Once Is Enough

Once Is Enough

Miles Smeeton

Foreword by Nevil Shute

TO BERYL

For she was cook and captain bold, And the mate of the Nancy brig

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

FOREWORD BY NEVIL SHUTE

1 PREPARATIONS IN MELBOURNE

2 FALSE START

3 THROUGH THE BASS STRAIT

4 ACROSS THE SOUTH TASMAN

5 INTO THE SOUTHERN OCEAN

6 THE WAY OF A SHIP

7 THIS IS SURVIVAL TRAINING!

8 RECOVERY

9 THE TREK NORTH

10 FIRST DAYS IN CHILE

11 REPAIRS IN TALCAHUANO

12 STILL IN TALCAHUANO

13 TO CORONEL AGAIN

14 NOT AGAIN!

15 THERE’S A WIND FROM THE SOUTH

EPILOGUE

APPENDIX: MANAGEMENT IN HEAVY WEATHER

POSTSCRIPT

Copyright

About the Publisher

MAPS

Drawn by K. C. Jordan

Melbourne and environs

Melbourne to Seal Rocks

Through the Bass Strait

Across the South Tasman

January 6–24

January 24–February 12

February 12–March 6

March 6 to Arauco Bay

Arauco Bay to Talcahuano

December 26 to Valparaiso

DRAWINGS

Drawn by the author

Accommodation plans

The first jury-rig

The galley and broken doorpost

The first accident

The forecabin and the powder-tin

The final jury-rig

Rolled over

Under the jury

‘Pitchpoling’ diagram

Tzu Hang’s lines

Foreword BY NEVIL SHUTE

SOME years ago I had an afternoon to spare in Vancouver, so I went down to the yacht harbour to see what sort of vessels Canadian yachtsmen use. There I found Tzu Hang moored alongside a pontoon, slightly weather-beaten, sporting baggywrinkle on her runners, and wearing the red ensign. As I inspected her Miles Smeeton came up from below and invited me on board. That was my first meeting with this remarkable man; I did not meet his more remarkable wife till some time later.

The Smeetons had bought Tzu Hang in England a year or so previously and they had sailed her out from England across the Atlantic and through the Panama Canal to Vancouver with their eleven-year-old daughter as the third member of the crew. Before buying this considerable ship they had never sailed a boat or cruised in any yacht. They made one trip in her to Holland and then set out across the Atlantic for the West Indies. Navigation was child’s play to them; seamanship they picked up as they went along. With only two adults on board they had to keep watch and watch, but did not seem to find it unduly tiring. They made their landfalls accurately, passed the Panama, reached out a thousand miles into the Pacific before they could lie a course for Vancouver, and they arrived without incident. I asked if they had had any trouble on the way. Miles told me that they had been hove to for three days in the Atlantic; the only trouble that they had in that three days was in keeping their small daughter at her lessons. They made her do three hours school work each morning, all the way.

When I began yacht cruising after the First World War it was regarded as an axiom amongst yachtsmen that a small sailing vessel, properly handled, is safe in any deep-water sea. I think that Claude Worth, the father of modern yachting, may have been partly responsible for this idea, and it may well be true for the waters in which he sailed. A small yacht, we said, will ride easily over and amongst great waves if she is hove to or allowed to drift broadside under bare poles; you have only to watch a seagull riding out a storm upon the water, we said. Perhaps we failed to notice that the seagull spreads its wings now and again to get out of trouble; perhaps we were seldom caught out in winds of force 7 or 8 and much too busy then to observe the habits of seabirds, which probably had too much sense to be there anyway.

