The Lonely Sea and the Sky (53 page)

  Pidgy looked disgusted; what a life for a bird! Streams of water were sluicing into the cockpit, the air was wet and windy. During the night he had moved from his new camp and stood on the seat beside the companionway, but I had to move him back for fear I should tread on him. He tried other spots, but he was in the way wherever he went, poor devil. I debated taking him into the cabin and putting up with his indescribable mess, but then I thought, 'Surely a bird is used to the open air', and contented myself with making his tent as snug as possible. I gave him a box full of muesli which was his favourite food (except for the raisins which he threw out, just as my son Giles does). A big wave gave his den a fair washout, and swamped the rest of the muesli. I gave him another plateful in the tent, but he just sat outside waiting till that too had got soaked. That night I was woken frequently by crashes and once wondered if something had broken or come adrift, but all was well.
Gipsy Moth
was sailing at 6 knots through rough water. During the night Pidge seemed quite happy, squatting inside his wigwam facing the entrance. He chattered his beak silently at me when I spoke to him. I ate a handful of dates and an orange in my berth. My nails were worn too far down to peel the orange, but I managed by starting it with my teeth, and finishing with the ball of my thumb. On the whole I had an easy night, which did me good.

  In the morning, for some reason, I laughed at Pidge. To my surprise he was sensitive about it, and much disliked it. He stamped to and fro, chattered his beak and gave me dirty looks.

  12 June. I woke at 5.30 in the morning to find the ship headed north, and cursed at having to get up. But I fell asleep again, and woke two hours later to find the heading east-north-east. Horror! I was headed for Iceland – not the way to increase the daily average run.

  John Fairhall of
The Guardian
in London gave me the positions of the known icebergs which I had asked for. I wanted to know how far south they came, so that I could plan my route.

  While charging the batteries I noticed that the motor's speed varied, suddenly running much faster, then slowing right down. After forty-eight minutes of charging there was a loud 'plonk', and the propeller slipped into gear. I switched off immediately. The cord holding the shaft had snapped. I found steam blowing through escape holes in the gearbox and the clutch. They were so hot that rain dropping on them sizzled. The clutch must have been partially engaged. The truth was that this engine was not built to freewheel for more than a minute or two after starting up.

  The biggest penance I suffered through the failure of the charging motor was due to the paraffin riding light I used at night instead of electric light. Unfortunately my Old Faithful of the 1960 race had been broken, and I bought what I was told was the best riding light to replace it. What I suffered through that lamp! Night after night I spent from half to one hour trying to get it into the rigging alight. In the cabin the slightest jerk put it out instantly. In the cockpit any sudden puff of wind extinguished it. If only I could get it fastened to the backstay in a steady wind before it went out it might survive for several hours. I tried warming it up in the cabin before venturing out, using a higher or lower flame and filling it only half full. How I cursed the makers of that lamp! How I damned the designer, and wished he could be brought into the Atlantic to try making it work.

  13 June. Great sailing! A rough breaking sea, with
Gipsy Moth
crashing through fast and strongly as if she loved it. Great sailing, but not for Pidge; I saw the look of disgust on his face when he caught a wave (I think he must have been a crabby old bachelor). Sometimes he seemed to give me a malicious look. Later when I went on deck I found that the log had stopped, and at first was puzzled why. Indirectly Pidge was responsible. I had given up stowing the coiled ends of the ropes in the lockers under the cockpit seats because Pidge fouled them up so horribly. I had left them coiled on the deck beside the cockpit coaming. The seas breaking on deck had washed them overboard, where they had tangled with the log line. Ropes trailing in the water are used to slow up a yacht, so that this must have cost us speed. On top of that I spent hours untangling the log line with its thousands of tight twists. A lot of clear white sparkling sea was coming aboard as I did so; it was blowing a gale though the sun was shining. I could not be sure how long the log had been out of action.

  15 June. Pidge! Pidge! Pidge! He ruled my life then. Every morning I had to feed and water him as soon as I emerged, before I trimmed the sails and got the ship back on to her proper heading. I couldn't bear his forlorn beady look. Then I would notice the various messes on the cockpit seat, which I'd tread in while handling the ropes, so I had to go round and clear all of them up before getting to work on the ship. During the night, even if I darted out in an emergency, I had to shine my torch round and locate Pidge before stepping into the cockpit for fear of treading on him. That morning when I fed him, and gave his tabernacle another covering, he let me stroke him, so I reckoned that he must be pretty fed up. He looked like a sick jackdaw.

  I got another sun-shot when the sun half showed through the ragged stormy sky. I had to grab the chance, and though I only poked my nose out of the hatch, both the sextant and I got a thorough sea bath again. The seas were very rough, abou 12 feet, with a gale south-west by west.

  16 June. How that anchor light maddened me! Once it went out while hanging quietly on a hook in the cabin without being touched. The battery charging on this day got the acid level up to 1143.

  I was still getting my story through every day, and wondered if I could keep it going. Later, I had to stop charging, because the exhaust flames were blowing through the asbestos wrapping round the short exhaust pipe at the forward end of the motor. I could see the red hot gases flowing quickly, like a river. The pipe had been burnt away.

  During the day the wind dropped to a zephyr, and in a short while veered through 225 degrees from north right round through east and south to south-west. Taking the opportunity to shave, I spotted that the barometer had dropped a millibar in the ten minutes while I was shaving. I went on deck at once, and changed the big genoa to the tiny spitfire jib. The genoa was already being overpowered. After midnight the ship was thrown about so badly that I had to change to a leeward berth for fear that I should be thrown right across the cabin into the pilot berth at the far side while asleep. (Apart from the effect of this on me, all the eggs were stowed in that berth!) As soon as I had settled into the new berth,
Gipsy Moth
tacked herself, and came up aback, headed north-east. All my oilies and boots had to go on, and I jibbed her round. The anchor light went out, of course, and I could not get it out on the stay again alight until three attempts had failed. What a job in a gale! Nine hours later
Gipsy Moth
was becalmed again. What a life!

