Solitaire Spirit: Three Times Around the World Single-Handed (25 page)

It was fitting that the thirteenth week should be the worst I had ever spent at sea, the week I thought I had lost
Solitaire
, the week that I lost my affection for England. Since leaving home I had been bitter, frightened and depressed. The bitterness I could understand but not the time I was taking to get over it. The court case had upset me deeply. Weren't the upper classes, the lords of the manor, supposed to look after the peasants? I could picture
Solitaire
beating up the English Channel, her red ensign streaming in the wind, with a certain pride in completing the long haul. But after 90 days at sea the picture had started to fade.

And this was the day the storm started.

South Atlantic – Indian Ocean

September – October 1980

Thursday, September 30th
. Our noon sight showed we were about to enter the Roaring Forties, 250 miles below South Africa on latitude 39°S. The morning winds, around Force 4, came from the north and were cold despite my heavy sweater, foul weather gear and sea boots. It was not just the cold that had made me put on the full gear: the day before one of the water containers had burst and soaked both my sleeping bags so that the only way I could sleep on them now was by wearing oilskins.

I had been forced to stop using the old number two genoa a week before as we had been getting the odd gust that would have ripped it in half. We were reaching under working jib and main with one reef, which had gone in when I had started to feel uneasy. Although, cold apart, it seemed a perfect sailing day with a few scattered clouds in an otherwise clear winter sky. A swell started to build up and the hairs at the base of my neck began to stand on end. During the afternoon wind strength remained constant but the sky turned from blue to black in less than two hours as though coats of film, one atop the other, had finally turned sea and sky to jet. There were no breaking waves but the swell increased until the sea rollercoastered.

Normally I would have taken down the main but for weeks I
had been over-reacting. Was I at it again? The only headsail strong enough for these waters was the working jib, which meant I would have to keep the main up for as long as possible or the voyage would last for ever. Apart from running out of food we would be too late this year to round Cape Horn safely.

If we were to have any chance of maintaining schedule the old rules of the game would have to go by the board, starting with the first and oldest: reef or reduce sails as soon as you think about it. That afternoon I was trying to read
Hawaii
, so uneasily that I found I was scanning the same line again and again. Although
Solitaire
carried no wind speed indicator I know that during our first voyage outside Cape Town we survived winds in excess of 100 miles an hour (as later reported by ships damaged in the area). I know what they sound like in the rigging, what effect flying spray has on bare flesh. This storm did not frighten me as it lasted only a few hours and the waves had little time to build up. My main fear was being run down by a tanker.

When the storm struck – without warning – it was with the force of one of these tankers. This was an assassin's bullet hitting before the victim heard the sound of the rifle. You're alive, you're dead, you're upright, you're on your side. There's a whisper in the rigging, then it screams. A panic-stricken dash to the deck to find the mast nearly in the water. Both spray dodgers have gone. The self-steering wind vane is pushed fully over and is vibrating against its stop. Sails are filling with the sea, their seams about to split. Both sheets are released; for a moment part of the boom and main disappear over the side and God knows what's happening to the headsail because I'm blinded by wind and spray.

I clawed my way to the mast and tugged on the main's luff but the bloody thing would not come down. The pressure on the sail was jamming the slides. Finally I succeeded in lowering it. I should have returned to the cockpit and pulled back the boom inside
Solitaire
's guard-rails but if I didn't do something about the headsail I'd lose it. Quickly I lashed part of the main to the boom, nothing below me but white broken water. Once the jib was safely
down I could return to the cockpit and retrieve the boom dangling in the sea. I tied a rope onto the wind vane and around my waist. When I released it from the self-steering unit it tried to take off like a rocket, bearing me with it. I promptly had second thoughts and in the end managed to take it below, where I wrapped it in a protective blanket.

Now I could think about my own needs. Luckily I had been wearing my wet weather gear on deck, the first time I had ever sat around with sea boots on. As I like to feel
Solitaire
moving under my bare feet, wearing sea boots is like going to bed with a woman wearing boxing gloves. I had had no time to put a towel around my neck so my shirt and sweater were saturated and as I realised this my teeth began to chatter. Then the risks I had taken without a safety harness dawned on me and the chattering increased in tempo.

Tea would have tasted like ambrosia, but first I had to fit a shock-cord onto the self-steering rudder to prevent it banging back and forth, and I needed to retrieve the 30ft of line on the log. One spray dodger was again ripped in half, the other hung over the side, held by a few odd ties. Both had to be removed and stowed. At that stage I was merely thinking of just another stormy night at sea. I would put extra lashings on the sails and rubber dinghy, pump out the bilges, then settle down for a night's sleep lying a-hull.

When the storm started I was confident that
Solitaire
and I had all the answers. After all, hadn't we faced every situation, every type of wind, every type of sea? All sails were down. It would be hours before the seas built up and became dangerous. Lord, what poor misguided fools we are!

Without knowing it, everything I had done so far had been wrong. I was working to rules from the first voyage, rules which said that, provided everything was secured and there was a good depth of water, storms were nothing to worry about. There had been exceptions of course, when the storm brought fierce lightning, which I hated, or we lay off a lee shore or in a shipping lane. Then I would prefer to be sitting in front of a roaring fire, a dog at my feet, contemplating a stroll to the local for a pint with the lads. The
rules from our first voyage were as outdated as trying to fight an atomic war with conkers.