From time to time our complacent sense of security was just a little ruffled. Erling Tambs, in Teddy, was overwhelmed in some way by the sea when running in the Atlantic; his account was not very clear and it was easy for us to assume that he had been carrying too much sail, had been pooped and broached to. The lesson to us seemed obvious; heave to in good time or lie to a sea-anchor, perhaps by the stern if the ship was suitable. Captain Voss, sailing with two friends in a seven tonner in the China Sea, was turned completely upside down so that the cabin stove broke loose and left its imprint on the deckhead above, on the cabin ceiling. But that was a long way away; all sorts of things happen in China. … Captain Slocum was lost in the Atlantic without trace after sailing single-handed round the world—but anything could have happened to him.

It has been left to Miles Smeeton in this book to tell us in clear and simple language just where the limits of safety lie. We now know with certainty that the seagull parallel was wrong. A small yacht, well found, well equipped, and beautifully handled, can be overwhelmed by the sea when running under bare poles dragging a warp, or when lying sideways to the sea hove to under bare poles. The Smeetons have proved it, twice. Twice these amazing people saved their waterlogged, dismasted ship by their sheer competence and sailed her safely in to port, greatly assisted on the first occasion by John Guzzwell. With equal competence they have now produced this lucid and well-written book to tell us all about it.

At the risk of offending the author I must stress the fact that these are most unusual people, lest more ordinary yachtsmen should be tempted to follow them down towards Cape Horn— ‘After all, they proved that one can get away with it, didn’t they?’ Nobody reading this account can fail to realise how excellently they had prepared, equipped, and provisioned their ship for the long voyage from Australia down in to the Roaring Forties. One can say, perhaps, that she was overmasted for that particular trip. But vessels cannot be rigged solely for going round the Horn; she had also to sail through the doldrums of the Equator on her way back to England. I visited the ship in Melbourne before she sailed; she was rugged and tough and functional to the last degree, as were the people in her.

Quite a number of yachtsmen have now sailed round the world with their wives, for the most part running downwind in the Trades in the lower, more generous latitudes. How many of the wives, I wonder, could take a sextant sight from the desperately unsteady cockpit of a small yacht at sea, work out the position line with the massed figures of the tables dancing before one’s eyes, and plot it on the chart? Beryl Smeeton can do this with such accuracy that it was common practice on this yacht for anyone who was unoccupied to take the sight and for anybody else to work out the position line; their competence was equal. What can one say of a woman who, catapulted from the cockpit of a somersaulting ship into the sea and recovered on board with a broken collarbone and a deep scalp cut, worked manually like a man with her broken bone and did not wash the blood from her hair and forehead for three weeks, judging that injuries left severely alone heal themselves best? What can one say of a woman working as a carpenter to repair the gaping holes in the doghouse while the dismasted ship lurches and slithers in enormous seas, who refuses to nail the boards in place but drills a hole for every wood screw and does the job as properly as a professional carpenter could have done it on dry land? These people are quite unusual, and all yachtsmen reading this book had better realise that fact. More ordinary people would undoubtedly have perished.

They had, I think, one gap in the great cloak of competence that wrapped them round; they thought too little of their engine. In a sailing yacht designed to cruise the oceans the auxiliary motor must always take a second place to the sails and gear, yet if the weight and complication of a motor is to be carried in a ship at all it would be better to have a good one, one that will work under extreme conditions. Tzu Hang had a petrol motor with the usual electric ignition; this motor, for the sake of the internal accommodation, as is common in week-end yachts, was buried deep down in the bilges under the doghouse deck in a position where it was practically impossible to start it by hand when immersion had killed the starter batteries. After each disaster when a motor would have been a help to the dismasted ship this motor was a useless nuisance to them; the ship would have been lighter and so safer with it overboard. They could have had a hand-starting diesel mounted up in a position where one could swing upon the handle with both hands, driving the propeller-shaft by belts or chains. Accommodation might have suffered slightly, but the motor would have worked as soon as they had drained the water from the crankcase and refilled with oil. In so functional a vessel as Tzu Hang I think the motor was unworthy of the rest of her.

