Solitaire Spirit: Three Times Around the World Single-Handed (11 page)

Solitaire
sailed 200 miles to the east of the Galapagos Islands, passing through areas showing six per cent calms on the charts. She had to overcome a north-flowing current of 15 to 20 miles a day as she struggled over the Equator for her third crossing to the free-flowing trade winds that started 300 miles to the south. She was sick as she told me but again, because of my inexperience, I took no notice. She lost her will to live, dragging through the sea on legs too tired to move. I assumed the slow progress to be due to the adverse current and light winds, and fought back with every sail arrangement I could possibly manage to contrive.

The first light breezes from the east indicated the start of the trades.
Solitaire
carried no whisker poles for holding out twin headsails simply because I could not afford them. Instead I had made do with two 13ft aluminium poles to which I had fitted eyes at both ends. I tried using these with both the number one and two genoas hanked on, plus the full main. Still she would not budge. Seas flowed past her and the self-steering lost control, even the tiller having little effect upon her erratic course. She would broach continually, swinging 180° and backing her sails.

When finally we came into the true trades, constant Force 3 to 4 (7 to 16mph), I sailed on a broad reach, with a quartering wind, the number two genoa poled out, a reef in the main. Yachtsmen would have considered me crazy to have so little sail, and in such conditions I would have loved to have set a spinnaker, had I possessed one. Half of the course settings were by sail adjustment as the self-steering was of little practical use.

Unknown to me a cancerous growth was spreading its tentacles around her.
Solitaire
's cries for help quietened as it entered her mouth, silencing her. Now she was wallowing, hardly noticing the winds that entreated her to frolic.

Wednesday, March 24th, found us at latitude 6°05´S. We had left the Equator 365 miles astern and were 300 miles below the Galapagos Islands. A favourable current gave us an extra 10 to 15 miles a day in south-east winds around Force 4. In these ideal conditions
Solitaire
should have been romping along, covering at least 120 to 140 miles a day. All she produced was a limping 50 miles. Our trailing log clocked only 1,115 miles in 27 days, not a third of the way to Hiva Oa, with half our food and water already consumed.

On the self-steering rudder and under the stern I found pink stalks up to an inch-and-a-half in length with a white and grey bud on each top which I cleaned off with a paint scraper. Could these growths be the reason for
Solitaire
's illness? I rejected the idea when I remembered antifouling her hull only five weeks earlier. Surely that could not be the cause.

During one of those cleaning sessions I found myself in one of those stupid situations that happen only to single-handers. I had pushed myself through the bars of the pushpit as far as I could, leaning well out and holding on with one hand while scraping with the other. I felt a pull on my hair and threw the scraper into the cockpit, grabbing at my head. My hair had become tangled in the trailing log line! It took me a good half hour to free myself. After that I had a dread of getting stuck up the mast, only to be discovered a year later as a swaying skeleton.

Afloat it is difficult to see all of
Solitaire
's hull as it rounds sharply just below the waterline and falls away to the keel, so I decided to lean out as far as possible, using a lifeline and an extra rope for support. I had expected to find someone's old sail or a bunch of rope tangled on the keel. Instead I found a swaying pink and white garden completely covering the hull, keel and skeg. No wonder
Solitaire
had wept. Again I felt as I had when the bruuuph, bruuuph drill had come to light. I prepared to pounce then, deflated, realised it had us in thrall, that I had a plague of goose barnacles.

There were three reasons why getting rid of them would cause problems: I'm a poor swimmer, there were sharks in the area,
and I'm a confirmed coward. I spent the morning making every conceivable excuse I could think of for not going over the side.
Solitaire
listened in silence except for a muttered slop slop, slurp slurp. I suppose she could have nagged that I had been the one to give her a cheap coat of antifouling and was thus responsible for her sickness but she didn't, which made the need to be forgiven the more dramatic. I badly needed to hear her whisper and laugh with me again.

In the afternoon I dropped her headsail and under the main brought her onto a reach, allowing her to roll in 3–4ft waves. The rubber dinghy was inflated and secured to leeward. With two lifelines and armed with a scraper, I dropped into it and then, holding onto the toe rail, reached down the hull as far as I could on each roll. I spent an hour or so on one side, clearing only a foot and a half of the barnacles, their rubbery feet still clinging below the waterline.

