January to March, 1982

Norman Taylor

(Transcribed from tape, made in real time, hence the repetition and stilted expression but it does have an ‘immediacy’ so I have done little editing)

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You may think that sailing around Cape Horn is all seagoing excitement but I can assure you right now that it isn’t. I have just spent the last few days with the rest of the crew of “Buccaneer” cleaning, scrubbing, washing, rubbing down and then varnishing the brightwork on the entire vessel from stem to stern. But before we get on to that, I should begin at the beginning.

I arrived, after skiing in Utah, at the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia at Rushcutter’s Bay in Sydney on January 10^th 1982 expecting to sail on the yacht “Destiny” in the Xerox Sydney to Rio race. I had secured the navigator’s position on “Destiny” in Oct. after navigating her to Lord Howe Island in the 1981 race. On arrival in Sydney I was quite horrified to find that “Destiny” had pulled out of the race and was not going to sail because I had secured three months unpaid leave from my school, St Patrick’s, and it was also a life’s ambition to round ‘Cape Stiff’. The skipper of ‘Destiny’ had had a heart attack earlier and had withdrawn three weeks before but could not let me know as I was in the USA. I immediately went down to the C.Y.C. and saw as many owners, skippers and other entrants in the race as I could do in the time and then I sat back and waited. I felt, at that time, that I was not going to get back into this race simply because there were only three, four, or five boats sailing (depending on how many actually turn up for the start). One is on the way from Tasmania, one is on the way from New Zealand and one coming from Queensland for the start. I had to compete with three or four other people from the crew of “Destiny” all looking to get into the race, so I had quite a few agonizing days. To cut a long story short, the vessel “Buccaneer”, which is owned and skippered by Joel Mace made me an offer as foredeck hand which I was very happy to accept and I went down and started work an hour later.

When I arrived, the scaffolding was all in position, the vessel was high and dry, and the job which I walked into was to give the entire underwater hull a scrub down. There were four of us working there. The vessel is some 76 feet long and she is very flat to the chines and scrubbing the underside which is very flat was really quite unpleasant, with the copper anti-fouling solution and the water pouring off all over us. Every one of us looked like a redskin at the end of the day. In a couple of days we had it all scrubbed down, we then filled some spots and eventually coated her completely with anti-fouling.

We moved over to a berth at the C. Y. C. and I was assigned to re-plumb a couple of toilets into position in the bows (the heads) and then look after all the bright work. Anybody who had ever done varnishing will know that it is no difficult job but it is pretty mindless, boring, time-consuming and tiring as most of the time you are on your knees and you are rubbing away with little bits of sandpaper. Nearly everything is curved or hidden or awkward to rub back and you have to rub the varnish right down to the wood and then start layering on the coats. That job is pretty well completed. Today is Thursday the 14^th Jan 1982.

This morning (the 14^th) the vessel was taken out into Sydney Harbour under motor and the compass was swung and adjusted, and I made up a brand new table of deviations.

Just a few words about the construction of the vessel: she is approximately ten years old, made, I believe, in New Zealand, double-plied. She has had some extra frames fitted for going around Cape Horn, and is sloop-rigged. She is big for a sloop, the biggest sloop that I have ever sailed on. Usually when they get as big as Buccaneer most designers start to split the rig. She looks as if she would be very fast, being long and narrow-gutted. She has a very good underwater profile being flat for spinnaker running, with lots of very big sails, many of which are new. She is fitted with coffee grinders and a good assortment of winches. I have not actually sailed on her yet although I went out under motor on the compass swing.

I believe that there will be fifteen crew, divided into three watches of four each and other people will be doing galley, navigation, radio schedules electrician and things of that type. Arrangements of course may alter as we see how we all shake down. The average age of the crew I would guess to be around twenty-five. The experience varies from highly experienced—one of the guys has been in three around-the-world Whitbread races. Some have been on board the vessel racing for a couple of years and have sailed in many races. There are others with less experience than myself. Between varnishing, I have been doing a few necessary jobs like visiting the duty-free store, arranging for my Brazilian visa, trying to find an inexpensive way of getting back to Australia on completion of the race. Incidentally, the skipper is forecasting that we will go from Sydney to Rio in 43 days.

That seems to me to be a bit optimistic. Maybe I will eat my words when we get to the other end.