  Pidge seemed to like chopped up bread to eat better than anything else now. I had tried him with both cheese and sugar, but he turned them down. He had two red bands on his tough, scaly legs, and I passed his number to London. It turned out that he was a French aristocrat coming from a long-distance racing family and that he was racing from the Channel Islands to Preston, Lancashire, when he came down on
Gipsy Moth
. Perhaps the very old blood in his veins made his manners so peculiar! He never finished more than two-thirds of any dishful I gave him, and rejected any piece which was a fraction bigger than his maximum. I never understood this – if a pigeon can swallow a whole acorn, why can he not eat a piece of bread a fifth of the size?

  Fog came, reducing visibility to half a mile. I was amazed at how little fog I had met so far; in 1960 I was in fog for more than a third of the voyage. My course to clear the icebergs was 247° True.

  18 June. I hit a head-on gale, a very different proposition from a gale on the beam. A modern yacht can make headway against a gale, provided that the sea is not too turbulent, but in a west Atlantic gale, the ship gets thrown about so much and its way is stopped so frequently that it cannot progress into wind; every time its way is checked, the wind pushes the hull to leeward.

  At 9 o'clock in the evening the jib sheet parted at the clew with a sharp twang. I rushed up to get in the sail before it flogged itself to bits. The stem I was standing on was jumping 15 feet above the water. My hands were so numb that I had trouble tying the knots of the sail ties. During the jib trouble, the halyard fouled up the forestays, locking them together, so that I could not set another headsail. It was all my fault, because I ought to have shortened sail long before. I had been repairing the motor exhaust and had wanted to finish that job before going on deck. I tried to get moving with a trysail and a staysail. As I was setting the trysail I was swung round the mast, and my head was knocked into the reefing gear of the boom. I was surprised that I was not knocked out. When I set the staysail as well as the trysail, the ship seemed to go mad, and I hurriedly dropped the staysail again.

  The barometer had dropped nearly 20 millibars in a period of minutes, and a pinkish glow suffused the overcast. I expected hell to be let loose that night.

  When I came aft from the jib picnic, Pidge was missing. My heart dropped; I thought that he must have been washed overboard. In the end I found him back in his locker under the cockpit seat, very forlorn, wet and bedraggled. I gave him one of Stalker's oat cakes; nothing but the best for him on such an occasion. He seemed to love it.

  In the twilight before nightfall I set about reefing Miranda. I believed this to be the toughest job I have had to do at sea. First I lowered the gaff to the boom, and as they swung weathercocking astern I slung a rope over them and managed to haul them round against the wind, to lash them to a backstay. Next, keeping my footing as best I could on the bucking, twisting counter, I worked away; mostly by feel, to find the reefing eyes in the folded sail, and pass a reefing cord through them. I had to use both hands on this job, working above shoulder height, and holding on by grabbing the head-high spars when necessary. I do not know how long it all took; I would estimate two and a half hours. I stopped in the middle and went below till I had some feeling again in numb fingers. I was being bull-minded, bloody-minded if you like, but I had made up my mind to reef that sail. I had ceased to consider whether, with the gale increasing, I should be able to use it when it was reefed. In the end I finished the job, and somehow felt in better spirits for having done it.

During the next nine hours
Gipsy Moth
only moved 10 miles to the north-west. Even so, I reckoned that I was working too far north, and would soon be north-east of the icebergs, so that they lay between me and New York. I dreaded those bergs, though the chance of hitting one of them was minute compared with the risk of steamers – but icebergs take no notice of the international regulations that a yacht has right of way! I decided to change tacks and head south. I had difficulty in getting the ship to tack without a headsail in the gale, with big turbulent seas. With dawn I set to work on untangling the forestays, but it took me more than two hours before I had the spitfire set; and after that the spitfire was not enough to keep the ship's head up to the wind in the wild sea running.

  Poor Pidge. The cockpit was half full of water, and I could see his skin as if his bedraggled feathers did not exist. He looked so miserable that I took him below and tried to settle him in a large biscuit tin. Unfortunately I had nothing really suitable. He would not stay in the tin, so I took him back to his cubby-hole. I supposed that a pigeon was used to roosting out in anything, but it was bitingly cold.

  By noon I had made good only 9 miles towards New York, although I had sailed 70 miles. My hands were numb after only twenty minutes of handling ropes in the cockpit. The gale had now backed, and I was headed east of south. I decided to hold on to the southerly course, however, to get clear of the icebergs. I had made a blunder heading north-west the day before. The sea was very rough, with plenty of surf from the combers, and the breakers twisting in all directions. I could not keep warm, though I had on my long woollen underpants, a thick knitted ski-sweater and a padded nylon jacket, with the heater going full blast. Every time I came below I propped my sea boots upside down on top of the heater, and hung my scarf and storm stalker on a hook above it. The storm stalker was saturated, but I put it back on wet and clammy each time because it was invaluable for protecting my eyes against flogging ropes. The most I could hope for was that the stove heat would warm it, and dry it a little each time.

  I finished repairing the burst exhaust pipe, and started charging, but there was no oil pressure until I added another pint to the engine. I was amazed that I succeeded in transmitting to London with green seas catching the aerial. I lowered Miranda's gaff, furled her sail, and secured the whole to a backstay. I thought
Gipsy Moth
would sail herself in that gale without Miranda, but as soon as I got below and started cooking some vegetables, she tacked herself, putting the sails aback. I had to dress up again and jib the ship back on to her old heading.