Hanging onto
Solitaire
, trying to keep a grip with my toes as the dinghy dropped away, made me want to give up and throw up. Oh well, tomorrow it would only be worse so I climbed back on board, turned
Solitaire
around and worked on her other side. Then we were back on course, broad-reaching, with our number two genoa filling with only a slight improvement in her performance. All the thanks I got for my trouble was slop slop, slurp slurp.

For the next few days I lost interest in everything but trying to ease the pain in my arms and stomach. We became a couple of tetchy invalids reluctantly settling for a desperately slow passage. To save water I stopped shaving and started my first intentional beard as we slurped across the Pacific in perfect slurping conditions. I would spend hours in the cockpit marvelling at this sailing paradise with cool trade winds and clear, blue skies broken only by a few wispy clouds. The transparent waters provided a private aquarium of beautiful tropical fish that would look up, saucer-eyed, to admire our exotic garden of pink stems and nodding white heads which grew larger with each slurping mile.

At night I had an I-hate-barnacles hour. No longer content
with merely scraping them off I wanted to inflict pain and hear their screams, to collect every last one and lay them on
Solitaire
's decks so that we could both witness their death throes. The day of reckoning was drawing near.

On Friday, April 23rd, after eight weeks or so at sea covering 3,020 miles and with 600 miles still to go to Hiva Oa, we sighted our first ship. To be honest, it was not a ship but a yacht and they sighted us, not I them. I had felt like a spot of work that morning and spent half an hour picking the weevils out of my daily cup of rice. Despite this strenuous exercise I still felt pretty active, but could think of nothing that demanded attention until I remembered my golf clubs, which were as dirty as old boots. So I spent the morning below cleaning them.

Towards noon I heard the sound of a trumpet. If that's Gabriel, I thought, I'm not going, and banged my head to clear it. Then it sounded again. On deck, clutching my five iron, I saw a 40ft boat off our bow manned by an elderly couple and two in their mid-twenties. Canadians by the home port on their stern. Their twin-poled headsails had been eased and they were holding position a few yards off. I walked up to
Solitaire
's pulpit.

‘Ahoy,' they shouted. ‘We've had you in sight all morning. Seeing no one on deck we became worried.'

‘I'm fine,' I said, waving my iron. ‘I was cleaning my golf clubs.'

There was a thoughtful silence. ‘Do you know if there's a bank in Hiva Oa?' they asked. ‘We need to cash a cheque.'

‘I'm sorry,' I replied. ‘I'm a stranger here myself, don't often play this course.'

Another long silence. ‘You sure you're all right?'

‘Perfectly,' I assured them.

With that, they pulled in their sails and drew away. I couldn't believe it. After eight weeks with no one to talk to, they were leaving without even an invitation to coffee. I wanted to say something really mean but the best parting shot I could think of was, ‘You haven't seen my bloody golf ball, have you?' The I-hate-barnacles hour that night was extended by 30 minutes.

On Monday, May 3rd, the noon sight put us 47 miles from Hiva Oa. Looking back over my life I seemed to have done few things right so now I wanted desperately to recompense by making a good landfall. I had nothing to confirm my longitude calculations, apart from some days when I had taken two sights, morning and afternoon, which gave position lines crossing at about our latitude.

Slow progress, a flat sea and clear skies helped my navigation. Today I checked and re-checked a dozen times, for failure to sight land next morning would mean I had let down
Solitaire
yet again. In the afternoon I decided to test the engine, which normally I ran every two or three weeks, just to circulate the oil and top up the battery. I turned the key but nothing happened so I went over all the connections. Those on the solenoid seemed loose and dirty. Cleaned and tightened, we had a motor again!

The Marquesas Islands stretch for about 200 miles, half a dozen of them 3,000ft high or more, and on a clear day they should be visible for 30 or 40 miles. Hiva Oa, at 3,520ft, should not be difficult to spot, despite having no lighthouse or radio direction beacon. But, with one error of more than a thousand miles to look back on, anything was possible!