I think I am reasonably well supplied with cold-weather equipment. I have two suits of wet-weather gear, five sets of thermal underwear, two of which are very thick, and the others are under-ski suits. I have an actual skiing outfit with me, a spare parka, plus large sweaters and six changes of clothing ranging from jeans and shirts to overalls. I also have six beanies, a balaclava, ski goggles, some very large and thick steering gloves- meatworker’s chill room gloves (given to me by an abattoir worker I know), because I am expecting to spend some time at the helm as my main position at the moment is foredeck man, as well as deputy navigator and deputy radio operator. All my cold weather equipment is not very stylish.

Most people have Henry Lloyd equipment from top to toe. I have ice-room gloves, American long johns from skiing and a large selection of warm but throw-away clothes bought from op-shops. My wet weather gear is fisherman’s orange or white stuff bought at the trawler store in Townsville and I have rubber wellies, oversize enough to take two pairs of thick socks, not the lovely blue or yellow sea boots of the others. But from my experience in the Great Australian Bight I think that my gear will be OK.

 

All this week has been an absolute panic of fitting stores on board. We have loaded the entire ship up with what looks to me to be enough food for one hundred days. We estimate the passage as being about 43 days and we therefore ought to have plenty of food.

We carry two freezers and one refrigerator. These are run on a small auxiliary generator unit, a diesel generator which also generates 240 volts for a microwave oven, the first one I have seen, apparently you can cook things in plastic . Every crewman has to bring two 3 litre ice cream containers full of a cooked frozen meat dish and they are to be microwaved hot and supplemented with canned and dried veg. as the main meal of the day. I brought stewed chops and spaghetti mincemeat sauce cooked at Sandie’s (Sandra Tracey) in Paddington.

With Sandie and a prayer before the start!

I had my first sail yesterday when Hoods delivered some new sails, we hanked them on in Sydney Harbour and took them out to find where the blocks should go and whether we would accept and buy them. So we did little jobs and awaited the start.

The start morning, the 24th January 1982, was very exciting. Only four yachts started. We came out with a nice 15-knot northeaster. We had a tack start with helicopters flying around over the boat—almost like a Sydney-to-Hobart. We didn’t make a very good start because we fouled up one of the tacks at the last moment. We got the jib backed and later, when we raised a spinnaker, because there was bit of wind pressure it took us a few seconds to get it properly set. We were in fact third boat of four out of port over the line. However, “Buccaneer” is a very fast boat and we moved along very nicely.

We came out with No. 1 and a staysail and full main and the vessel is swinging along very nicely at about 11 knots. We are almost out of sight of Sydney. I did the initial navigating. We have taken our last land fix and the next land we will see will either be Chatham Islands or possibly Cape Horn or the Falkland Islands, or possibly none of these and straight into Rio. The vessel is well snugged down; all loose items securely stowed. All my kit is well stowed in my bunk which is in the worst position, as I had last choice being a latecomer to the crew. It is all the way aft with no ventilation and everyone’s farts drift aft! Also it is next to the diesel alternator which is run daily to keep the batteries charged, run the freezer compressor and the microwave. The vessel is sailing along, heeled at 15 degrees, moving smoothly through the water.

It is now 1.45 pm Sydney time on 24 January and we have been under way for one and three-quarter hours. I am just having a little rest. I did quite a lot of work on the coffee-grinders, work that I am unaccustomed to, and I felt quite tired until I got a spell. I am now off-watch until 4 o’clock when the real watch system starts.

Well, I have just come off watch, 1.15 a.m. on 25 January, and I am tired. The noise you can hear is the diesel generator running. I am so tired and it is so warm here that I think I will just go to sleep and see you later.

It is now 4.40 p.m. on the afternoon of the 25^th. Our first day’s run, which included tacking out of Sydney Harbour, is over, and we did some 239 miles. This looks like very good progress for us, very encouraging on our first day. It means we have averaged just over 10 knots because we had to tack out of the Harbour, and we didn’t set the log until we cleared the Heads. This has not been accomplished without a few problems.

The main one was that we met a lightish patch of wind, about 15 knots, in the early hours of the morning. We set our spinnaker and no sooner had we set it and started romping along at about 14 knots than the wind started to increase. The decision was made to take the spinnaker off. This requires the services of quite a few people. It was a very large, brand new spinnaker. We got all the people up on deck and were just about to drop it when we did a mammoth broach. Three of the crew including me were in water up to our waists, the spinnaker was caught in the broach, filled with water, and ripped in half. We are advised by the skipper who is mightily displeased that we are going to sew the spinnaker together by hand in our off-watch time, which is going to be a mammoth task because there is no sewing machine on board. It is not a job that a bit of tape can fix, and it is a very large spinnaker to be sewn by hand.

