A Voyage For Madmen (35 page)

What splendid news for England. The Frenchman was out; the three courageous Brits were now racing for home. Barring mishaps, Knox-Johnston now seemed certain to win the Golden Globe trophy for the first person to sail alone around the world without stopping. Nigel Tetley, heading north in the South Atlantic, looked good for the cash prize for fastest time, but Donald Crowhurst, the dark horse of the race, who ‘should now be approaching New Zealand', could still overtake him in elapsed speed.

At the other end of the earth, at the furthest reach of each sailor's due north, the British transarctic expedition, led by English explorer-author Wally Herbert, was at the same time approaching the North Pole after more than 400 days on the polar ice cap. For what? Another first in the annals of Arctic achievement: the first surface crossing of the Arctic Ocean by way of the North Pole. Never mind that it was not especially important or useful; it was wonderfully demanding. Herbert's team was travelling in the classic mode of men pulled by dogsled, evoking the glory years of England's heroic failures in polar exploration. It was another glorious, brutal, Ulyssean endeavour, and, pointless or otherwise, the island nation was showing that it still had, in spades, the stuff of which heroes are made.

Donald Crowhurst's route 10 March 1969 – 1 July 1969

A
FTER
W
AVING
adiós
to Nelson Messina at Rio Salado, Donald Crowhurst headed north – towards England, of course, to win his regatta. But once over the horizon, beyond the eyes of Nelson Messina or the patrols of the Prefectura Nacional Marítima, he turned south. He was planning to rejoin the race.

His idea was to reappear at some point in April, break his radio silence, announce his position, and continue racing for home. Where, when, and how exactly he did this was crucial to his deception. He did not want to be spotted and identified by a ship before he was in the right position, and he had to work out his fake passage time across the Pacific and his ostensible date for rounding the Horn. He also hoped to get some 16-millimetre film footage of Roaring Forties conditions, and perhaps of the Falkland Islands. They might not be the Horn, but they were down there. It could be credibly easy, even commendably safe, to pass Cape Horn far enough offshore not to sight it: a glimpse of the Horn would be an almost irresistible temptation to a circumnavigator, but in thick weather even a minimally safe offing could leave the fabled rock hidden in stormwrack. A shot of the Falklands could vouch for a Southern Ocean passage to minds otherwise undisposed to serious doubts. Lastly, he wanted to
send a radio message home, supposedly from the Pacific, via Wellington, New Zealand, before his arrival date at the Horn. This might be easier, he thought, if he got far enough south to bounce a signal over the lower, narrower spine of the Andes. So on 10 March, he turned south from his position off Rio Salado and sailed down into the empty, loneliest region of the South Atlantic, away from the world's eyes, to plot his reemergence and strategy for taking the cash prize from Nigel Tetley.

His last purported position before initiating radio silence had been Gough Island, west of Cape Town, on 15 January. From there to Cape Horn was approximately 13,000 miles. He decided to allow ninety days from Gough Island to Cape Horn, supposedly reaching there on 15 April – an average of 144 miles per day; incredible but not quite impossible (Moitessier's monohull
Joshua
often did better). A reappearance shortly thereafter in the South Atlantic would put him – on elapsed time – comfortably ahead of Nigel Tetley. Then he would race for home as legitimately fast as he could.

He crossed the fortieth parallel around 16 March and continued zig-zagging south. He still had almost a month before reappearing more or less where he was. He soon ran into several days of Roaring Forties storm conditions, but by the time he was off the northern shores of the Falkland Islands on 29 March, the weather had become unusually quiet. He shot some footage of a quiet sunset near Port Stanley. Then two more days of strong westerlies carried him away from the islands, northeast up the Atlantic.

Early in April, he began transmitting Morse cables on the frequency serving Wellington Radio, New Zealand, but with no success (not necessarily due to distance, but to atmospheric conditions). However, Radio General Pacheco in Buenos Aires picked him up on 9 April and repeatedly asked for his position. Typically, Crowhurst would not oblige with hard information. Instead, he used Radio General Pacheco to send his first words to England after eleven weeks of silence. It was a Morse message for Rodney Hallworth.

DEVON NEWS EXETER – HEADING DIGGER RAMREZ LOG KAPUT 17697 28TH WHAT'S NEW OCEANBASHINGWISE.

The cable was phoned to Hallworth as he was shaving on the morning of 10 April. He immediately phoned Clare Crowhurst to give her the great news. Later, he sat down to work out what he could from this short, enigmatic message. How characteristic of Donald: the spare humour, the frustrating lack of detail, and a pinpoint position. But this one was better than most: Crowhurst's log or logline had broken at 17,697 miles on 28 March; ‘Digger Ramrez' was obviously the Diego Ramirez group, a scant 60 miles or so from Cape Horn. Why, Donald was sailing past the Horn as he read this! Hallworth realised. He prepared his press release.

