Once Is Enough

CHAPTER THREE

THROUGH THE BASS STRAIT

ON my way below, I sat for a moment on the bridge-deck, the short deck which holds the mizzenmast, between the doghouse entrance and the cockpit. I put my hands on the after end of the sliding hatch, and then slipped down, taking my weight on my hands. All the same, I arrived with a bang below. This was the normal way of going down when we were in good spirits or in a hurry. At other times we would turn sideways and use the vertical steps on either side of the door in the bulkhead which led into John’s compartment.

The small area which I had arrived in with a thump was the centre of the ship’s activities below decks. It was 5½ by 5½ feet square, excluding portions of it which extended to the sides of the ship, underneath the deck on each side of the doghouse. It was covered by the doghouse, a low roof raised 1½ feet above the deck, in which was the sliding hatch, by which I had just come below. As we were running fast now, with the wind on the beam, I closed the hatch by sliding it back over my head, so that no spray would come in. In order to close it completely, I would have to close two small doors, but this portion of the hatch was normally left open, unless there was a strong following wind blowing coldly into the cabin.

I looked back through the small open doorway at the singer of Carmen Jones still in full voice, and shouted to him to stream the log. He turned to let the patent log, which was coiled ready in the stern, over the side into the water.

The doghouse was lit by two windows in each side and by two heavy ports let into its front. The ports were partially obscured by the transom of the dinghy, which was lashed down on the deck, upside down, in front of them.

While I was taking off my wet oilskin jacket, I was standing on the small space immediately above the engine. The deck here lifted up, so that I could get at the engine, or at least get at the top of the engine, when I wanted to work on it. As it had just been running, the teak deck above it was still quite warm, and the cat was making the most of it at my feet. In Canada, where we used the yacht frequently for getting to and from the island on which we lived, the cat was quite accustomed to the sound of the motor, and would sit on the engine cover, this removable piece of deck, while we were moving under power. Now that we used the engine so rarely, she would never stay below while it was running, and protested loudly to everyone about its use, and the discomforts of a deck passage. Directly it stopped, she always went below and sat on the warm cover.

Immediately in front of me and between the two ports in front of the doghouse, were the ship’s clock and the barometer. They could both be seen from the cockpit, and the man on watch could see the minutes dragging slowly towards the time of his relief. The barometer was dropping slightly and I set it. Behind me was the opening which led into the after compartment, John’s place, which he shared with various water tanks, fuel tanks, a large number of eggs, a 4-gallon tin of sand for the cat, four 2-gallon plastic bottles, and his own tool-box and numerous other articles, all lashed down and well secured. The well of the cockpit formed the back of this compartment, and John’s berth was partitioned off on the starboard side. In order to get some light into this part of the ship, there were two dead-lights in the deck and in the front of the cockpit well there was a window. From down below, if I looked aft, I could see the helmsman’s legs through this window, and when the hatch was closed and the washboards in place, it was sometimes reassuring after a heavy sea, to look aft and see a pair of legs there, solid and unmoved.

At my feet, and in front of me, there were two steps leading to the level of the main cabin, and below the clock and the barometer there was a short handrail, which we used when stepping down into the cabin. On each side, below the doghouse windows, there was another handrail, for use when moving in the doghouse. Because of the constant and often violent motion, we found these handrails most useful, and as necessary as the straps in the London Underground.

On each side of where I was standing there were two bins, the tops of which formed the bottom steps, when coming below by the more sedate method, or when going on deck. They also made two seats, where we sat for meals at sea, conveniently close to the cook and the galley. If it was very calm, or in port, we used the cabin table for meals, but if we were keeping watch and steering, it was better to use these seats, as we could shout to the helmsman, and pass him his food at the same time as those off watch were having theirs. In rough weather the helmsman would usually prefer to wait until he could be relieved for his meal.

