10
My first golden cruise
The next two weeks were mostly occupied with final meetings about the molding of the boat. I think we had at least three final meetings. I was beginning to have doubts about some of the modifications planned for the boat. First, I abandoned the idea of replacing the whole cockpit and decided just to make the existing one deeper. Then I was talked out of that, because of doubts about the cockpit draining properly when heeled. Finally, George talked me out of raising the decks with the teak sandwich idea. He was concerned about the possibility of leaks around the hull/deck join. I gave in on the custom interior, too. I would accept the Swede’s standard interior and simply add extra stowage space.
A letter came from Mike Ellison of the Amateur Yacht Research Society, who was helping to organize the Azores race. When Harry McMahon and Ewan Southby-Tailyour had not been able to get enough free time to do the race, I had told Mike I’d consider taking a girl crew, which the committee had suggested entrants do. Now Mike had two candidates for me, and the following day I received a letter from one of them, Shirley Clifford. She sounded fine, but she was married to Richard Clifford, a Royal Marine officer who had done the last OSTAR, and I wrote her a frank letter explaining that I had not expected inquiries from a married lady, and that I didn’t want any angry Marines buzzing about. I didn’t, either.
Golden Apple departed about one o’clock on a Friday afternoon, Hugh Coveney having come down to provision and fuel us. The rest of the crew were Ian Hannay, skipper, an English airline pilot and, as it turned out, a former British Olympic helmsman in the Dragon class; Richard Edwards, an English medical student; and Killian Bush, George’s son. Killian worked at the yard and had crewed on Apple the year before. I’d had some sort of mild bug since the day before and was feeling rotten, so as soon as we set sail at Roche’s Point, at the mouth of Cork Harbor, I turned in until time for my watch. It annoyed me to feel poorly at the beginning of a trip to which I had so looked forward; it was my first sail out of sight of land.
I was awakened later by the sound of the engine starting. It was a sound I would grow to hate during the next three days. The wind had been light when we set sail, and now it had dropped to nothing. Motoring on a Ron Holland one-off racing yacht is not like motoring on anything else. Instead of the purr of an engine, muffled by soundproofing, we had a deafening chug, muffled only by a panel of sailcloth between the quarter berth and the engine. Soundproofing is too heavy to be used on a superfast Holland design. We motored on through the late afternoon and into the evening, picking up, at some point, an exhausted pigeon who perched on a spreader, hunkered his head down, and fell into an apparently dreamless sleep, stirring himself from time to time to shit on the deck below.
Dawn came slowly, and we found ourselves motoring onward in a haze that made it impossible to judge distance. The sun shone weakly through it. The effect was one of being anchored in one place with the engine running, there was so little sensation of movement in the haze. By late afternoon things had cleared enough to sight Land’s End, my first landfall in a yacht, and that was exciting. That lower-left-hand corner of England was abeam by 20.00 hours, and I turned in after my three-hour watch, looking forward to nine uninterrupted hours of sleep. Motoring was curiously tiring, and I still felt rotten. I was awakened by Hannay at 03.00 after only six hours of sleep and told that I was on watch. (Often on a yacht when racing, or when cruising in heavy weather, the skipper and/or the navigator does not take a watch, but saves himself and is awakened if there are problems.)
It was now clear and very cold (it was only April, remember) with a huge full moon lighting everything through the haze. As I took the helm, Richard gave me the course and said he hadn’t sighted the Lizard light and thought we had probably passed it in the fog, earlier. I settled down in my long underwear, jeans, two sweaters, offshore jacket, lined mittens, and my balaclava. The balaclava was the best idea I’d ever had, I thought, keeping me nice and warm inside my jacket’s hood.
Half an hour later I sighted two flashing lights slightly off the starboard bow. This was very peculiar, according to the ship’s light patterns I had studied in the yachtmaster’s course. A larger ship will have two mast lights, one high, aft, and one lower, forward. But they do not flash. The only thing that flashes is a lighthouse or a buoy, and besides, I couldn’t see the red and green port and starboard lights which a ship should be wearing. I switched on my pocket torch (always necessary on a night watch, I had discovered) and had a look at the chart. We were past the Lizard, we thought, and the lights were too high to be buoys. I turned to port to avoid the thing, which seemed to be moving.
The two lights continued to flash, and the whole thing made no sense, so I decided to call the skipper. I didn’t feel too bad about waking him up, anyway. I shouted “Ian!” half a dozen times, but got no reply. Finally, I lashed the helm, stuck my head down the companionway, and yelled, “SKIPPER!” This message did not reach Ian, but Richard stumbled, shivering, out of his sleeping bag. We regarded the flashing lights together, through the haze. Finally, Richard dug out Reed’s Nautical Almanac, consulted it briefly, and timed the lights.
“Well,” he said, finally, “one of ’em is the Lizard,” and went back to bed. I corrected my course quickly, having been steering toward a large and very solid part of Cornwall for the past five minutes. Sure enough, as we drew abeam of the thing, the lighthouse became visible. The second flashing light appeared to be caused by the light striking another, smaller tower of some sort behind the lighthouse. Later, what seemed to be Falmouth appeared and receded.
That afternoon came the highlight of this exciting voyage on the world’s fastest one-tonner. We put into Salcombe for more fuel. We had no dinghy and only one jerry can and the petrol stations were all closed, but the kindly harbormaster quickly arranged for us to buy ten gallons from the local ferry operator, and we were on our way again faster than if we had had a dinghy and more than one jerry can and if the stations had been open. Moreover, after crossing the bar at the mouth of the harbor, we found that rare thing, a breeze, and got a couple of hours of sailing in before it died and we had to go back to the engine.
I was on at midnight, then again at nine on Monday morning (the skipper was saving himself again). It was quite foggy, and we were approaching the Needles, the group of rocks at the western end of the Isle of Wight. Ian fiddled with the Radio Direction Finder, did some calculating, and said, “You’ll be hearing the Needles fog signal soon.” Soon, indeed, the mournful sound came out of the fog, and shortly afterward, the proper buoy appeared on the nose. I was impressed.
We were in the Lymington Yacht Marina by eleven, cleaned out the boat, cleared customs, rang Avis for a car, and by one I was in bed at the Angel Hotel, dead asleep. It had been the most boring and most exhausting three days I have ever spent on a boat, before or since. So much for exciting delivery trips in fast sailing boats.
The following evening I met for the first time, in person, both Ewan Southby-Tailyour and Shirley Clifford. Ewan (it is pronounced Uwan, I discovered, and Southby, as South) looked more distinguished than his years would suggest, and Shirley looked just like her photograph. Everybody was a bit restrained when we first met at my hotel, two-thirds of the group being British, but after our arrival at a Poole restaurant and the subsequent wine consumed, relaxation prevailed, and I may even have been forward with the lovely proprietress. The evening ended, I think, with an aura of goodwill, in the officer’s mess of the Poole Royal Marine base at three a.m. Shirley reassured me that it would be okay with her husband for her to sail with two strange men to a remote island in the North Atlantic. She was a victim, she said, of the “marry your crew and give her hell” syndrome and could not occupy the same floating object as her husband.