Solitaire Spirit: Three Times Around the World Single-Handed (19 page)

In October I saw an advertisement in the local paper asking for electronic wiremen and rang the firm for an appointment. ‘I have to tell you I'm 53 years old,' I said, having been turned down so often that I believed I had no chance.

I turned up with my last £10 note in my pocket – and got the job. If the basic wage was unexceptional, there was plenty of overtime and by saving hard I reckoned I could still leave for Cape Horn the following June. I walked and ran the four miles to and from the factory, which helped build up my legs and get me fit for my voyage.
Solitaire
was the one I really felt sorry for, sitting forlornly in her cradle with her mast down, dreaming of her warm bed in Hiva Oa sunshine. As winter progressed, the marina became more like a graveyard, the snow-covered boats so many tombstones.

To save money I spent Christmas in the marina, trying to hide from the manager, but he caught me on Christmas Day before I could dodge behind the tombstones. His weekly enquiry as to when I was going to remove
Solitaire
changed to ‘Are you still here?' I remembered vividly my last Christmas which had been spent in Cape Town when it had been, ‘Can't you stay longer?' Rome collected me on New Year's Day to spend it with his family and Annegret, a girl he had met in Cape Town, an airhostess with a German airline, who was to play a major role in my second voyage.

Work fell off after the holiday so I moved to Plessey Electronics on a six-month contract with good money and more overtime. For £25 I was offered an old banger that had six months left on its MOT and was taxed for a month. I bandaged the broken silencer but never managed to cure the carburettor, which drank petrol like an alcoholic, so I threw the bum in the dustbin and got another from the scrap yard. I needed a car for work and, more importantly, to start fetching equipment and stores for the voyage.

I drove to Derek Daniels' home to order a second Hydrovane self-steering gear. He would service my old unit free of charge for the feedback information it would provide and I could then use
it as a backup. He guaranteed the delivery date on the new one with ten per cent discount. From Kemp Masts I ordered a new Jiffy reefing boom. With this system of slab-reefing I could feed all the down-hauls back to winches in the cockpit and use the old roller boom as a stand-by. Meanwhile I had been buying ship's stores from the supermarket, and the boat's lockers, unlike Mother Hubbard's, were starting to fill.

As the weather warmed I hired an industrial sander and spent my spare time on
Solitaire
's topsides, finally giving her four coats of International 709 paint. I also bought some antifouling to be applied just before the boat went back in the water. This time I would not risk strangling
Solitaire
as I had in the South Pacific. I splashed out, too, on wet weather gear, having it heavily lined to combat the freezing conditions in the Southern Ocean.

There were changes to make on the rigging for safety's sake. The lower shrouds of 6mm stainless steel wire had to be stepped up to 8mm to match the rest of the rigging. Sails were the major item. It might be possible to pick up some strong second-hand headsails, but I needed two new working jibs and a new mainsail, on which I held very definite views. The mainsail would be similar to the one Lucas had sent me in Australia, with a straight leech, no battens and three reef points, the last reef point to provide a virtual trysail. And I needed a heavy luff rope, not only to give strength but to grip on in icy conditions. The seams had to be wide with three rows of stitching and, had I been able to afford it, all panelling seams would have been taped with further stitching. The sail was to be at least 8oz material and heavily reinforced. All eyes, clews, tacks were to be stitched rather than pressed in position, for in the past such eyes had inevitably pulled out. My old Lucas mainsail was still good enough to serve as a backup. The working jib was to be made to the same specification apart from stainless steel, not rope, in the luffs and the piston hanks had to be heavy duty because on my last journey I had worn out two sets.

I consulted a number of sailmakers, all of whom said they could supply to specification and deliver within ten weeks at
prices ranging from £400 to £500. A local sailmaking firm had several advantages: they were only five minutes' walk from where I worked, they claimed to specialise in heavy cruising sails, their price was competitive and there were no transport costs. I called at their office on March 14th, 1979, and we had a long talk about the specifications and my reasons for them. If I paid cash with the order, the price would be £400 with delivery on May 14th.

