Once Is Enough

I always disliked the nine to twelve watch in the evening. Between washing up after supper and the beginning of the watch, I was too wide awake to sleep, but half way through the watch I became involved in a desperate struggle to avoid it. The morning watch was far better. I was usually well rested after six comparatively undisturbed hours in my bunk, and the wonderful prospect of breakfast in an hour and a half made pleasant the worst of mornings. From seven onwards Beryl would be about and I would be able to talk to her as she appeared from time to time in the hatchway.

Until then there were many things to see and think about. First the weather portents, the barometer, the wind, the sky and the clouds, and the sea. Then the set of the sails and a quick look round for any loose ends of rope, or signs of chafe. Then a check on our position, and a search for land if we happened to be near it. Then a check on the birds that might be visible about the ship. I was always trying to recognise a companion of the day before, and often found one.

By the time all this was done Beryl appeared at the hatch. I showed her Pyramid Rock, a jagged tooth sticking abruptly out of the sea on the port quarter.

‘Can you see Flinders?’

‘No, not yet; I’m not sure, maybe there is something … still poor visibility.’

She had plaited her hair and tied it over her head. It didn’t look very elegant, but at sea we had to put up with it. She passed me the cat’s earth, in the blue plastic basin, to empty over the side. As I handed it back, I heard the primus hissing.

A moment later Pwe arrived on the deck herself, put her paws on the cockpit coaming, just aft of the doghouse, and looked at the weather. She decided that it was too wet to keep to the deck and went below again. Here she did all that was possible to interfere with the cooking, protesting her hunger in a loud voice, and jumping on to Beryl’s back, if she got the chance, in order to explain her need more lucidly.

I heard Beryl call that breakfast was ready and, without any delay, John appeared and handed me a bowl of porridge with milk and brown sugar. If Tzu Hang had been sailing herself he would have stayed in bed, and I would have handed him his food into his berth. Now he sat down on the step at the foot of the ladder and Beryl, who almost always does two things at once, sat in the cook’s chair and read, and at the same time fried bacon and eggs. From time to time she gave the cat a piece of fried bacon rind from the pan, and Pwe would pat it about the deck with her paw, till it was cool enough for eating. If we were having cooked bacon, Pwe would not dream of eating the rind unless it was cooked also. After bacon and eggs came burnt toast and home-made marmalade. Burnt toast is the hallmark of Beryl’s wonderful breakfasts, as inseparable from them as her book is from her, when she is cooking.

These typical breakfasts were provided for us day after day for fifty days all across that great Southern Ocean. Perhaps never before had such good breakfasts been eaten so regularly for so long in those particular waters.

After breakfast we could see Flinders Island indistinctly, and soon we began to try to pick out the entrance to the Banks Strait. After a time we could make out a small mark on the horizon ahead which took form gradually. A lighthouse, a black lighthouse instead of a white one, as described in the pilot book, but a lighthouse all the same, on a low flat island. It was Goose Island, and as we rounded it we entered the Banks Strait.

Then came another marvellous day of sailing. Forsyth Island to port and the green Tasmanian Coast away to starboard, and the boom as wide as could be in order to let us get round Swan Island. There was white water showing everywhere as we squeezed past. By noon, when we reset the log, we had done 163 miles. By four o’clock in the afternoon, we had to haul down the mizzen and shortly afterwards we handed the main, running under the two headsails, whereupon the wind began to ease, as it so often does in the evening, and we set the main again.

The Sydney-Hobart race had started on the same day as we did, and we had wondered at one time whether we would have to pass through them. We heard in the evening, on the radio, that the leaders were not yet into the Bass Strait, and were meeting with light winds only. We were lucky to be on the top side of a depression which would, with any luck, carry us most of the way across the Tasman Sea.

By midnight when Beryl relieved me, the wind was right aft with an awkward sea running. It was necessary to steer all the time, and we had rigged preventer guys so that the boom would not smash over if Tzu Hang gybed. As she rolled in the steep following sea, the boom would try to lift against the preventer guy, and sometimes the leach of the sail would give a flap, which set the helmsman to spinning the wheel frantically. There was no need to worry with either Beryl or John at the wheel.