I have come off watch. I haven’t been sleeping well in my first twenty-four hours at sea, probably because I am just not yet used to the motion and it is very hot below. There has been a fair bit of wind around and I think the average has been twenty-five and we have had it up to thirty-five knots, never below fifteen. We are scooting along on our course. One shouldn’t complain. I spent a lot of the afternoon sewing a patch on the new mainsail which has already lost a batten pocket at a very vital position and I had to get in the reefed sail with the mainsail in operation and moving all the time to sew a new pocket made out of tape into position. The weather is very enjoyable. It is nice and sun-shiny, lots of nice big waves, white caps around, no sign of any dolphins.

I have just come off watch and now I am on what is called “mother watch.” A “mother watch” is a watch that has no specific duties but turns out every time there is an emergency to assist the duty watch. Actually I shouldn’t say it has no specific duties: it has the duty to cook for the entire ship and I imagine that I am going to end up performing quite a lot of this task as I am reasonably competent at cooking and the others on my watch not so. We have the ship sealed up pretty well, because we have taken a few waves here and there. Temperatures down below, especially where I sleep on the bunk which is farthest aft, are very high. I find the new sleeping bag that I have got is too hot, and have stretched it out and am sleeping on top of it. I sleep as near naked as it is reasonably possible keeping in mind that I have to jump out any time I am called and be ready in very short order. One of the most unsatisfying things at the moment is the amount of liquid that one is allowed to drink. Being out there on watch and being in the sun, when it is about, makes you very very thirsty and one realizes just how much liquid one normally unconsciously drinks when one is limited to a litre and a half of water. I, and all the crew, are very much noticing that we can’t just go to a tap or pickup a soft drink or a tinny. In the 24 hours that I have been on I have mastered quite a lot of the rope and other work necessary on a maxi yacht, I am learning the ropes as they say. It is quite a bit different from the small yachts I am used to sailing.

Here it is, 3 a.m. on the 26^th, our second night at sea. I am still on mother watch. The mother watch theoretically has nothing to do other than to prepare and serve food, wash up and look after the galley. In fact the mother watch is called every time there is an emergency before the off-duty watch who are asleep. What has happened is that I went on to the mother watch at 4 o’clock today, I cooked until 8.30, I then snatched a bit of sleep from 8.30 until 11 and I have just been on deck continuously from 11 until now (3 a.m.). This was necessary because we have had headsail wraps and a bit of a blow up there. We have had the highest of winds so far coming from the southwest at about 40 knots. These southwesterly winds should be a feature as we get down towards the forties although we are still quite a long way away. We must be approximately 340 miles out of Sydney and we are heading for the southern part of Stewart Island (N.Z.)

I have just taken my cod-liver oil pill which is quite a feat lying down and taking them without water, to manage to swallow them. As far as clothes go I have done very well. I have been wearing my Buccaneer T-shirt and shorts underneath wet-weather gear. It is still sort of sticky and a bit messy, but it is not soaking wet and that is all that I have gone through so far in two days, so I am feeling quite happy about that.

It has been surprisingly rough, as the weather has been breezy. I don’t think we have had wind below 15 knots the whole way and also it has been up to 45 in the gusts and some people were getting seasick today. I wasn’t amongst them. What really did it to them was being in the galley and cooking over a meths stove. The combination of meths and food seems to really get to even the strongest stomach. With the south-westerly there has certainly been quite a change in temperature downwards.

For the first time now I am going to put some clothing on to try and have a sleep. I don’t know if I have mentioned this but we have very limited water allowance—1.5 litres per man and that, when you are working very hard up on deck with the coffee-grinders, and hauling on ropes and running backwards and forwards, hanging on for grim death on a sloping wet deck, is a very small amount of water indeed. Every man around the place feels it and wishes that there was more to drink of whatever variety. We are hoping for a bit of rain sooner or later and then we will get some water that we can guzzle and drink well in excess of the ration.