I handed over a cheque for the £400 within a week, along with my Lucas sails to act as a pattern.

‘Do make them strong enough to take me round Cape Horn,' was my last request.

‘We will make them strong enough to lift the boat out of the water,' they promised. Later I received confirmation of order and delivery date.

Calling in to pick up the sails on May 14th I was told they would be completed five days later. On May 19th an employee tipped me off that they had not even been started and it was the same story on May 26th. After more phone calls and visits, I was finally told they would be ready on Saturday, June 2nd.

Handed three plastic coated sail bags, I asked to see the mainsail. At first they refused, claiming that they did not allow sails to be removed from their bags and inspected on the premises! Finally they let me pull about 4ft of the sail from its bag. The first thing that came to light was what I thought was a large tack or eyelet which had been pressed in and not stitched as agreed. Then I realised it could not be either since the material was too narrow, but could only be the head of a sail with the headboard missing! The reinforcing was limited, there was no rope in the luff, the cloth merely turned back on itself, small diamond-shaped pieces had been sewn on into which eyelets had been pressed to take the plastic slides, and the seams were too narrow. My first reaction was that I'd been given someone's poorly-made sail by mistake.

‘You've given me the wrong sail,' I complained, whereupon they asked if I had paid for the sails in full.

On affirming this I was told, ‘In that case the sails are now your property and you have no case.'

I contacted a solicitor who was also a yachtsman. He made an appointment to inspect the sails but the sailmaker failed to keep it. I contacted the Association of Sailmakers but since my sailmaker was a member of theirs, they refused to act as arbitrators. On June 27th my solicitor advised me to contact the Office of Fair Trading, at which stage I knew I had little chance of leaving for Cape Horn that year as
Solitaire
was not fast and we would be unable to reach the Horn before winter set in. I considered all the actions I could take, starting with taking the sails to the nearest rubbish dump and burning them.

To set off on a voyage without first class sails would give concern to my family and would be unfair both to them and
Solitaire
. But to walk away from the legal problem could mean that other yachtsmen would be taken advantage of, so I visited the Office of Fair Trading and stepped onto a merry-go-round until 1982, when I staggered off as sick as any long ride on the legal circuit can make you.

Once more I was to feel as if I were in hospital, this time one for the insane. Three teams of surgeons came to operate. First were the solicitors, talking softly and incomprehensibly; second were the judges, entering your stomach not with scalpels but with bare hands, twisting your guts into knots; and third were the get-on-your-bike-and-look-for-work brigade whose speciality is the heart. They remove you from the operating table and sit you in a small cubicle where a girl, young enough to be your grandchild, asks, ‘Have you looked for work? How much money do you have? Prove it!' You are then allowed to leave their hospital, reporting weekly for your dole prescription, wishing you were a thousand miles away and had never heard of British justice.

The Consumer Protection Department advised collecting the sails and having an expert's written report whether or not they were of merchantable quality and fit for their purpose. I was further advised to apply to Poole County Court for a hearing before the
registrar, which was arranged for August 4th, 1978. The sailmaker failed to turn up. The case could now go before a judge after I had engaged an expert witness. Then my contract with Plessey's ran out and I could not afford the repairs to get my car through its MOT so I sold it for £18. Meanwhile I had promised to leave the marina by the end of June for Cape Horn and when this fell through, I was put under more pressure.
Solitaire
was put back in the water and I sailed for Lymington in mid-August, entering Lymington Yacht Haven for a winter berth on September 25th. From now on this friendly marina would always be looked on as
Solitaire
's home.

The court case dragged. First there were problems in finding an expert witness and a sailmaker made it all clear when he said, ‘Dog doesn't eat dog.' In other words doctors don't appear against doctors, an outlook shared by solicitors and sailmakers. Since Vectis cloth had been used for the sails, I tried its makers, Ratseys, who used this as a reason for not inspecting the sails! However, they recommended I should contact the chairman of the Association of British Sailmakers, who turned out to be with Bruce Banks Sails and could not help. He recommended a surveyor who, after examining the sails, said, ‘Your troubles are over. I'll appear for you in court.' Whereupon he jumped on an aircraft and was never heard from again.