All through the dark and windy night, as the white wave tops marched in luminous procession past the ship, bright green bars of phosphorescence shone suddenly out of the night and fell astern, glowing like emeralds between the black breasts of the waves. They were beacons for Tzu Hang pointing her way to the south.

CHAPTER FOUR

ACROSS THE SOUTH TASMAN

NEXT morning Tzu Hang was still racing along, with the wind a little too far aft for comfort. The glass was low, and the wind’s grey horsemen, the low rain clouds, came riding up from behind throwing a lash of rain across us as they passed, while the albatrosses ranged like greyhounds in front of them, across the downland of the sea. Wherever we looked we would see somewhere the sudden tilt of an albatross’s wing, as it turned to sweep down and along the moving valley of the sea.

Perhaps I was thinking of albatrosses, but at any rate I wasn’t paying sufficient attention to the steering, and allowed Tzu Hang to slew as a wave passed, so that there was a sudden wump as the boom went over in a gybe. The preventer guy had parted and the boom came over with a bang against the backstay, but the initial shock had already been taken by the preventer guy, and no damage was done, except to my reputation with the rest of the crew. I started to haul in on the main-sheet but before I was finished, Tzu Hang rolled and the boom gybed back again.

Two faces appeared almost immediately at the hatch opening. Neither of them said anything, but I said, ‘I think that we’ll have the main down now and set the twins.’ When it was all finished John said, ‘Thank God it was you and not me.’ The thought of the accidental gybe stayed with him all the day, and seemed to give him ill-suppressed satisfaction, and in the evening he said, ‘You know, I haven’t really felt right since I let Tzu Hang gybe on that rough night going into Auckland, and now thank goodness you’ve done one.’

‘Not one, two, and only a few seconds between. You’ll never beat that.’

‘No, thank goodness. I really feel fine about it now.’

Beryl looked rather smug. I think that she was the most careful helmsman of the three of us.

Tzu Hang was rigged in those days with a topmast forestay from the top of her mast to her bowsprit, a jibstay which hauled out on a traveller on her bowsprit, and a forestay which went to a fitting on her bow. The twin staysails were set on separate twin forestays bolted through a deck-beam half way between the bow and the mainmast, and on booms from a mast fitting 5 feet above the deck. When they were not required, these twin forestays were fastened out of the way of the staysail boom to the pinrails near the shrouds.

When we were running under twin staysails, the sheets from the booms led back to a block, and then to the tiller, so that Tzu Hang steered herself. It usually took us about twenty minutes to change from fore-and-aft rig to running rig, from the time we went on deck to the time we went below, and we were always doing it. We had not yet changed the wheel for the tiller, and self-steering would not work with the wheel, but now there was no further danger of a gybe, and the ship could be left to herself for short periods. It was much easier on the helmsman, but the sail area was reduced and we were not going so fast.

Not going quite so fast, but very nearly, because at noon we had 153 miles on the log, and by three in the afternoon it was blowing force 7, and Tzu Hang was beginning to sit up on the wave tops and to rush forward on them in the most exhilarating way. One wave top climbed on board just in front of the cockpit and we seemed to be wrapped in the breaking crest. We handed the twin staysails and ran under bare poles until after tea, when we set the twins again.

For the next few days we were caught up in a relentless rhythm of the sea. The ship reeled and surged and swung away on her course; the glass rose slightly and fell again, as depression chased depression across the Tasman Sea; rain squall after rain squall followed short sunlight, and we climbed repeatedly on to wet decks for our three-hour watches and, sleepy and chilled, down again at the end of them. The glass stayed low, and everything below decks became damp and sodden. The shifts in the wind kept us busy with sail changes. For most of the time we were under twins, but when the wind came abeam, we dropped the weather staysail and took the pole out from the other, sheeting it home as a reaching sail. Then we set the storm-jib and mizzen, and that was all that we needed. When the wind was aft, and provided it was not too strong, we set the mizzen as well as the twins.