When I stood on these two steps, with my legs straddled, and my head out of the sliding hatch, I could just see comfortably over the doghouse, with the minimum exposure. The position reminded me of the days when I used to peer out of the turret of a Sherman tank, also hoping to avoid exposure. When ducking over a steep sea there was also a certain similarity in the motion.

In front of these two seats, on the port side, was the chart table, and on the starboard side, the galley. The chart table was a large one, and under it were shelves and racks for charts, and at one end of it, against the side of the ship, there was a bookshelf for the navigational books in use. Dividers and rulers were kept in canvas bands against the bulkhead, above the table, and the sextants were in a locker just below the hatch.

The galley, on my right as I looked down into the cabin, was lined with stainless steel below and behind the two stoves. Beside them there was the cook’s seat, also known as the electric chair, because the two engine batteries were below it. It faced forwards and had a curved seat, with two arms, so that the cook was held firmly in place, whatever the antics of the ship. In front of this seat was the dresser and sink, and 2 feet above the dresser, and up to the deckhead, were two shelves full of good things, such as tea, cocoa, chocolate, and sugar, and other loot for the night watches. Above the stoves were racks for saucepans and plates, and numerous mugs and cups, of a motley shape and design, hung from cup-hooks beneath them.

I hung up my coat in the oilskin locker, in front of the chart table, and then turned to the chart and laid a course down past Wilson Promontory, past Rodonda Island and the Curtis group, and up to the entrance of the Banks Strait, the southern passage through the islands, which lie between Australia and the north coast of Tasmania.

All that afternoon we made great progress, as if Tzu Hang was as pleased as we were to be on her way at last. The low coast to port went flying past, and in a few hours we had covered the same distance that it took two days to put behind us on our way up to Melbourne. We were under storm-jib, staysail, full main, and mizzen, and waltzing along with the sun abeam, a cold wind, sunshine, and squalls. I took over from John for the second afternoon watch from three to six. When I came up to relieve him, after making the entries in the log, he went forward to try and sweat the jib and main up a bit further. He could never leave the deck without trying to improve the set of the sails, and always the first thing that he did after coming on deck was to try and get their luffs a little tauter.

John had already fastened the wheel in approximately the right position, so that I was able to go forward and give him a hand. After working the heads of the sails up an inch or so, we coiled the ends of the halliards and hooked them up on the belaying pins on the mast. Then he went below to take off his oilskins, and I returned to the cockpit.

With the sea abeam Tzu Hang was going very comfortably, but every now and then a splash of spray came over the side of the ship, so that the decks were wet. None of us was ever content with the adjustment that the previous watch had put on the wheel, so I now turned my attention to try and improve the setting that John had spent most of his watch in achieving. With the wind on the beam Tzu Hang will not sail herself except under certain combinations of sail, and this was not one of them. On each side of the wheel, attached to the gunwale, is a piece of elastic shock cord, in turn fastened to a short piece of line with a loop in the end. These loops can be dropped over the spokes of the wheel, so that it is held in the right position but still allowed a certain amount of play. The wheel had been fixed in the position to counteract Tzu Hang’s tendency, under this rig, to turn up into the wind. When she is under a balanced rig, she can be left alone for hours and hours, and sometimes for days, but when artificial means are used to keep her on her course, she usually requires watching, and occasional corrections.

John appeared again in the hatchway, his arms resting on the step of the hatch. He was the carpenter, and was in charge of all maintenance, repair, and improvements, to the hull and fittings. Beryl was the mate and sailmaker, and was responsible for fitting out and provisioning the ship, and the repair of the sails. I was the skipper and navigator, and also the rigger; so that our duties were well divided. We were all adequate navigators, and often John would work out a longitude from my sight, or I would work out a position line from Beryl’s.