It is now 4.40 p.m. and I am into my bunk. We have been sewing the sails for quite a lot of today. We have also been the mother watch and we have had to produce food for the entire ship for three times today. I am now off-duty until 8 p.m. this evening and I am on regular watches now for two days. We started today the mammoth sewing task of repairing the spinnaker. I have just been given another regular job, to read sea temperatures, positions, cloud cover, wind speed—lots of meteorological information which we transmit from the ship and is used by the Met Office in preparing forecasts for this area. Our ship input data is important because there is not an awful lot of other shipping. We transmit to amateurs in NZ who relay it. Right at this moment, or a little while ago at any rate, we came actually into the Roaring Forties and we are I believe about 500 miles from the south of Stewart Island. We are still making good speed; there is a nice swell. It is a lovely bright sailing day. We have about 30 knots of wind, but as we are going with it we are only experiencing about 20.

Well, here we are, the third day out, 27^th January, and we are about 200 miles off Milford Sound N.Z. We are west of Milford Sound and we are holding well offshore. Right now it is 1.45; I have been off-watch since 12 o’clock; I am back on at 4. We had our moments of high drama first thing this morning. It was all hands on deck—the mainsail had torn. Because we are trying to stay well off shore, we are pinched up right into the wind. The leach of the mainsail has got a dreadful flap, and this flutter in winds that are of average strength of about 30 knots with gusts to 45 really gives the sail a bad shake. Anyway the mainsail went this morning. All hands went up and we took it off with a great deal of drama. Having got that off we had an old mainsail, but when we got that up it flogged so much before we could harden-on that it broke another batten, so we had to take it down and put a new batten in.

 

When I had finished putting the mainsail back on, up and down twice, I had the task of swilling out the bilges. This has become a bit of a joke among the people detailed to do it. It takes a long, long time. It is typical bilge water, greasy, a bit of diesel, a bit of water and all the rest of it.

It really is a wild, beautiful day out there. The swell is moderate and we are getting into the forties. We have got a perfect south-westerly for going very fast. We are therefore trying to steer about 135 degrees and we mustn’t get too near New Zealand in case anything happens to our stick and so we are pinched rather close to the wind at the moment. The rollers are quite majestic; the wind is 30 knots gusting 35. It is a nice day, clear, and the ocean of course is a brilliant blue. I have spent several hours of this with my head down in the bilges with a sponge soaking up bilge water and wringing it out into a bucket, getting a bucketful in this kind of seaway, and then handing it up topside.

We have been working sail. It has been very wet and a lot of us have got quite a lot of wet clothing around at the moment. I have just opened up my first set of polar underwear, but not because it is particularly cold. It is cool: you can certainly see the change. The temperature has dropped from 17 down to 11 and we are expecting it to go down to 5—but somewhere between 5 and 1—as we get further and further south. The reason I have gone to my polar stuff is that it is supposed to dry very very quickly and I am hoping that it is going to dry out between watches. Because, in spite of good wet weather gear and towels and every precaution you can take, the weather comes at you with such fury that somehow it seems to penetrate.

I had a lunch of tinned salmon, cheese, cucumbers, tomatoes, bread and butter and instant soup and a glass of Tang (orange powder). We are still very short of water and that is the only liquid we are allowed with a meal, one cup of soup and one glass of Tang.

It is now 7.30pm on 27 January and this is a Wednesday. We have been at sea now for three days and a bit and during that time we have travelled quite a long way. We are not too far from New Zealand after a very fast crossing of the Tasman, and are heading south to clear Stewart Island. I have spent the day reasonably pleasantly apart from the hassles this morning changing the mainsail and a couple of other smaller incidents. I have done a great deal of stitching repairs to the sail. The sea that has been running has been quite magnificent. The wind is 30-35 knots south south west. There is a far bigger sea—beautiful, majestic breaking sea. Occasionally we slide down, accelerating to about 16 knots; then we drop back to our ordinary 10 knots. We don’t have a lot of sail area up: we have a triple-reefed second main. The best main, the one that was ripped, is the one that I am repairing at the moment. We are cutter-rigged—we have got a stormsail on the inner forestay and No. 3 high-cut yankee on the mainstay. We had quite a decent meal of fried pork chop and tinned potatoes and tinned carrots and a nice fresh apple. The only thing I am really lacking is a good drink of water or any damn thing at all. We are very short of liquid still. We are finding the 1.5 litre ration very difficult to get used to.