The Smeetons and Tzu Hang are back in British waters now; I doubt if they will stay there. A few days ago I got a letter from Miles Smeeton. In part it reads:

We sailed on the 10th for the Firth of Forth, almost with mechanics and shipwrights still on board. Had two days to Hartlepool where we put in on account of a storm warning—and then off for the Forth and bang into a north-westerly gale. We were hove to for three days but Tzu Hang behaved beautifully and kept her decks dry and re-established our confidence.

So they go on their way again across the seas. In this admirably written book they have done a good job for yachting. All yachtsmen should read it and be grateful to the valiant people who have dared to chart the limits of their sport.

CHAPTER ONE

PREPARATIONS IN MELBOURNE

THE crowd still thronged the Spencer Street bridge when Clio and I came back from the Olympic Games. They were leaning on the parapet and looking at the Royal Yacht, as they had done ever since her arrival in Melbourne. They were in holiday mood, looking for the best angle for their cameras, and full of enthusiasm and pawky Australian humour. Just across the bridge in a shop window a notice had been posted: ‘English spik here,’ it said; and on the door of the funeral parlour, a little further up the street, there was a card saying briefly that any Olympic visitors were welcome.

Looking down river from the bridge, we could see how it wound its way between wharves, warehouses, and docks, its course marked by high cranes and the masts of ships, until in its last mile it curved between low flat banks to its outlet in Port Philip Bay. In front of us Britannia’s beautiful tall bow reached over the bridge, and beyond her, on the other side of the river, an Australian ship was moored. Immediately opposite Britannia, and tied up to the south wharf, there was another yacht, also flying the British flag, for she was registered in England, although her home was now in Canada. She was very small compared to her royal neighbour, but she also intended to sail in a few days for England, and by the same route, south of New Zealand and south of Cape Horn. She was called Tzu Hang, and she was ours.

Beyond the Britannia, and parallel to and across the river from Tzu Hang, ran Flinders Street, with its ships’ chandlers, whose shops Beryl visited every day with a preoccupied air and carrying long lists in her hand. Behind Flinders Street, the land sloped up to Collins Street, with its banks and clubs and prosperous good-looking buildings, and to the low hills on which the city of Melbourne is built. Not so long ago the river here used to be full of sailing ships, and Clio and I would have seen a forest of masts and spars; but now there were only two, Tzu Hang and a big yacht down from Sydney, which was tied up in front of us.

‘Look at that idiot cat. She isn’t half giving those sails a go,’ someone said, calling the attention of his friend to Tzu Hang, and when we looked across we saw Pwe, the Siamese cat, sharpening her claws on the cover of the mainsail. The sail-cover was put on not so much for looks as to protect the sail from the cat. As we watched we saw a man climb down on to the deck of the yacht, carrying one of the plastic bottles which we used for topping up the water tanks, and Beryl appeared in the hatch and took the bottle from him.

‘I wonder who that is?’ I said. ‘It’s not John.’

‘Oh, it’s just someone she’s roped in,’ said Clio irreverently of her mother. ‘She’s always roping someone in to work. Come on.’

She ran on now across the wharf to where Tzu Hang was lying. Although she was only fifteen she was already fully grown in height, tall and slim. She leant out from the edge of the wharf, unaware of her best clothes, and caught hold of the shrouds, and then swung on to the ratlines, and dropped down on to the deck. She wouldn’t be with us on this next trip. She had been with us on all our previous trips; from England to Canada, and three years later from Canada to New Zealand, and then across to Australia, and now she had to go to England to school. We were going to follow in Tzu Hang as quickly as possible. She was not the first member of the crew to leave the ship, because her small brown dog, who had also been with us on all our travels, had already been sent off home from Sydney. He was travelling in luxury now in a cargo ship, spending most of the time in the bunk of one of the apprentices. We hoped to be back in time to receive him when he came out of quarantine.