I was starting to suspect even the preparation for the voyage. Money, or its shortage, decided what we could or could not take with us, apart from my wet weather gear, which was the best I could find, being the type used by Rome on his Whitbread round-the-world voyage. It seemed to have everything I wanted: the jacket heavily quilted for warmth; the double-lined trousers had substantial plastic zips, which in turn were protected by flaps. The trouser tops fitted snugly under armpits and the jacket had a built-in harness on to which the safety line clipped. The outfit cost around £150, it was money well spent. The first problem showed up when I tried to wear sea boots, which I normally don only when close to English waters. Even at night, although my feet would be cold, I felt no pain and certainly had no frostbite worries. In the old days in emergencies I would dash on deck naked apart from the safety harness. Now when I was needed there in a hurry, I first had to tuck my long trousers into my socks, pull on the outer trousers, put on sea boots, then work the trousers back over the boots, tightening the tapes. The linings slowed down the drill.

I hit another snag trying to get back on deck – I could not get through the hatch! In storms I would lock myself below and wait for a lull, then slide back the hatch cover, remove the top board, step out and replace them. It was fairly easy provided you were not wearing padded jackets. After leaving England I had fitted two bolts to the top board to prevent its loss during a capsize. To clip on my safety line I had to lean over the boards to reach the U-bolt. It made me feel sick.
Solitaire
's movements were so violent and the winds so strong that I had to keep my back to them. So powerful was the spray that I feared for my sight.

It had become very dark and I was becoming painfully aware that my feet were turning to ice. There was more than a foot of water in the cockpit. With the spray-dodgers lost, seawater broke over us more quickly than we could jettison. It forced its way up my wet suit and over the top of my boots, freezing my legs and feet.

Somehow the trailing long line, with its weight and spinners, had wrapped itself around the self-steering gear, and as it was nearest I decided to make a start with this. Waves continued to break over us and an aching body joined my frozen feet. For the first time my body temperature worried me. In winter's seas you might be lucky to last half-an-hour if you fell overboard off the English coast but if I went over in these latitudes I would have only minutes.

For the first time I realised that many of
Solitaire
's features that had worked perfectly on the shake-down cruise were a disadvantage in these seas. The skirt that ran around the top of the cockpit, 3–9in above the deck, had prevented water streaming into the cockpit. Now it also trapped and held it until
Solitaire
was thrown on her side and the seawater partly spilled out. The cockpit that had been perfect in Tahiti, Australia, and South Africa was far too large. Instead of holding parties of ten or twelve happy guests it was now holding tons of freezing seawater. The cockpit was made from a single moulding with a 14in seat halfway down its side dropping to the cockpit floor. The seats lifted to provide locker space. I had modified the two lockers so that the channels around their covers were self-draining. On the first voyage the covers were held in place only by shock cords since I could not afford anything more expensive. I had attached half-inch ropes onto the hull, fed them through holes in the locker tops and secured them in this Mickey Mouse fashion. When leaving the cabin you stepped onto a centre shelf which held the mainsheet traveller. An adjustable pulley and block ran from the traveller to the end of the boom, holding the latter in place.

The main trouble with leaving the cabin was my heavy clothing coupled with
Solitaire
's violent pitching and tossing. What I really needed was something to hold onto and use as a lever. The pram cover frame was far too weak to suffice.

I centred the mainsheet traveller, which meant that the ropes to the foot of the boom passed in front of the hatch, giving me room to squeeze by, using them as a handhold. All I wanted now was
to strip off my wet clothes and brew tea, but once I had struggled below I remembered I still had to pump out the bilges. So back I went out into the cold, the breaking seas and the howling winds. Then came the bliss of holding the kettle on top of a dancing stove to produce a life-giving, hot, sweet cuppa. When I started to think about changing my wet clothes I realised I had insufficient replacements and those I had were the wrong type for these conditions.

The suitcase I had carried around the world in 1968 now contained one suit, a dozen assorted nylon dress shirts and sports shirts, and five sweaters. Rex Wardman had also given me a lovely thermal jacket for Christmas, and Margaret a pair of quilted trousers. She had driven me to the Surplus Army and Navy stores in Southampton, where they were selling off old ex-navy diving suits for £10. Unfortunately when we arrived they had sold out apart from one moth-eaten suit that was falling to bits. It was a green fur-lined one-piece affair that I tried on and spent an enjoyable half-hour running around like the Incredible Hulk, frightening customers.

On the way back to Lymington I had asked Margaret if I could put it on again and lean out of the car window. At the time we were driving through the Southampton Red Light district.

‘You do and I'll throw you out,' was Margaret's reply.

The thought of a green man knocking on doors in that area had me chuckling for days. Funny how the mind wanders when you are cold and tired!

In a storm like that we could be badly damaged at any time so I had to keep my wet weather gear on. Even if I changed my sweater it would be dry only for a few minutes before soaking up the water from my jacket. The best I could do was take off my boots, empty them, and wring out my socks. After that I wedged myself on the floor behind the water containers and pulled a sleeping bag over my head to retain some body heat. At first it was too cold to sleep but, as my clothes reached body temperature, I started to drop off – only to be brought back with a shock to find myself sitting in 2in of water covering the cabin floor. The bilges were full again
despite my pumping them dry within the last two hours. We must have taken in well over 100 gallons in that time.

I waited for
Solitaire
to steady herself, slid back the hatch cover and put my head out into a shrieking, screaming world of horror. Massive seas were crashing on my poor boat, trying to bury her alive, giving her no chance to recover, to fight back. The cockpit was full of water. The lockers that I had made self-draining for the odd breaker were under boiling seas that would be gushing under their covers and running forward under the engine mounts to fill the bilges and then, more slowly, the cabin itself.