In addition to her other duties, Beryl was also the cook, and John and I tried to recompense her in some way for her labours by being the washers-up. We sometimes offered in a half-hearted way to do something about the cooking, but she really did not trust us with the stoves, and often when something went wrong with them, we were suspect, either for having pricked them too much or not enough, during the night watch. We also took one extra three-hour watch each, so that Beryl could be free for meals and get a good sleep in the afternoon. John and I took three three-hour watches, and Beryl two, making twenty-four hours in all. Our watches always came at the same time, so that we were able to get accustomed to the hours. Beryl had the twelve to three watch at night, and always said that she preferred it, although most sailors think that it is the worst one. Even when watch-keeping was not necessary, whoever would normally have been on duty was responsible for the running of the ship. We knew automatically who had to turn out to stop a rattle or correct a course.

Now as John looked aft from the shelter of the doghouse, his eyes wandered over what he could see of the ship, he was always in search of something that he might do to improve her. Although she wasn’t his, he made himself part of her, and she always came first with him. Generations of his family had followed the sea, the hard sea of Cornish fishermen and Grimsby trawlermen. Salt water was in his veins, and I sometimes wondered whether he wasn’t sired in it.

He looked behind him at the clock. ‘What does the log say?’ he asked.

‘Fourteen miles.’

‘Good lass; seven knots. I streamed it two hours ago. Keep it up.’

‘Are you going to turn in?’

‘No, it’s nearly tea-time. Those pills are good. I don’t feel a thing.’

‘Nor do I, but I’m going to have another tonight for luck.’

‘Directly I get a chance, if it isn’t too rough, I might take these doors away and put in washboards. They let too much wind in. What do you think?’

‘Too much water too, sometimes. Is Beryl asleep?’

‘No, here she comes. My, my!’

Beryl appeared in the hatch opening. She is inclined to let herself go over useful sea-going dresses, and I saw that she had already decided that it was cold enough for the ‘Southern Ocean Cruising Rig’, a combination woollen suit made up in the McLeod tartan, with a built-in belt, and a sliding hatch behind. It was practical, warm, and bright; bright yellow and black.

‘How are we doing?’ she asked now, that many times repeated question. I told her and she went down to make tea, and John went with her. I watched a squall dragging over the sea towards us and wondered whether it would hit us or pass behind. A few shearwaters were swinging low over the waves, but I could see no albatrosses. John stood up again and passed me a mug of tea and a slice of fruit cake. I thought that everything was very good, and best of all the fact that we were really off and laying the miles behind us. I imagined the string of dots, the daily positions, growing across the chart. 6,700 miles to Port Stanley: 67 perhaps, 67 little crosses, before we arrived. We might be there in time to send a cable for Clio’s birthday. Sometimes the crosses would lie close together on the chart, and sometimes they would stretch out across it, reaching for the harbour on the other side, but the time, I knew, would pass quickly as we settled down to our sea-going routine, and cups of tea would follow cups of tea, at about this time, on each succeeding day.

The cat arrived suddenly on the bridge-deck. When any of us came on deck, we came up slowly and deliberately, taking careful hold of first the edge of the hatch and then the shrouds, but the cat used to arrive with a single spring from the chart table, so that she seemed to fall from nowhere, as light as a windblown leaf, on to the deck. The preliminaries seen from below were not so graceful. She would stand on the chart table swaying to the roll, and craning her neck as if she hoped to see where she might land, and trying to make up her mind to jump. The backstage view of her shaggy little backside, as it disappeared over the step of the hatch, couldn’t compare with the arrival of the ballerina as seen from the stalls in the cockpit. She stayed with me for a moment or two, but it was too cold and rough for cats, and she returned below again.

John relieved me at six. He had had his supper and I had mine as soon as I got below. We tried to have all our meals by daylight, in order to save kerosene, and when we were keeping watch we were always ready to turn in when we could, so that the day consisted of watch-keeping, eating, and sleeping, with only a little reading before we fell asleep. As soon as washing-up was done, I opened my stretcher cot on the port side of the main cabin, and unrolled my sleeping bag and climbed in. The bunk on the other side was full of twice-baked bread, which we found didn’t go mouldy, as long as it was kept in the open. We had sixty loaves.