I have just come in from a 4 to 8 a.m. watch and last night it was very cold. I am still only wearing about half of the quantity of clothing that I brought with me, so I think if it doesn’t get much colder than this I should be all right. We are down around 46 degrees and we are probably going down to about 51—53 degrees, so we haven’t that much further to go. We had a fairly typical night—moderate to rough seas, 25—35 knots of wind, and we are fairly close-hauled, just to make sure that we are clear of New Zealand’s Stewart Island as we go round. This south-south-westerly, which would be quite a good wind for us once we start to run towards the Horn, means that we have to be almost close-hauled to clear Stewart Island and it makes for a wet and bouncy sort of sail. We are hurtling along at about 12 knots. There is a lot of spray around. It was very early dawn—4.30 by my time here, and we got about 50 per cent cloud cover at this time.

Today is Thursday 28^th January, 10 p.m. I have just come off a continuous 12.5 hours of duty. This has been necessitated because I have been on this caretaker watch that is supposed to have all the free time and deal only with emergencies. The only problem is that we have just had emergency after emergency. They haven’t been bad emergencies—a lot of sail changes brought about because the wind has been slowly dying and the sea has been moderating. This has necessitated very frequent sail changes, particularly due to shifts in direction of the wind. The general trend is for the sea to become flatter and flatter although there is still about a 10 foot swell. Although there are no waves the wind strength is 10 knots and the temperature is such that with the gear that I had on for the cold the other night I have been sweating quite hard today. I haven’t had a chance o take anything off. It was so warm this afternoon that a couple of the off-duty guys stripped off and had a very brave sea water bath on deck. There has been quite a bit of gear failure, most of it associated with spinnaker flying which we haven’t so far done an awful lot of. As the wind moderated we had an opportunity to get spinnakers up. Each time we put them up, for some reason or another they came down.

First of all, a block just came to pieces right at the masthead which meant that we had to send a man up the mast and the man who went up was the youngest guy on the ship, an apprentice electrician aged about twenty. He was up there for about an hour and a half, which is quite a feat I think. I have climbed a few masts myself. I don’t mind being up in the harbour but in a hard seaway it is quite a different thing. I get quite scared up there when rolling around (I did it in the Bight once on a Trimaran). You get bruised because you can’t avoid colliding with the mast.

Anyway we got that one sorted out—we had to get the spinnaker down and rolled and bagged and our spinnakers are so large on a maxi like Buccaneer that it takes six men a long time to sort them out, bag them, pack them. A lot of huffing and puffing goes on. Having done that, then the bolt on the parrot’s beak operating mechanism on the spinnaker pole failed two or three times and let a well-set spinnaker go, and from then on we had a lot of trouble. We went back to the old-fashioned goose-wing. However, at this moment we have a spinnaker beautifully set. The wind is only ten knots. It is fairly calm and we are flying along at about ten knots ourselves.

We are reportedly, at this time, the leader in the fleet which has actually been cut down to three because we understand that Jacqui has fractured the quadrant on his rudder stock or some problem serious enough to cause him to pull out of the race and return to Sydney.

We are slowly changing course to pass below Stewart Island. I haven’t had a good look at our course. I haven’t done any navigating today, so I am not quite sure what our position is. We have just had another enormous meal after all our work. It was prepared by the other guys on mother watch, including myself. We had my stewed lamb chops instant mashed potato (lots) and tinned carrots, tomatoes and onions, heaps of bread and butter and jam and tinned plums followed by a nice cup of tea. I have now been relieved and if nothing at all happens I shall sleep beautifully from 10pm until 6 tomorrow morning. But it is extremely doubtful with the spinnaker up that I will get a free night, and as the wind increases I’ll be called to either put on a lighter spinnaker or to get rid of the spinnaker and set a stronger headsail. This is Norman Taylor signing off from near Stewart Island for tonight.

Just then I suggested that it wouldn’t be too long before I was up on deck and that is what happened. About thirty-five minutes ago we all felt the vessel broach on the port side and then on the starboard side a bigger broach and on the port side an even bigger broach and the first time the cry was “All hands, all hands.” Out we rushed and we got a spinnaker in and what we have now set is a poled-out reacher. The wind is dead astern, shifting about 30 degrees. This vessel is really tender when she has got a spinnaker on. What we have is a No. 1 genoa with the pole brought just about square and we have got the sail stretched really tight and we are now doing about 14 knots in front of a twenty-knot wind and the vessel is really quite stable. I am back in bed but I am keeping my gear on because I am on call all night.

