A Voyage For Madmen (10 page)

O
NLY THREE MONTHS EARLIER
, a fifth competitor (counting Bernard Moitessier, preparing in Toulon) had decided to join the race.

Sunday 17 March 1968 was cold and wintry along the south coast. Nigel Tetley and his wife, Eve, read the Sunday papers in bed at home – a 40-foot trimaran moored in Plymouth Harbour. Living full-time aboard a trimaran was not the hardship it could be on other yachts:
Victress
was 22 feet wide and had the living space of a small cottage. That morning they had a small coal stove burning inside the cabin, which was toasty and comfortable. Tetley, 44, was a commander in the Royal Navy, less than a year from retirement, and Eve, his second wife, taught geography in a local school in Plymouth.

While Eve looked through one paper, Tetley noticed a headline in another: ‘Round-the-World Race'. He picked up the
Sunday Times
and read the details of the Golden Globe race.

Tetley had once thought of sailing alone around the world, but two years earlier he had met Eve and, like many a would-be single-hander, he'd given up ideas for solo adventures.

But he surprised himself. The notion of this race tapped into
a compulsion stronger than he was aware of. He knew immediately that he wanted to do it.

He pushed the paper across the bunk so that Eve could read it. When he was sure she had, he said, ‘May I go?'

After a long look at her husband, Eve said, ‘I would not try to stop you.'

Time was now short to launch such an effort and Tetley began to prepare immediately. Like Commander Bill King and Robin Knox-Johnston, he believed his best chance lay in having a boat designed and built specifically for this race.
Victress
was not a racing boat but a five-year-old live-aboard cruising yacht. Tetley had sailed her, with crew, in the 1966 Round Britain race, and the trimaran had performed well, finishing in fifth place. But a few weeks going around the British Isles in summer was small beer compared to four or five months in the Southern Ocean. What he had in mind now was an altogether different machine, a fleet, simple, powerful 50-foot trimaran, that would cost him £10,000, money he didn't have.

He began writing letters to possible sponsors. He started with Tetley Tea, hoping they liked his name and reminding them of the long association between tea and the clipper ship route of the race. The tea firm declined. He wrote to other tea, tobacco, and drinks companies but the result was the same. He had nothing to offer a sponsor. He was not, like Ridgway and Blyth, a newly famous adventurer. He was certainly a better seaman than either of them, but an unknown if competent yachtsman was not what an advertiser was looking for.

Nor could he get away quickly. Tetley was still on active naval duty ashore in Plymouth, though he believed the navy would release him in September, five months before his official retirement date. This would enable him to leave before the
Sunday Times
deadline of 31 October, but he would be starting later than the rest of the fleet. His only chance of winning would be sailing faster than any of the other boats, possible in a trimaran.

Late in March, waiting for replies, the Tetleys set out on a short cruise aboard
Victress
with Nigel's two sons from his first
marriage. While they were trying to berth the boat in windy conditions in Penzance Harbour, a section of the trimaran's port bow was damaged. All the local shipwrights were busy fitting out boats for Easter. The only person Tetley could find to repair the damage was a coffin maker.

Sailors are naturally a superstitious lot. When they head out upon the deep, the constructs of society soon drop astern and they are surrounded by shooting stars overhead, phosphorescence in their wakes, and heaving shapes all around them in the sea and sky. It is easy, then, sensible even, to become afraid. Sailors are generally careful and conscientious engineers, fussing endlessly with their craft to make them seaworthy, but when they have done all they can do, they move quickly and easily to prayer. They have many of their own, like Psalm 107, surely written by a sailor.

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters;

These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep
.

For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof
.

They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths: their soul is melted because of trouble
.

They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit's end
.

Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses
.

He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still
.

Then are they glad because of the quiet; so he bringeth them unto their desired haven
.

Prayers may comfort. They may even work. But, as backup, in the spirit of assisting the Lord in his aid of those who help
themselves, sailors carry with them a seaman's chest of superstitions, evil eyes, rites, and invocations handed down from Homer's time. Some are specific: never sail on a Friday; never whistle aboard a boat unless it is for wind when becalmed; always make an offering to Neptune on crossing the equator. One precaution should have appeared obvious, not only to the mariner: never have your ship repaired by a coffin maker. But Tetley wasn't perturbed, so the coffin maker did the job.

Facing a mounting pile of rejection letters from hoped-for sponsors, Tetley soon decided, like Knox-Johnston, that if he was to go at all, it would be in the boat at hand,
Victress
, newly repaired. Still, he needed money to refit his boat for the voyage.

It wasn't until the third week in June, after the first three ‘rash' young men had departed, that he announced his intention to sail, without sponsorship, to the
Sunday Times
. A reporter and a photographer came down to Plymouth to interview and photograph the latest entrant. Tetley mentioned to the journalists that he and Eve enjoyed listening to classical music while sailing, and he demonstrated the trimaran's stereo tape system. The reporter suggested he look for a record company to sponsor him.

The following weekend, on 23 June, the
Sunday Times
carried an article with the headline, ‘Around the World in 80 Symphonies', with a photograph of Tetley and his wife Eve, both attractive people, laughing at
Victress
's saloon table. The article noted that the Tetleys shared a love of music, and that the commander, hoping for a music company sponsor, ‘wouldn't even mind being plugged as the ‘Around the World in 80 Symphonies' mariner'.

Richard Baldwyn, director of Music for Pleasure, a company that marketed cassette tapes, was reading this article while flying back to England from the south of France. Approaching England, the pilot announced that there was a problem with the plane's landing gear: the wheels might not go down. Baldwyn offered up a prayer to the effect that if he reached the ground intact, he would sponsor the music-loving Tetley. The plane landed safely, and Tetley got his sponsor.