New Year’s Eve, five days out, 750 miles on the log, and a black wet night. We had Christmas pudding for dinner; the first of the six Christmas puddings that we had for celebrations, and which would mark the small achievements of our passage. John and I were always trying to get Beryl to produce them, but they were rigorously controlled. As I sat up in the rain in the night watch, I thought of the previous New Year’s Eve, which the three of us, and Clio, had spent high up on a mountain ridge in Maui. I thought of her in England and wondered how she was getting on, and thought also that however keen I was to make a quick passage back to join her, I would also like to have a break in this wet rushing movement. At twelve I went forward and shook Beryl: ‘Happy New Year!’

‘Oh, Happy New Year!’ she said, and was awake immediately. I had a wet towel round my neck, five days’ grizzled grey beard, and wet oilskins, and as I leant forward to give her a kiss, she felt warm and damp and smelt slightly musty.

Back in the cockpit another black rain squall was marching up from behind, dark and forbidding, and by the time Beryl joined me it was sluicing round us.

‘How are you feeling?’ I asked her.

‘Feeling fine; still I wouldn’t mind a change so that we could fix up the tiller for self-steering.’

‘Me too, everything’s so damned wet.’

Wet or no, it made no difference while the wind lasted. Sleep and feed and watch; too little sleep, enough food, and too much watch, but by the end of the first week, we were still just short of a thousand miles: four miles short. We were also rather further north than we had intended as a northerly current was setting us up and knocking some miles off the run as measured on the chart. On that last day we were close-hauled under jib, staysail, and mizzen and with the wind from the south, but for the first time since we left Westernport, Tzu Hang was sailing herself, and what a blessed change we all thought it was. We were all down below.

‘This is more like it,’ said John. ‘That was really too much like work.’

‘Good heavens, I thought that all you single-handers were gluttons for punishment. Beryl and I never do that sort of thing. It was only because you were there that we didn’t stop and take it easy for a time.’

‘No,’ said John, ‘I suppose that it’s the cold and the damp, and such a long spell of it, but I wouldn’t like to go on indefinitely with weather like that. If she’ll steer herself it’s another story.’

‘The glass is shooting up, so maybe we can fix the tiller tomorrow.’

We all slept a glorious and undisturbed sleep that night, and woke up to find that the sails were flapping uselessly. We took everything down while the porridge cooked, and after breakfast set about changing the wheel to the tiller. At first it seemed as if we would be unable to do so, as the wheel fitting was frozen hard on to the rudder-post, and we had to heat it with a blow torch before we could move it. Wheel, wheel-box and worm-gear we stowed right aft in the counter, and put the tiller on in its place. Tzu Hang looks rather better with a tiller, or perhaps it is just that a change is nice.

While we worked a seal played around us, popping his whiskery nose out of the oily sea, and looking like a bald-headed old man, peering over the morning paper; then he turned over on his back and waved a flipper across his chest as if he was fanning himself. After a time he went on his way. Perhaps he was bound for the Snares, but anyway he didn’t seem to be at all perturbed about his landfall.

While the seal played around us the albatrosses came visiting. They came gliding over the swell, apparently using the cushion of air, raised by the lift of the waves, to support them. There seemed to be no breeze at all, and from time to time they were forced to give a few slow strokes with their wings. They always seemed to look rather furtive and ashamed when they did so, as if they hoped that no other albatross had seen them. It was obviously something that they did not want talked about in the albatross club. They glided so close to the smooth water that sometimes an end wing feather would draw a skittering line across the surface as they turned. One after another they came up to the ship and thrusting their feet out in front of them, they tobogganed to a halt and as they settled down, they held their wings together high above their bodies, until they folded them one after the other, in a curious double fold, against their backs.