The court case was set for May 5th, 1980. I found another naval architect who inspected the sails and said he would appear for me. The trial went so well that at times I thought the defendant's solicitor was working for me. When I was in the witness box he asked, ‘Did you ever write an article for a yachting magazine called “Barbados or Bust”?' I had expected my own solicitor to bring up my past sailing experience, not the opposition.

‘Are you the Leslie Powles who sailed from England with only eight hours' sailing experience?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Are you the Leslie Powles who was over 1,000 miles off course?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Are you the Leslie Powles who then came back to England with his tail between his legs to tell my client how to build sails?'

‘No, sir,' I replied, ‘I'm the Leslie Powles who then sailed 30,000 miles around the world and even managed to find Australia.'

The Australia came out in that country's accent, Austraaaaalia. There was laughter in court, the judge's face reddened, and that line of questioning came to an abrupt halt. It was one of the few enjoyable things about the trial.

The next insinuation infuriated me. They claimed that I had become frightened to make the non-stop attempt and had used the sails as a reason not to go. Finally the judge accepted that the sails were unfit for their purpose and that the sailmaker was in breach of contract. My £400 would be returned and my costs paid, but the expense of bringing
Solitaire
back into a seaworthy condition was refused, the judge taking the view that these costs were in the nature of living expenses and would have been incurred at the end of the voyage.

A second blow came in one of my solicitor's letters: ‘The court costs are limited to the appropriate county scale. We will obviously temper the wind to the shorn lamb, but in reality by the time the costs position with the Law Society is resolved you will not get the whole of your £400.'

Shorn lamb! I felt more like a sacrificial goat. By living off
Solitaire
's round-the-world stores during the winter months, I managed to keep £850 of my savings, but by now we were in a sorry state. The last of the food had gone and
Solitaire
's hull was covered with weed and had to be taken out of the water for antifouling. Her battery needed replacing, the rigging needed changing, and the fuel tank leaked. Time was running out.

At the age of 55, and for the first time in my life, I wanted to abandon the country of my birth. I had left England a dozen times before but never because I wanted to. Now I wanted to storm out, a spoilt child, the angry husband on the way to the pub to cool down, a feeling, true, which would pass. I was still a free man able to come and go as I pleased but this time go I would, even
if it meant rowing my boat down the Channel without her mast.

Once more I started to ready
Solitaire
. Once more I ordered a mainsail and two working jibs, this time from Peter Lucas of Lucas Sails who, after hearing my tale, agreed to help all he could. There would be no problems over the specification; I could even have my stainless steel wire in the luffs of the working jibs. The price was the same as the duff sails, £400, with a couple of bonuses thrown in: my old sails would be checked and reconditioned free of cost and his wife would do all the running about. In fact I received a third bonus. His wife was a lovely Canadian girl, bubbling with encouragement, and I even found myself whistling
Land of Hope and Glory
again!

I gave up the idea of changing
Solitaire
from Bermudan to cutter rig as the cost was too high. The best I could afford was to step up the lower shrouds from 6 to 8mm wire, matching them with the rest of the standard rigging. I had used a local Birmingham firm when I first rigged
Solitaire
in 1975, so I wrote to them asking for a quotation for the stainless steel wire fitted with swaged ends. They answered by return with a price out of my reach. I had just finished reading their letter when there was a knock on
Solitaire
's hull. The company's representative had called to explain that the price was high because the firm did not do their own swaging. The rep said that since he dealt with local companies doing this kind of work he could put it through at trade cost, and he spent three days chasing back and forth. The modification still cost £85 but what really warmed my heart was that a hometown firm had gone to so much trouble. I still had to change the rigging connections at the top of the mast but that was only a day's work.