He and Eve worked every spare hour together preparing
Victress
at Plymouth's Millbay Docks. This meant afternoons and long into most nights since both were working during the day – Tetley still had naval duties, and would not be released from service until 1 September.

Eve organised Tetley's food with great attention to nutrition, variety, and appeal. She augmented the inevitable corned beef and staples of the sailor's diet with tins of roast duck, roast goose, jugged hare, smoked turkey, venison, roast pheasant, and a huge variety of seafood, including octopus and rainbow trout.

Plymouth is a large natural harbour, the home of the Navy, an ideal place in which to prepare any vessel for sea. Tetley was soon joined by three other Golden Globe racers. The first arrived one day in July. Nigel Tetley looked up as the lock gates at Millbay Docks opened and a rough-looking steel ketch sailed in. It was unlike any yacht he had ever seen. There was a brutal practicality to it: telephone poles for masts, steel pipe for its bowsprit, no wood to varnish, just a plain paint finish – the only hint of warmth was the startling fire-engine red of its hull. A wiry, muscular figure stood at the bow rolling a cigarette as the boat appeared to sail itself slowly towards the dock. Tetley hailed the newcomer, asking the name of the vessel.

‘Joshua,'
came the reply. Bernard Moitessier had arrived.

In the weeks that followed, two more boats, Loïck Fougeron's steel cutter,
Captain Browne
, and Bill King's brand new light-displacement, slippery-smooth, cold-moulded, junk-rigged schooner
Galway Blazer II
, joined
Victress
and
Joshua
at the dock.

Fougeron, a 42-year-old Breton who managed a motorcycle company in Casablanca, was a friend of Bernard Moitessier's. He had sailed with him aboard
Joshua
from the Moroccan coast to the Canary Islands and undoubtedly was heavily influenced by the French sailing superstar. Fougeron had an able vessel, a steel-hulled 30-footer that would have met with Moitessier's approval.
Before sailing
Captain Browne
from Toulon, where he had fitted it out near Moitessier's
Joshua
, to Plymouth, Fougeron had had almost no single-handed experience.

The four sailors quickly put aside the concerns of rivalry. They looked over one another's boats, freely traded information, ate dinners together, and talked about their race. They established the camaraderie of soldiers waiting to ship out for war.

I
N THE MIDDLE OF
J
UNE
, two weeks out of Inishmore, John Ridgway was closing with Madeira where he had arranged to meet a journalist, Bill Gardner, from his sponsor
The People
, and hand over letters and photographs. He was making good time, but his mood was all wrong. The loneliness most single-handers quickly adjust to had only intensified. His hand-cranked Lifeline radio, the same model he had used successfully on the transatlantic row, had stopped working; unable to send or receive messages to and from home, his loneliness grew even worse. A compulsive eater ashore, he was losing his appetite and had to force himself to eat his daily ‘rations' prepared for him by the Horlicks company. And the collisions at the start of his voyage had tapped into a deep wellspring of anxiety. He confided to his log that he was now hearing, above the constant groans of a boat under way, ‘ominous creaking sounds' from the area at the side of the boat that had been hit by the trawler. Ridgway's confidence in himself and his boat was ebbing away.

On Sunday 16 June (two days after Robin Knox-Johnston sailed from Falmouth), Madeira's mountainous profile rose out of the sea ahead. Fishermen in small boats saw Ridgway and
waved. The land turned green and terraced with fields as he approached. But in the afternoon as he neared the northwest corner of the island, the spot for his rendezvous with Bill Gardner, a strong local wind, skewed and reinforced by its passage around the high land, rose and blew him offshore, where he reduced sail and hove to for the night.

The next day, a local boat carrying Gardner found Ridgway and
English Rose
. The men waved and shouted at each other across the water through loud-hailers, and then Gardner's boat drew close enough for normal talk, even jokes.

‘I've been waiting ten days,' said Gardner.

‘I'll bet you have. Sunning yourself on the beach.'

For a precious few minutes Ridgway had the companionship he sorely missed.

Using waterproof canisters pulled through the water by line, he sent Gardner a package of diaries, films, and tape recordings on a line. Gardner sent him back letters, newspapers, and local Madeiran bread, cheese, sardines, and beer. They talked about the race, Gardner filling him in on when Chay Blyth and Robin Knox-Johnston had sailed.

Soon it was time to part. Ridgway asked him to send his love to Marie Christine and his baby daughter, Rebecca, and the men agreed they would see each other again off the town of Bluff, New Zealand, in October, three and a half months away. Then Gardner's boat motored away.

Ridgway headed for the open sea, enveloped once more in absolute isolation.

Later, reading a copy of the
Sunday Times
that Gardner had passed to him, Ridgway discovered that the race rules governing ‘taking on supplies' extended to the mail and the fresh lunch he'd just received. How ridiculous! he thought, enraged by the pettiness of it. Obviously Gardner, who had now technically disqualified Ridgway, had thought so too.

Ridgway plugged on, but he remained desperately lonely and unhappy. After a struggle getting a sail down in windy conditions one morning, he came below into the cabin and burst into tears.
He realised that he had cried at some point on each of the last twenty-seven days.

He wondered why he was attempting this voyage, and what had driven the other competitors to attempt it. Years before, when he had thought of giving up the canoe race after capsizing, it had been his partner Chay Blyth who had been fierce about not giving up, who had pushed them on and made them win. On their transatlantic row, it was Blyth who kept up their spirits, once repeating over and over during a five-day storm, ‘It's almost over, soon it'll be a memory.'