To replace these two members of the crew we now had John. We had first met him in San Francisco, where we found that he also was bound for New Zealand, and like us had sailed down from Victoria in British Columbia. He was sailing single-handed in his little Laurent Giles-designed yacht, Trekka, which he had built himself, with great skill, in Victoria. We planned our trip across the Pacific together, and for a year now we had seen much of each other. When the two yachts lay together at the various anchorages and ports we made, John used to come on board for meals, and he would put on weight in port and take it off again as quickly during his single-handed passages. When he heard that Clio was going back to school, and that we would like to have a shot at the Horn if we could find a suitable crew to come with us, he said that he’d lay up Trekka in New Zealand, and come along with us. Nowhere could we have found a better companion.

Before climbing down from the wharf on to Tzu Hang’s deck, I had a good look at her, but I could see nothing that wanted doing now. She had been fully fitted out in Sydney, and spruced up again on her arrival in Melbourne, and she had had a good testing on her way down. She is a 46-foot ketch, 36 feet on the water line, 11 foot 6 inch beam and drawing 7 feet. She has a canoe stem and a marked sheer, and her bowsprit follows the line of the sheer so that it has a delicate upward lift, and she seems to be sniffing the breeze and eager to be off. The truck of her mainmast is 51 feet above the deck, and her mizzen 35 feet and she carries 915 square feet of sail. She is flush decked, with a small doghouse, 5½ by 5½ feet, separated by a bridge-deck from her self-draining cockpit, which is only 34 by 34 inches. She was built of teak in Hong Kong, copper fastened and with a lead keel of just over seven tons, in 1938, and she was shipped home in 1939. We bought her from her first owner in 1951, and sailed her back to Canada.

I let myself down on to the deck by way of the shrouds and went below, and I found Beryl and Clio sitting together in the main cabin opposite a stranger, an Australian and, I supposed, the man who had been helping her with the water.

‘Hullo,’ she said to me. ‘Here you are. This is my husband. I’m afraid I didn’t quite get your name——’

He introduced himself. ‘How d’you do,’ he said. ‘I just came down here to take a snap of the Britannia from the wharf here——’

‘And Beryl put you to work,’ I interrupted.

‘Too right she did, and I’ve been working here ever since. I tell her that there’s many a firm here would snap her up, for labour management you know. She’s been telling me about your trip. Sounds very interesting. I wish I could come with you.’

‘As long as it’s not too interesting.’

‘It might be at that. It can be quite tough even round here. I do a bit of sailing here. Tasman race, but crewing, not my own boat. Which way are you going?’

‘Well we thought we’d go straight across and through the Banks Strait, and then right down south of New Zealand, and then across keeping just about north of the limit of icebergs or floating ice. We’d go south of the Snares here and north of the Auckland Islands, and south of the Antipodes Islands.’ I showed him the route on a weather chart.

‘It’s a long way south,’ he said. ‘Have any other yachts been that way?’

‘Well one or two have been round the Horn, or through the Straits of Magellan, but I think they’ve all been up to Auckland first, so that our route will be a good bit further south than the others.’

‘Well I’d still like to come along, but anyway I’ll not say goodbye now, because I’m going to pick you all up in my car on Wednesday and drive you to the airport. I hear you are off to school in England,’ he said, turning to Clio, ‘I wonder how you’ll like that after all this sailing.’

The tea was made and the kettle was hissing pleasantly on the galley stove, but he wouldn’t stay. ‘The first time I’ve ever known an Australian refuse a cup of tea,’ I remarked, but he said that he’d have tea with us on Wednesday, and off he went.

‘What a nice chap!’ I said to Beryl. ‘How did you pick him up? Good show fixing a lift to the airport.’

‘Oh, he just came along and asked if he could give me a hand. He’s brought gallons of water. And when I told him that Clio was leaving on Wednesday, he said that he’d been longing to give someone a lift as an Olympic gesture, and that we were the first non-Australian visitors that he’d been able to pick up. I don’t think that he’s taken a photo of the Britannia yet.’