If the bread did go bad, we had a stove in the main cabin for baking, and also for heating: a blue enamel coal- or wood-burning stove, with a good oven, but only under certain conditions could we persuade it to burn at sea without smoking.

I lay in my bunk now and tried to sleep. The water was rushing past the planking at my ear, a sweet trickling, talking sound. Soon I heard Beryl getting out the navigation lights. She lit them, waited for them to warm up, and then handed them up to John. Probably we would use them only on this night, as from now we would be off the traffic routes. Last she lit the stern light and John tied it up on the mizzen-boom gallows, a white hurricane light which never seemed to blow out, and which showed up better than the red and the green. We did not shield it from forward for this reason.

Pwe came into my bunk and sat right up by my face, her whiskers tickling my cheek, and purring loudly. She was really glad to be at sea again. It was a life that she knew and enjoyed. I think that she felt she was mistress of the ship and the people in it. One of us was always petting her or playing with her, and she seemed to think that we were hers to do what she wanted. Beryl thought that John and I teased her too much, but from the scars on my hand and sometimes my nose, I seemed to be the one who suffered. She got John once when he was teasing her, and he cut her dead for a week, and though she gradually won him back, she never used her claws on him again.

At about a quarter to nine I swung myself out of my berth and lowered my feet on to the seat below it. Then reached across to the brass pipe in the centre of the cabin, which holds the sliding table. When not in use, the table is slid up and fastened close under the deckhead, out of the way, and the pipe is used to grab on to when one is moving in the cabin. Holding on to the edge of my berth and the brass pipe, I stepped down and made my way aft. There was an oil-light burning in the cabin and another oil-light in the forecabin, where Beryl was sleeping. Both were turned down and dim, but they were there in case of some emergency.

When I looked out of the hatch, I could see John hunched over the wheel. Behind him the stern light flickered and flared, and outlined his broad figure, enlarged by an extra jersey under his oilskins. Tzu Hang seemed to be going at a tremendous pace, and the night looked very dark and wild. ‘How are we doing?’ I shouted up to him.

‘Doing well,’ he shouted back, ‘fifty-six miles on the log. Pretty cold. No hurry.’

‘Any lights?’

‘Yes, you can see Glennie Island light just abeam, and Wilson Promontory ahead, only the loom of Wilson Promontory though.’

‘What are the bearings?’

John checked the bearings by looking over the compass, and I marked our rough position on the chart. We were just beginning to cross the Bass Strait. I pulled on my oilskin jumper and my oilskin trousers, and then my coat and my red sock over my head, and climbed up on deck. I sat down beside John until my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness.

‘I think that the wind is down a bit,’ he said.

‘Oh. I thought that it was blowing a little harder. All right. I can take her now.’

John stood up and stretched, then he stepped out of the cockpit and on to the deck, holding on to the shrouds and looking round him. After a time, he stepped carefully across to the hatch and disappeared below. For a time I could see his shadow moving against the lamplit wall of the doghouse, and then it disappeared and after a few minutes, I felt sure, he was asleep.

The night seemed very dark and although it was midsummer, I began to feel cold. I began to wonder why I could not see Rodonda Island. I peered under the boom but saw only universal blackness. There wasn’t a star to be seen and there was no moon. Only low overcast sky and rain. I walked carefully up the deck, leaning inwards and holding on to the handrail on the doghouse, and then the handrail on the bottom of the dinghy until I could cross over to the shrouds. From there I stepped across to the staysail boom and ran my hand along this to the forestay. Looking behind the jib, I could see Rodonda quite clearly, a dark round rock of an island, and perhaps a mile away. All was well. An hour passed, and I sat in the cockpit and listened to the rush of Tzu Hang and the occasional spatter of spray, and I watched the dark outline of her sail against the sky. I wondered when we should see Curtis Island. After that there would be no more land until the morning. The black waves came swinging like walls out of the night and disappeared again, and sometimes they hissed quietly as they came, showing a thin white line in the darkness, or a phosphorescent glow. There was no malice in them.