As night fell the sky filled with stars, although a sea mist obscured the horizon.
Solitaire
should have been within a few miles of the island but I could see nothing, no lights, no black shape. The sea was empty. I dropped all sails and waited for dawn. As the sky grew lighter, there was still no land. The sun had not appeared but it was daylight. Now I would settle for anything, a smudge in the distance, even land birds. All one could see was sea. I could not face another Brixham, another Brazil, another broken marriage. I went below, recorded another failure, and made myself a cup of tea. All I could do now was to take fresh sights and try to discover my mistake. Defeated, I climbed back into the cockpit.

I heard the Hallelujah chorus so loud it almost took my head off and tears of joy ran down my face. She had been there all the time, hiding beneath the early morning mist, the most beautiful island in the world. Her purple and blue mountains reached up
for the sky, green palms swaying in the breeze, surf breaking on golden sands. After 68 days at sea,
Solitaire
and I had made it and had got something right. I savoured every precious second.

Terrell had lent me one of his charts, from which I had sketched the island. The anchorage was at the far end of a bay and we spent the morning motoring there,
Solitaire
still rolling drunkenly with her cargo of barnacles. That morning I hated nothing, not even the blasted barnacles.

The bay we wanted turned back on itself. There was a moment of doubt when I could not see it, then I spotted a beach, palm trees, a few homes up in the hills and two boats at anchor.
Solitaire
turned to meet new friends, a blue ketch flying a French flag, an American flag on a trimaran with people on its spacious decks.

I dropped anchor and started to put
Solitaire
in order, making a final entry in the ship's log: ‘23.15 hours GMT. Anchored Hiva Oa, distance by trailing log 3,655 miles after 68 days at sea. On board one gallon of water, two pounds of rice, two tins of corned beef, six Oxo cubes.'

A dinghy left the ketch and started across. The men and women aboard could speak good English with a heavy French accent. Did I need anything?

Where could I buy bread? There was a store in the village, an hour's walk away. They left but the man was soon back with half a loaf, a jar of marmalade and a can of beer.

Later another dinghy came over from the trimaran with an Englishman in his early thirties and a beautiful doll-like creature whose golden skin and almond eyes showed traces of the Orient. Jeff and Judy were the couple I would spend most time with in the Marquesas. There are few men I have grown to admire more than Jeff. Born in Britain, he became a veterinary surgeon and moved to the west coast of America where he built his trimaran,
Dinks Song,
to escape the more mercenary practices of his profession. Each day shared with him brought fresh surprises. It started with his playing the guitar, singing in a voice that would have earned him a living anywhere in the world. He went through numerous instruments
which finished one spell-binding night when he stood on his foredeck at anchor in the bay at Fatu Hiva, playing the hauntingly lonely music of Scotland on his bagpipes – unforgettable!

I learned more and more about this man, mostly from Judy. He held an aircraft pilot's licence. With his high-powered rubber dinghy he water-skied and taught the Polynesian locals to emulate him. But what I remember Jeff for most was the 3-mile walk to the village, his face covered with dust, sweat and pain, never complaining. Jeff had only one leg. He had lost the other as a small boy in a coach crash in Scotland. People like Jeff make you humble – even after your first true landfall.

Now that
Solitaire
was about to be cured of her barnacle sickness, I found that I had contracted a terrible disease, the worse because you inflicted it on your friends. It is a disease of brain and mouth and is particularly prevalent among single-handers. It normally lasts for a few days after any long voyage and is called verbal diarrhoea. The brain keeps sending messages, ‘For God's sake shut up, you are boring the pants off everyone', which the mouth refuses to receive and continues to spew out garbage. On that first night in Hiva Oa Jeff and Judy made the mistake of inviting me back to
Dinks Song
for dinner. Judy, a first class cook, had spent most of that day baking. I completely demolished her work and was finally got rid of in the early hours, being bundled into their dinghy with a mouthful of cake, still trying to talk.

I awoke next morning from a deep sleep to a glorious day. A warm breeze rippled the still lagoon, palm trees barely a-sway while
Solitaire
slept on. I tried not to disturb her as I moved forward to check the anchor but managed to shake her slightly, whereupon she yawned and stretched. Her chain lay limply on its sandy resting place 3 fathoms below, looking as if it could be touched from the boat. I walked softly back. ‘Sleep on, love, you've earned a holiday.' With a contented sigh she snuggled back into her clean, warm bed.