They paddled round the ship as we worked, coming close under the counter, and all the time Pwe pursued them on deck. She crouched under the rail and then raised her head, with her ears flattened sideways, so that she showed as little of herself as possible when she looked over. Then she crouched down and crawled along the deck until she thought that she was directly over one of the big birds, when she looked again. But she could get no further, and her jaw used to chatter with rage and frustration.

Sometimes the albatrosses used to dip their bills in the water and then snap them together with a popping sound. They reminded me of the senior members of a Services Club, tasting port. We never found out what they ate. They trifled with pieces of bread, but never swallowed them.

As soon as we had fitted the tiller, John turned his attention to the washboards, which he made from some spare teak that we had on board. He made a perspex window in the lower washboard so that we could look through to see how the helmsman was and if he needed anything. While he was doing this, Beryl was working on some caulking, stopping a slight leak in the deck, and I was greasing rigging-screws.

When John worked with wood, he seemed to caress it. The tools in his hands looked as if they carried out his wishes of their own volition, and even the wood seemed to submit without protest. His movements were so sure that any work he was doing appeared amazingly easy. When he marked wood with a pencil, he marked it with one straight line, and when he picked it up again after laying it aside, he knew exactly what his marks meant. Most wonderful of all, everything always seemed to fit. Now he rebated the two washboards so that they overlapped and made a windproof joint, and when he dropped them into position in their slots they fitted as if the join had been a straight saw-cut.

‘How on earth do you get things to fit the first time?’ I asked him.

‘I reckon that’s what you learn in five years’ apprenticeship,’ he replied.

He was sharpening his chisel on a stone with regular even strokes, the angle never varying. When he finished the light shone on one smooth face, and not on a number of facets, as it would have done if I had been doing it.

‘When I was doing my apprenticeship,’ he went on, ‘and finished my first job, I went to the foreman and asked him to pass it. It was a small cabinet and I was pretty proud of it. He came and looked at it, and then went away without saying anything, and came back in a few minutes with an axe and smashed it. Then he told me to make a proper one. I guess that makes you learn to do a thing properly. Still everyone can’t be a carpenter. You have to be the right type you know.’

He said this as if he was commiserating with me for being blind or a cripple, and he was hoping for some reaction on my part.

When John had been a youngster in Jersey, the Germans had moved in and, owing to some failure of an engine in a small boat, he and his mother and father were unable to get away. The whole family were then taken to Germany and held throughout the war as hostages. John’s father has been described to me as a sturdy and uncompromising Yorkshireman, and I’m sure that John is very much a chip of the old block, so that the Germans must often have regretted their selection. What with one thing and another, John did not have a great deal of opportunity for orthodox schooling, so that when he found himself back in Jersey, he decided to learn a trade. When he had finished his apprenticeship, he went to South Africa with his mother to her people, as there were only two of them then, and after a time he set off by himself to Canada, to work as a carpenter and to build his boat, and to sail her round the world if possible. We were lucky to meet him soon after the beginning of his journey.

If the first week was all that we had expected of the South Tasman, the next week, which was spent largely south of New Zealand, gave us all kinds of variety. After the day of rest and repair in the sun, we had a grey wet drizzling day, with the wind in the north-west and continuous rain. We fixed a plastic water-bottle to the foot of the mizzenmast, and fastened a sail-cover upside down under the mizzen boom. We caught two gallons of water, and on the strength of this I shaved, and decided never again to go unshaven for so long, if I could avoid it. My beard felt dirty. It probably was, and it tickled me when I tried to sleep. From then on John and I kept our whiskers more or less under control.

The next day was warm and sunny, with a light following wind. John was the photographer, and he had about 2,000 feet of 16 mm. film which he intended to shoot. Now he suggested that we should put the dinghy overboard and film Tzu Hang under her twins. There was little wind. Tzu Hang was rolling along very quietly, and there was no white water, only the long easy swell. There seemed no danger in putting the dinghy over, and if he got left behind we would put the headsails down and wait for him.