It is 4.15 and I believe it is Friday the 29^th. We passed Stewart Island fairly early this morning, and are now about one hundred miles into the Great Southern Ocean. The sea temperature is around 10 degrees centigrade which isn’t all that cold. It is a gray day. There is a big swell, with 20-25 knots of wind more or less astern of us. It is just a bit too strong a wind for us to fly a spinnaker and we are flying a poled out No. 2. With a heavy and full mainsail we are zipping along very nicely at 11-12 knots. It is perfect weather for us.

The winds are light for this part of the world, and the seas which would normally be thought of as quite large in Townsville are in fact quite small for around here, and we are hoping that we get a few days like this. We are still, according to the position report, the lead boat, but the story goes around anyway that you can’t rely on the positions that are fed to us because of “skipper’s tactics”. We may not be the lead boat and we are just being lulled into thinking that we are.

All day today I have been on mother watch, which means I have been spare man. Four of us have been on spare. There was an emergency this morning when the brake on the prop-shaft snapped. The prop-shaft started running at a very high rate of knots. We were going very quickly with a poled-out No. 2, so it took time to sort out and slow the yacht down. Then we got the new brake fitted to the prop-shaft. Since that time I have just sewed, and sewed and sewed!

It is now afternoon on Sunday 31^st. We have been at sea for over a week. I haven’t been speaking to this talking diary for some time because we have been very much under pressure. We did 1259 miles in the first five days, which was quite a good achievement—well over two hundred miles every day. We have certainly had this old boat flying. We haven’t had enormous panics in the last day up until the one I am going to relate in a few minutes.

We have been busy with fluky winds that have been down as low as fifteen knots and as high as forty. These winds have been going up and down, up and down, which necessitated constant sail changing. Sail changing on a small vessel is a relatively easy task, as is bagging them and getting them out and putting them on again. On this vessel, the sails are massive—it takes three men to lift the sail out of the sail locker and three men going across a pitching deck to drag it over to the forestay or inner stay or wherever it is going; this particularly true of the reachers. The reachers are extremely big and what we do is change down from No. 1 Light, No. 1 heavy, No. 2 light, No. 2 heavy, and we go through the reachers that way. So that is six sails on and off, and as the wind increases we go for the yankees and we have a No. 1, a No. 2 and a No. 3 yankee. So you can see that every time there is a wind change of any significance we have an awful lot of work to do, and that is what has kept me so busy. (Take any crew position my son, but never the foredeck).

It is 1 o’clock on Monday- really Sunday- at the moment. We crossed the dateline a few hours ago. We are now in west longitude. We are keeping our average up.

We crossed the international dateline yesterday evening and so we are now on our second Sunday, 31 January. We are still keeping up our average of over 200 miles a day. The weather at the moment: the air temperature is about 1 degree C—there is the usual twenty-knot wind. There is a bit more in the way of waves since last night.

At the moment it is 10.25 am. I am on mother watch today—have finished cooking and have done the tidying and I have just thrown away the first of my clothing, which is pretty good. I bought several sets of shirts, pullovers and pants in op. shops to throw away as they got soaked and stink a little. They stink because, try as one might, you can’t stop peeing yourself a bit as you try to take a leak through all that clothing. Nine days I made the first set last, so I am slightly ahead of myself in terms of my little packs.

Last night we suffered a jibe and this caused the unstitching of about two feet of the main. This could not be allowed to persist. It is simpler to repair the main in situ than it is to take it off and put an alternative main on. The mother watch brought the sail down past the unstitching and lashed it as far as it could be done and then we stitched it by sitting on the boom as well as we could considering the motion. By the time we finished it was getting pretty close to dawn. I couldn’t sleep very well with people banging around topside, so I got up and made some food for the duty watch. Conditions were pretty rough where our friends were precariously balanced stitching the sail, too rough to send up tea or coffee. The ship’s toilets were hard to stay on and to pump clear and the rule is: if you blocked it, you cleaned it, so a “head” was made over the stern in full view of the cockpit. At first few used it, but gradually more and more people did; not caring that there were always people around. Finally I went to the toilet on the stern with a bare bottom’ It was coolish but not too bad and I quite enjoyed myself sitting there watching the world go by, although I did jump as an unusually large wave came over the stern. I even had my photo taken.