Two days later, Sunday 13 April, half the London papers reported that Donald Crowhurst had rounded Cape Horn – almost a week before his intended date. The
Sunday Times
allowed that Crowhurst might have already rounded the Horn, but the paper also thought he could still have as much as 1,000 miles to go. At any rate, if he kept up his current speed, he could be back in Teignmouth sometime between 24 June and 8 July. This would mean a circumnavigation of about 250 days – ten days faster than the current estimate for Tetley of 260 days. This would win Crowhurst the £5,000 cash prize.

Nobody seemed concerned that this message had come from Buenos Aires, the other side of the Andes from Crowhurst's supposed location somewhere in the Pacific. Radio contact at sea, as everyone knew by now, was a fluky business. Crowhurst's radio silence had been a month less than Knox-Johnston's, who had reappeared in the middle of the Atlantic. And Crowhurst was still the smaller story in the race. The papers were now full of news about Robin Knox-Johnston, ‘the surprising hero' in his small, Indian-built ketch, and his arrival any day now in Falmouth.

On board
Teignmouth Electron
, Crowhurst awaited Hallworth's reply with considerable anxiety. It was a month since he had sailed from Rio Salado. He'd had no news of the race since
his last radio communications three months earlier. Now, having sent an ambiguous position, he waited to hear if he had been spotted at sea or reported ashore or if suspicions at home had been aroused and the game was up. The reply, three days later, contained no hint of trouble.

YOU'RE ONLY TWO WEEKS BEHIND TETLEY PHOTO
FINISH WILL MAKE GREAT NEWS STOP ROBIN DUE ONE TO TWO WEEKS – RODNEY

Encouraged, and suddenly freed from his isolation chamber, Crowhurst became relatively garrulous on the radio. He sent back cables describing the smell of wood smoke on the wind off the Falkland Islands. (Hallworth heard poetry in the spare lines;
Wood Smoke on the Wind
should be the title of Crowhurst's book, he thought.) In another, he peevishly quibbled with the term ‘race-winner' when applied to Knox-Johnston, suggesting an even distinction between first home and fastest time.

In frequent if not regular communication with both General Pacheco Radio in Buenos Aires, and now Portishead Radio in England, he learned of Moitessier's abandonment of the race and Tetley's position, supposedly far ahead of him. (Bizarrely, the tracks of the two trimarans came so close together on 24 March that the two men might actually have passed within sight of each other, Crowhurst headed south towards the Falklands, Tetley past them going north. The weather at the time was stormy and visibility would have been poor – but what a surprise that would have been for both men! And perhaps a much different ending.)

Heading north, now ‘past' Cape Horn, Crowhurst's fake and true positions merged, and in the middle of April he began to race home for real.

Nigel Tetley felt him coming. He had heard that both Knox-Johnston and Crowhurst had reappeared after months of silence and doubt, and were alive and well and bashing on. Like
Moitessier, Tetley felt the rarest of kinship for his fellow racers, like soldiers facing a common enemy, and he was always happy and relieved to hear that they were alive, safe, and doing well.

But he was now very aware that the prizes that had so recently seemed within his grasp were slipping away. He would not be first home, and it looked as if Crowhurst, on elapsed time, might overtake him. He would be out of the money, effectively in last place.

So he pushed on harder than ever.
Victress
was now so damaged as to be a write-off by the time he reached England. He accepted that; her last and only remaining function now was to get him there. The worst seas and weather were behind her. She had only the gentle tropics and spring in the North Atlantic to face. His job was not to spare her, nor even, any longer, to save her – only to keep her afloat long enough to complete the voyage while moving as fast as possible.

But what had begun as the slow, steady, normal attrition of breakage and failure – bits of moulding coming off, windows leaking, decks and outer hulls leaking – had been accelerated and made worse by the hard months and hammering damage of the Southern Ocean. The self-steering rudder had vanished into the deep shortly past the Horn; Tetley didn't have a spare, but by then he had become, like Knox-Johnston, so adept at balancing the boat with sails under a variety of conditions that this was a slight loss, more of a nuisance. The wire cable between the wheel and the main rudder broke again, but he replaced the wire as he had before. The fibreglass sheathing had begun to delaminate from the side of the port hull, long flaps of it had peeled away revealing the bare wood beneath. The plywood had no seams, like those in a rounded, conventionally planked hull, only a few joints where sections of plywood met over the frames; but without the watertight barrier of the fiberglass, seawater began to seep through those joints and undermine the strength of the glue and fastenings there. At this moment, when
Victress
needed all the sparing and gentleness he could give her, Tetley found himself forced to drive her on harder than ever if he was to keep ahead of the relentless gaining of Donald Crowhurst.

She couldn't take it. One morning at dawn, he found that a large section of deck between the main and port hulls was disintegrating. The beams beneath the deck, supporting it, were splintered and broken. More importantly than supporting the deck, these beams were part of the once rigid cross-arm structure keeping the port hull attached to the main hull.

Just as bad, the plywood in the bow of the port hull was holed and split, frames were broken and separated from the hull skin, and water was filling the hull. When he climbed down into the port hull and squatted knee-deep in water, he could see the deck lifting overhead, the frames broken away from the hull sides, and the plywood skin flexing in and out with each wave. The trimaran was coming apart, literally separating into its components.