Читать книгу Once Is Enough - Miles Smeeton - Страница 6

SOME years ago I had an afternoon to spare in Vancouver, so I went down to the yacht harbour to see what sort of vessels Canadian yachtsmen use. There I found Tzu Hang moored alongside a pontoon, slightly weather-beaten, sporting baggywrinkle on her runners, and wearing the red ensign. As I inspected her Miles Smeeton came up from below and invited me on board. That was my first meeting with this remarkable man; I did not meet his more remarkable wife till some time later.

The Smeetons had bought Tzu Hang in England a year or so previously and they had sailed her out from England across the Atlantic and through the Panama Canal to Vancouver with their eleven-year-old daughter as the third member of the crew. Before buying this considerable ship they had never sailed a boat or cruised in any yacht. They made one trip in her to Holland and then set out across the Atlantic for the West Indies. Navigation was child’s play to them; seamanship they picked up as they went along. With only two adults on board they had to keep watch and watch, but did not seem to find it unduly tiring. They made their landfalls accurately, passed the Panama, reached out a thousand miles into the Pacific before they could lie a course for Vancouver, and they arrived without incident. I asked if they had had any trouble on the way. Miles told me that they had been hove to for three days in the Atlantic; the only trouble that they had in that three days was in keeping their small daughter at her lessons. They made her do three hours school work each morning, all the way.

When I began yacht cruising after the First World War it was regarded as an axiom amongst yachtsmen that a small sailing vessel, properly handled, is safe in any deep-water sea. I think that Claude Worth, the father of modern yachting, may have been partly responsible for this idea, and it may well be true for the waters in which he sailed. A small yacht, we said, will ride easily over and amongst great waves if she is hove to or allowed to drift broadside under bare poles; you have only to watch a seagull riding out a storm upon the water, we said. Perhaps we failed to notice that the seagull spreads its wings now and again to get out of trouble; perhaps we were seldom caught out in winds of force 7 or 8 and much too busy then to observe the habits of seabirds, which probably had too much sense to be there anyway.

From time to time our complacent sense of security was just a little ruffled. Erling Tambs, in Teddy, was overwhelmed in some way by the sea when running in the Atlantic; his account was not very clear and it was easy for us to assume that he had been carrying too much sail, had been pooped and broached to. The lesson to us seemed obvious; heave to in good time or lie to a sea-anchor, perhaps by the stern if the ship was suitable. Captain Voss, sailing with two friends in a seven tonner in the China Sea, was turned completely upside down so that the cabin stove broke loose and left its imprint on the deckhead above, on the cabin ceiling. But that was a long way away; all sorts of things happen in China. … Captain Slocum was lost in the Atlantic without trace after sailing single-handed round the world—but anything could have happened to him.

It has been left to Miles Smeeton in this book to tell us in clear and simple language just where the limits of safety lie. We now know with certainty that the seagull parallel was wrong. A small yacht, well found, well equipped, and beautifully handled, can be overwhelmed by the sea when running under bare poles dragging a warp, or when lying sideways to the sea hove to under bare poles. The Smeetons have proved it, twice. Twice these amazing people saved their waterlogged, dismasted ship by their sheer competence and sailed her safely in to port, greatly assisted on the first occasion by John Guzzwell. With equal competence they have now produced this lucid and well-written book to tell us all about it.

At the risk of offending the author I must stress the fact that these are most unusual people, lest more ordinary yachtsmen should be tempted to follow them down towards Cape Horn— ‘After all, they proved that one can get away with it, didn’t they?’ Nobody reading this account can fail to realise how excellently they had prepared, equipped, and provisioned their ship for the long voyage from Australia down in to the Roaring Forties. One can say, perhaps, that she was overmasted for that particular trip. But vessels cannot be rigged solely for going round the Horn; she had also to sail through the doldrums of the Equator on her way back to England. I visited the ship in Melbourne before she sailed; she was rugged and tough and functional to the last degree, as were the people in her.

Quite a number of yachtsmen have now sailed round the world with their wives, for the most part running downwind in the Trades in the lower, more generous latitudes. How many of the wives, I wonder, could take a sextant sight from the desperately unsteady cockpit of a small yacht at sea, work out the position line with the massed figures of the tables dancing before one’s eyes, and plot it on the chart? Beryl Smeeton can do this with such accuracy that it was common practice on this yacht for anyone who was unoccupied to take the sight and for anybody else to work out the position line; their competence was equal. What can one say of a woman who, catapulted from the cockpit of a somersaulting ship into the sea and recovered on board with a broken collarbone and a deep scalp cut, worked manually like a man with her broken bone and did not wash the blood from her hair and forehead for three weeks, judging that injuries left severely alone heal themselves best? What can one say of a woman working as a carpenter to repair the gaping holes in the doghouse while the dismasted ship lurches and slithers in enormous seas, who refuses to nail the boards in place but drills a hole for every wood screw and does the job as properly as a professional carpenter could have done it on dry land? These people are quite unusual, and all yachtsmen reading this book had better realise that fact. More ordinary people would undoubtedly have perished.

They had, I think, one gap in the great cloak of competence that wrapped them round; they thought too little of their engine. In a sailing yacht designed to cruise the oceans the auxiliary motor must always take a second place to the sails and gear, yet if the weight and complication of a motor is to be carried in a ship at all it would be better to have a good one, one that will work under extreme conditions. Tzu Hang had a petrol motor with the usual electric ignition; this motor, for the sake of the internal accommodation, as is common in week-end yachts, was buried deep down in the bilges under the doghouse deck in a position where it was practically impossible to start it by hand when immersion had killed the starter batteries. After each disaster when a motor would have been a help to the dismasted ship this motor was a useless nuisance to them; the ship would have been lighter and so safer with it overboard. They could have had a hand-starting diesel mounted up in a position where one could swing upon the handle with both hands, driving the propeller-shaft by belts or chains. Accommodation might have suffered slightly, but the motor would have worked as soon as they had drained the water from the crankcase and refilled with oil. In so functional a vessel as Tzu Hang I think the motor was unworthy of the rest of her.

The Smeetons and Tzu Hang are back in British waters now; I doubt if they will stay there. A few days ago I got a letter from Miles Smeeton. In part it reads:

We sailed on the 10th for the Firth of Forth, almost with mechanics and shipwrights still on board. Had two days to Hartlepool where we put in on account of a storm warning—and then off for the Forth and bang into a north-westerly gale. We were hove to for three days but Tzu Hang behaved beautifully and kept her decks dry and re-established our confidence.

So they go on their way again across the seas. In this admirably written book they have done a good job for yachting. All yachtsmen should read it and be grateful to the valiant people who have dared to chart the limits of their sport.