I sat in the cockpit and thought of nothing in particular. I thought of Beryl in the forecabin and wondered if she was sleeping and thought that this watch was like all watches and that it was going slowly. Soon there was only an hour to go, and I went below to make myself some tea, but I kept looking aft to watch the occasional flash of a light so that I could check the course, and several times I had to climb up on deck to correct it.

I woke up Beryl and she was awake at once, and when I was back in the cockpit, I could see her shadow moving as I had seen John’s below. She came and sat beside me and I felt a warm flood of companionship between us. ‘The wind is up, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘No, I think it’s down now.’

I checked the log, leaning aft and flashing a torch on it. There were seventy-eight miles on the log in eleven hours, and the wind looked like holding. Beryl settled down with her hand on the wheel. She wouldn’t move until she woke John at three, sitting patiently and alert at the wheel, and quite untroubled by any need for the various devices that John and I would employ to pass the time.

I turned in but could not sleep until we had seen Curtis Island. After a time, I came to the hatch again. Beryl was just as I had left her an hour before.

‘Want anything?’

‘No thank you.’

‘Seen anything?’

‘No. Sometimes I think that I see something to port, but I couldn’t be sure. Now I can’t see anything. Can’t you sleep?’

‘No, I just want to see Curtis Island. There’s a creak. Have you heard it?’

‘Yes, isn’t it annoying? I heard a creak. I thought that it must be the mast.’

Tzu Hang never creaks in a sea, and this new noise, together with the possibility that we were being set further towards the west than I had allowed for, and consequently nearer to Curtis Island, had kept me awake. Once the noise had been noticed, it seemed to grow louder and more persistent, like a rat gnawing at a wall board. I began to imagine that Tzu Hang had been strained during the bashing we had given her, on our way up to Melbourne. I moved about, listening anxiously, as if I was a new and nervous father trying to discover in the middle of the night whether his offspring was really only sleeping.

Under the doghouse the noise sounded louder, and I noticed a new mug swinging on its cup-hook. I steadied it and the noise stopped immediately. It was only a rough bit of pottery in the handle, grating on the hook. I suppose it went on, but we never noticed it again. The noises of a ship blend into a tune so well known that it is never heard. Anything new strikes a discordant note which seems to vibrate through the ship as horribly as reveille to the soldier. We are often asked how we know, if we are all asleep below, if anything goes wrong, but any little change in the ship’s rhythm, any slight sound, and least flap of a sail or the lift of a boom, and whoever is nominally on duty awakes immediately.

I heard Beryl call. ‘Now I can see something,’ she said.

I looked out of the hatch. The sky had cleared slightly, and dark against a dark sky, but clearly visible, was Curtis Island. Perhaps it was a good three miles away, but it looked much closer. I went below and fell asleep immediately and stayed asleep until I felt someone shaking me by the leg. It was John and it was also daylight. I felt as if I had dropped off for a few minutes only and quite indignant at having to get up so soon.

When I went aft to put on my oilskins, I looked out of the hatch. It was a grey morning and there were plenty of whitecaps still showing. Tzu Hang seemed to be going as well as ever. John was leaning over the after end of the cockpit, cleaning the face of the log.

‘What have we done?’

‘117. Pretty good. I think that the wind has dropped slightly, but she’s still going well.’

As soon as I was ready, I climbed up the ladder and then made that familiar movement to the cockpit, one hand to the mast, one hand to the shroud, as I stepped aft. It is as well that these movements should become automatic, because they have to be carried out on black nights, with a wildly moving deck, and spray flying; when there is no room for mistakes. A great mountaineer once said that only fools and children jump on mountains, and he might have added Gurkhas, going down hill. The same applies to small ships.

For once John was content to go below without fiddling with the sails. If he was quick he would get an hour and a half before breakfast. His eyes looked slightly red on the rims, and I knew that he would be asleep in a moment. But no trump of doom, no clarion call to heaven, would bring him out of his box-like berth quicker than Beryl’s call to breakfast.