We sat down to tea. ‘You really ought to have been at the Games,’ Clio said, ‘it was such fun.’

‘I don’t think that I’d ’ve enjoyed them very much. Besides they look so like the school sports to me, and you know I hate school sports. I think the umpires are the best part. They look so funny all dressed up in their little blazers, and they go trooping after each other in single file, looking exactly like a string of cormorants, and when they sit on those steps one on top of each other, they look even more like cormorants, sitting on a rock. Anyway Pwe and I have enjoyed ourselves, and I’ve made a new rack for the saucepan lid.’

Beryl’s carpentry suffers from her preference for using up an old piece of wood rather than throwing it away, but all the same she is a very enthusiastic and determined carpenter, and was always making something about the ship. The cat was sitting on her lap, her eyes closed and her ears pricked, and her tail lashing gently at the mention of her name. Her eyes opened now, a deep clear blue, as the ship stirred and someone stepped down on to the deck.

‘Here’s someone who always knows when tea’s ready,’ said Clio as John came down below. He was tall and fair, and filled most of the cabin door, so that Beryl had to squeeze past him to get to the kettle.

‘What do you think of my saucepan rack?’ she asked, pointing it out to him.

John is a carpenter, or rather an artist in carpentry. He looked at it, and then patted her on the shoulder. She looked quite small beside him. ‘Pretty good,’ he said, and I saw that she was pleased with the praise from the expert.

The remaining days before Clio left went all too quickly, and almost before we knew it we were standing disconsolate on the airport, watching an aircraft climbing away from the end of the runway.

‘She was better than me, when I left my Mum in South Africa,’ John said, ‘I couldn’t see for tears and fell down the gangway.’ And after a moment’s thought he said, ‘Still she didn’t really know what she was doing, did she? She kissed me too.’

‘I think she had a pretty good idea,’ Beryl said, and we all laughed.

Later, when we were back in Tzu Hang, I said to Beryl, ‘Do you think she’ll be worried?’

‘Worried about what?’

‘Oh, about us and Tzu Hang, you know, when she’s not there.’

‘No, I don’t think so. As a matter of fact I asked her and she said she wouldn’t be.’

‘Good heavens. Why on earth not?’

‘Don’t be so silly. You don’t want her to worry, do you? She said that she reckoned that Tzu Hang would look after us.’

‘I hope she does.’

‘Who? Clio or Tzu Hang?’

‘Clio—or rather, both.’

In the wharf shed on the south wharf there was a small room with a telephone, which we were allowed to use. This was Beryl’s operations office, and she sat there in blue jeans and a checked shirt, ordering immense quantities of stores to be delivered to the ship. When they arrived, she and John filmed each other staggering along the wharf carrying big cartons of food. John was hoping to make a complete record of the trip with his ciné camera. In the afternoons she went up to a friend’s house, where she treated the eggs that we were taking with us by plunging them into boiling water for five seconds, and then into cold. It was the first time that we had tried this method of preserving eggs, and by the time we had eaten the last one it was over two months old. It still tasted good to me.

Soon after the Games were over Britannia left, and, as Melbourne began to reassume her workaday clothes for the few days left before Christmas, the smoke from workshops, tugs, and launches came drifting up the river, smudging the white sail-covers and making black marks on the deck. For the last few days we moved into the entrance to a little yard at the end of the wharf, as our berth was required for the dredgers, which were coming up from Port Phillip Heads. We were separated from the rest of the wharf by some high iron palings, so that casual onlookers no longer came to stand above us, and this seclusion was most appreciated by Pwe, who now spent some of the day, as well as of the night, ashore. Some shrubs grew along the palings, and there she assiduously hunted sparrows, but the Melbourne sparrows were too smart for her. Fortunately no quarantine officials found her—though there are few ships’ cats who don’t take a turn ashore when they get the opportunity, and no one is very fussy about them, as long as they are not mentioned.