TAPE TWO

We crossed the dateline yesterday on 31 January (Sunday) (at 180 degrees of course) and because of this we got another Sunday which we had today. We got another small rip in the mainsail last night in a jibe which hit us in the middle of the night; then it was all hands on deck to get the sail down and get it repaired. Now she is bowling along at a steady rate of knots. It is 5.20 local time in the afternoon on our second Sunday 31^st January. We are moving at 10 knots and we have got about a 30 knot wind more or less behind us. We have got a sort of lumpy cross sea and are roll, roll, roll, just about rolling our scuppers under. I have just got into bed now having been up since six this morning doing my turn on cooking and then I had a very big clerical job writing up all the emergency procedures should we have trouble approaching Cape Horn.

I have been researching all the South American stations, all the ports and entry information making sure that we have got charts to get into these places for 400 miles north on the western side and on the eastern side of the tip of South America. I have also been looking forward a bit more optimistically to the glorious day when we round the Horn; we are all looking forward to it in our dirty, tired, very much over-worked state, and I emphasise “over-worked” really, not that I was expecting this trip to be really cushy, but, due to the sail tearing that we have had, we have had to work very, very hard in quite trying, cramped , cold, wet circumstances with a lot of broken sleep and none of us, apart from the skipper, getting more than six hours in the twenty-four and usually it is a fair bit less and with another quite hard day we are feeling a little bit jaded I think. There have been mutinous mutterings.(One should read the Cornforth articles in The Australian, Cornforth who was a professional reporter and crewman on Josko’s “Anaconda”, tells us horror stories about near mutinies, so I guess our ‘mutterings’ were not so bad).

The above is one of Cornforth’s articles and others will appear at appropriate points.

I have also been looking at our “finish” procedure—looking at the regulations, getting out and making a note of the chart number for entry into Rio, what we must do within a certain amount of time, what customs formalities are, the very lengthy entry procedures, infringement of which could in fact cost us the race on protest by another skipper.. We have to file a declaration form which says we haven’t used the engine, we haven’t done anything illegal and if that isn’t filed within 90 hours of arrival—if somebody forgets it in the midst of the celebration then, as far as they are concerned we haven’t arrived and our arrival time will then start from the time when we file the form which in effect (if the other yachts get in anywhere near us) would definitely lose us the race. There is another little problem I discovered I reading the fine print and that is the requirements for getting rid of certain types of food we have on board before we enter Brazil. Otherwise we are going to find ourselves stuck in the middle of some harbour somewhere with a yellow flag with nobody allowed to come near us, no shore leave, because we have got food on board and they won’t let us dispose of it when we get into Rio Harbour so we have to carefully examine all this food and make sure that if we have any we dump it well off-shore. It is quite a tragic thought that we will be almost certainly dumping quite large quantities of food that people in those poor districts of Rio which I understand are called favellas would be very happy to receive.

It is now 10.30 on the evening of Sunday (Monday on the western side of the date line) and I have just come in from my four-hour shift, It is quite a cold night. The remarkable thing about it is the lack of wind and the peace and quiet—the actual wind is about 15 knots—we are showing eight knots right up our tail, and we are doing about six knots under a very large spinnaker and full main. The sea is as flat as it is on a Saturday afternoon off Townsville and it is really quite a pleasant, calm little sail. We received a forecast about 15 minutes ago. The forecast looks as if we are going to get an increase in wind, but nothing startling—just up to 35 knots. On the position reports this evening we appear to be a little farther ahead than we were earlier and as long as all these positions are correctly reported we seem to be handily in the lead at this time. Of course there is still a long way to go. In two and a half hours I have to be up on deck, so goodnight.

I have just climbed into bed, this time with two pairs of underwear on, and my beanie and it is really nice to snuggle down in the bag on this coolish night. Nothing very much happened. It started to get light about half past two and was really quite light by 2.45am. We are running very nicely, once again an amazingly smooth sea as we are now down around latitude 52 degrees. We seem also to be in the lead on the other two yachts on both handicap and line honours at this time, although you never can tell because that is based on everybody reporting their position properly.