We had two dinghies on board, stowed one on top of the other, upside-down. The bottom of one was of moulded fibre-glass, light and fast and easy to handle. It has stood up to an immense amount of rough use for several years, and was easily pulled on board by one person. On top of this was a plywood pram, also light and seaworthy and with a high freeboard, so that it fitted down on the deck. Stowed upside-down it looked splendid and conformed to the lines of the doghouse. Moreover, it had two handrails running along its bilges. In the water and the right way up, it looked rather like a pale blue bath, but it was a great load-carrier and a good seaboat, and provided there was no head wind and a light load, it was easy to send through the water. John had carried an outboard engine on Trekka, and during the Pacific crossing, and in New Zealand, we had done some great trips with it and John’s outboard.

We undid the lashings and prised the boat off the fibre-glass dinghy, to which it was clinging like a limpet. Then we unfastened the life-line and dropped it over the side. John jumped in and we handed him his movie camera in a plastic bag. He took the oars and rowed away from the ship and as the wind had dropped altogether now, we saw that he could row faster than we were sailing. He rowed on ahead of us, working hard, and was soon far enough away to leave his oars in the rowlocks and start filming. Completely alone, in a pale blue bathlike boat, and on a vast and slowly heaving sea, he looked like something out of a nursery rhyme. An albatross landed beside him and pecked at an oar. Tzu Hang rolled slowly past him as he filmed, and when he was about a hundred yards behind her and had taken a shot as she went behind a swell, he rowed up after us. We all had a go then. It was a fascinating sight to watch the ship rolling slowly along in this big smooth swell. The motion, which we had become accustomed to, looked tremendous from the dinghy. She was showing a vast amount of copper paint as she rolled, and it was still very clean, with only a few goose-barnacles visible here and there. Nothing seems to be able to defeat goose-barnacles. I believe that they would grow on pure arsenic. When we were sailing up to Canada, the log-line became so fouled with them that we had to change it. We left the old line in the stern so that they would dry up and we could then rub them off, and the cat used to eat a few off the line every day. Above the copper there were some signs of green weed clinging to the bottom of the white paint, but otherwise Tzu Hang was looking quite yachty. She had had a complete refit in Sydney. As I was thinking about all this, she drew away from me and I had a sudden panic feeling of being deserted, and rowed as hard as I could after her. Although there was no wind, she seemed to be going quite quickly through the water.

Beryl got in the dinghy and rowed away as if she had spent her life on the open ocean in one, but when she was back on board, I understood exactly the feelings of an old hen foster mother, when the last of its ducklings is back again from the water and safely under its wing. Tzu Hang seemed to do so too.

Next day was Sunday and we were becalmed. We were busy with all kinds of work on the deck. John painted the washboards, I finished the rigging-screws, and Beryl was still hunting for and recaulking small deck and skylight leaks. It was warm on deck and not at all the weather that we expected so far south. It didn’t seem to go with this sea, which the great grain ships used to cross. I wondered how often, just in this bit of water where we were sitting in the sun, a square-rigged ship had flung past, down to her topsails, and wondering whether she was south of the Snares and north of the Auckland Islands. A number of sailing ships were wrecked on the Auckland Islands, and although there are 140 miles between them and the Snares, they are better behind than in front, when visibility is bad. We were approaching the dotted line on the chart, which is inscribed, ‘Icebergs and loose ice may be met with south of this line’.

We had lunch on deck. Lunch was always cold and consisted of twice-baked bread, which was holding up well, butter, cheese, jam, salami or sardines, fruit cake, and an orange. Sometimes we had soup, and we had orange juice or grapefruit juice to drink. We also had a large supply of onions which we ate raw with our cheese.

During the morning John had taken some shots of all the activities on deck, while Pwe spent her time hunting the albatrosses with her usual ineffective procedure. I remembered the reporter in Seattle who had telephoned me for a story, and who had said, ‘Say, Captain, will you tell me what you folks do all the time, just laze around and lounge about on deck?’