Cloud and the Teasing Skirt. The slapping sails, the rattle of the rigging, the strange sounds that would take hours to find... a shifting mug, a loose can. One sound had lasted longer than all the rest, a bruuuph, bruuuph, over and over again. Whenever I moved from my bunk I would alter
Solitaire
's balance and the noise, hearing me, would stop. Even if I slid along the floor on my belly, holding my breath, I could not catch it. Then the Giant scrubbed his back, and I had it. Bruuuph, bruuuph. A new drill was rolling back and forth in a drawer. I watched it with pleasure for a few minutes, like a cat with a mouse, then I pounced. Clutching it in my fist I took it to
Solitaire
's stern, and threw a brand new drill worth a bag of rice 50 yards into the sea. You really should not do that sort of thing. Later I learned the secret of destroying calms. You simply ignore them.

Once the sea was flat I would drop the headsail, and put a reef in the main to reduce chafe, which drives the chappie taking the bath bananas. Invariably I would spend my first day on deck busy with odd jobs, always remembering to smile and whistle from time to time for Leering Clouds hate happy whistling. To attract the Teasing Skirt I would bring out my secret weapon, a couple of good books, and while reading would watch her advances from beneath lowered lids. Red skirts hate being treated in this way and soon show all they have. There are compensations to long calms for at the end you will hear the Hallelujah chorus played by the London Symphony Orchestra. It's like sitting in the Royal Albert Hall, eyes closed, waiting, waiting, waiting. Then a faint cough; a ripple touches
Solitaire
's side. A flute softly tunes up and the
sails stop flapping. The string section plays a few bars and her rigging hums. The conductor taps his baton, a slight pause and
Solitaire
is sailing and the most marvellous music in the world is heard. The chorus sings Hallelujah, Hallelujah, higher and higher, Haaaaaleeeelujah...