'Afraid it can't be helped!"
I went on, warmed by her challenge, and too absorbed to realize how odd it must sound to her shore ears, to describe the need to keep up the continuity of the weather watch.
"Coming back to port really means that we lose one week's weather out of every four-on the spot, that is. We naturally take readings and observations on the way back to port and out again, but it's not quite the same.'
'I read somewhere that during the Napoleonic wars Admiral Collingwood blockaded the French port of Brest for twenty-two months without ever once stepping on to dry land,' she said. 'You're not doing too badly for yourself — once a month!'
She turned to the two photographs and stared hard at them, as if she had come to some decision. Her voice was subdued, warm in its sincerity.
'Now it's my turn to be unfair. I said just now, it takes courage. A year-that's what I really meant.'
I might have dodged into some conventional repartee, but her sincerity forbade it.
'No one has ever described it as courage before,' I replied a little wryly, wondering what had made her choose to work for a ship's chandler. 'Screaming boredom, insufferable separation from the bright city lights, wayout type of living, hermit existence-it's been called all that, and more. But courage — no.'
She waited. The electric drill was still and I guessed the crew was busy with the crating. Since she had begun to talk, perhaps I felt a little differently. It was their job. They could do it well enough by themselves. They didn't need the skipper to nursemaid them on every minor function connected with the ship.
Her eyes dropped to the wind repeater, as if silently urging me to go on.
‘In many ways it's better to be in a ship than be stuck on one of the weather observation islands down in Antarctica,' I said. The sea is always alive, and you have something to occupy yourself with all the time. They tell me that one of the biggest problems for men on Gough is boredom off watch, during leisure time.'
'I don't understand why there has to be a ship to observe the weather as well as the island stations.'
The trouble is that Gough is 1400 miles from the Cape; Tristan da Cunha, still nearer South America, is 2000,' I replied. 'On the east, the opposite side of Africa, we have a weather station on Marion Island, but it's 1200 miles from land. To the south, in Antarctica itself, there's the South African base-2300 miles from home. It's no good reporting a storm front passing over Gough and expecting as a matter of course that it will strike the Cape. Between cup and lip, so to speak, a lot can happen in 1400 miles. A storm front can sheer off to the north or the south of the main land mass, or change its whole character and form what we call a secondary low. . anyway, most of the storm systems which give the Cape its bad name start east of Gough towards the Cape — in other words, after they have passed over the island.'
'What about weather satellites?' she asked. I had begun to find my tongue; it was strange, and a little exciting, to be talking weather outside the sterilities of synoptic readings. 'There was a radio talk about them the other day. It seems they are able to photograph the build-up of storm-cloud formations over any part of the ocean.' She flicked a quick glance at me, wondering whether her question might kill the conversation. 'All you have to do, it would appear, is to sit tight in your office safely on land and wait for a satellite photo to come in-without going to sea at all.'
I smiled a little at her seriousness. 'You're trying to talk me out of my ship! No, weather satellites are valuable, but they're not the whole answer. From them you can see vast stretches of ocean and its weather. If I had some of the photos here I'd show you how you can actually watch the great battalions of cloud taking up storm formation as a front approaches South Africa from the south-west, from Antarctica. The storm may extend for a thousand miles. But we weathermen need a great deal more than a photograph. We want upper air temperatures, wind speeds, barometric pressures-a whole lot of technical things we lump together under the term synoptic reading. If we have these readings we can also work out, far more accurately than from a satellite photo, when and how a big storm system will strike the Cape.'
'It seems an awful lot of effort to go to in order to tell people whether or not to go for a picnic or a swim.'
'Fortunately, those people are at the bottom of our priority list,' I replied. 'Ships in coastal waters and aircraft are our main concern — farmers next. For them, however, I suppose we could have got by without the Walvis Bay. It's oil rigs which make this ship important. Without them, she wouldn't be here tonight.'
'Oil rigs?'
'The weather ship's main function is to supply accurate information for the big floating rigs drilling for oil on the continental shelf off the southern Cape coast. Our forecasts are of prime importance to them-there's a great deal of money involved in missing just one day's drilling, or having expensive equipment smashed because the oil-men didn't know what sort of seas to expect. When this little Walvis Bay starts to cavort in a southwesterly swell 600 or 700 miles out on the high seas, it's a fairly good bet that three or four days later the huge drilling platforms on the coast will likewise cavort. In fact, it was oil, which really clinched the whole weather ship project. Without finance from the backers of the oil rigs, none of the other bodies concerned could have afforded a ship like this with her special expensive equipment. When you arrived, I was dismantling some of it to make sure it wouldn't get damaged on the passage to Durban. It's a great responsibility, all this special apparatus, and it's a major part of my job to see it doesn't get smashed at sea. I sail Walvis Bay on a very light rein in the Southern Ocean, with one eye all the time on my equipment.' 'And this is your whole life?'
'I'm used to it,' I answered. Then it slipped out. Why should I have told her? I didn't need a confessional, but those steady, provocative eyes were on me.
'Single-handed yacht racing is a loner's game,' I said a little self-consciously. 'I graduated in that school. Whalers first. To the Antarctic-but that was more a bit of schoolboy fun than serious sea-going.'
She asked no questions. She simply waited, in that quiet, serious way of hers.
So I added. 'I raced Touleier in the Cape en Buenos Aires race. It was a sort of curtain-raiser to the big Rio race this year.'
'And won — I know.’ she answered. 'The whole world heard about Touleier's exploits — they even learned to pronounce her name.' She ran it round her tongue, as if it gave her pleasure to do so. 'Tow-layer.' She ran her finger round the dial of the wind gauge repeater, as if vicariously sampling those great gales which had swept me across the empty ocean between the two great continents of the south. 'You call it a curtain-raiser, the papers called it sorting the men from the boys.'
I remembered a field of ice as I neared the winning post, the gale blowing the spicules of ice so that they scored the face of the compass.
'If you can stand forty-four days alone in a yacht at sea, it's easy to take twenty-one days each month in a ship like Walvis Bay, which is thirty times her size, surrounded by men, in touch with the land every three hours by radio, discussing all the time things like pressures, wave heights, wind direction and force, plotting. .'
'Mr Hoskins didn't tell me it was the skipper of Touleier I was bringing a chart to tonight.'
'He was my backroom boy for the race. That was the first time he fathered my needs for a special outfit; Walvis Bay is also special. You get used to this sort of life. It has its compensations. Who do you know gets one week's holiday every four? That's what happens to my crew. Three weeks at sea, one in port. It's also got its rather imponderable academic rewards. No one has ever yet sat in continuous watch over the weather in the Southern Ocean where I'm stationed. Already some extremely interesting new developments have come to light which we could not have known without on-the-spot observations.'