It is 3.20 on 1^st February. It has been raining heavily all day and out on deck this morning I managed to soak up quite a bit of water. It is afternoon and I have just woken up from a sleep (the effects of a large lunch). I went to bed fairly wet and I see that I am now pretty dry. We rigged up the bucket on the main, at the gooseneck, and collected at least eighty litres of water and several people had sponge baths and so on. I wasn’t willing to go out on deck and bathe as it was pretty cold. I did wash my hair for the first time in eight or nine days and I had a really nice lengthy wash of my face and hands in clean fresh water. We originally put up a fancy sort of boom tent water gathering device but it just wouldn’t gather water very well—it flapped around a lot in the little bit of breeze that there was so we found we could gather virtually as much by slinging a bucket and using the topping lift to lift the boom and then the water ran off the sails, down the boom and dripped into our bucket at the rate of a bucket every ten minutes—two gallons in ten minutes. We were warmly dressed throughout today and it has been quite cold. The seas have been incredibly flat. We have had about 6 or 7 knots of breeze and at one time this morning we flew a spinnaker and a 2,500 square foot blooper.

I am recording this from my bunk and you may be able to hear in the background quite a lot of noise. Pretty obviously there is some sail-changing going on deck at this time. As the off-duty watch we are the last people to be called. The on-duty watch and the mother watch handle sail changes if they can. It is only when something quite horrendous is happening that they call the off-duty watch. We have been called plenty of times.

There are still all kinds of sails to continue sewing and everybody on board who has any free time at all and any time when the work is light, is required to sew sails and we have not by any means caught up with the damage that we have sustained so far. We are not actually gaining on the pile of sails that is awaiting our attention, though the whole twelve of us are sewing by hand pretty regularly. For instance, we have got a spinnaker that has got about 196 feet of sewing to be done and we have done about 50 feet so far. So the sails that get done are the types that we think we will need first. The less likely to be used ones are done last. This has been quite upset by the remarkably light winds we have had just lately. We have really wished that we had our 2.3 spinnaker and we have been thinking that we would not be using that until we turned the corner round Cape Horn and were heading north. We are going quite fast still and on the last call we were still the leader on both line and handicap.

I have developed some sort of rash on either side of my nose. I have been treating it with a little bit of Savlon and I think it is starting to subside. I don’t know if it is a change of diet or having pretty constant salt water running down my face. The noise and commotion that was going on on deck seems to have ceased now so apparently whatever they wanted to do is all finished and the ship is settling down again. The boat is making very little motion. I am in bed at the moment and Joel has been ill with some sort of cold for 24 hours and the navigation is going to fall totally on me very shortly.

I have been in the sail bin packing the enormous spinnaker. I have just crawled into my bunk to have 1 and a half hour’s sleep before I am due back on deck again. I have had my dinner. What you need to sail these oceans is not so much endurance to cold weather as you just need to be able to work hard without sleep over a long time. There are three people down with colds; there is one guy who had a fainting spell on deck.

I am the third oldest on board. The skipper is 65; there is a radio operator, Ray Smith who is about 55, and then there is me. I am by far the oldest of the guys that are regularly working sail on the boat and believe me tonight I am feeling my age. (Actually the radio operator is two years my junior he is not 55 but 47 and I am 49.)

It is now February 3^rd. It is about 10 pm and our position is 167 West by 54 South. Temperature is about 8 degrees and I am standing in the galley at the moment. I have just completed my evening part of cooking; have been cooking since 5.30. We have had to feed the watch. The noise you can hear in the background is the noise I hear at least twice a day as I have this beautiful choice bunk whereby I sleep next to the Onan Diesel Generator. I have just come back from fighting with a very large and flogging kite. Seven of us up on the foredeck—most of us not even strapped on, we have just wrestled this very large kite down. One of the main things about a maxi boat like this is not so much that the sailing is different—of course it isn’t—but the gear is so big. For instance we took in our no. 1 heavy when we had a bit of light weather a few days ago, and in order to get it on deck, as it weighs 350 lbs., we winch it up with a halyard and then five of us drag it over all the obstacles that clutter a foredeck into the forepeak. One of the nice things about Buccaneer is that in the forepeak flat there is a well for you to stand. This gives you quite a feeling of safety when you are plunging around in the sea in the dark. The spinnaker braces are so big that they are quite a thick metal core thinly covered with a bit of rope. They are very stiff and difficult to handle and very heavy when you pull back 80 feet of it.

The crew on board is Joel Mace who is the skipper-owner. We have got Ted Noble, Tony White, and Ken Heynatz who are watch captains. They are in charge of the three watches. Incidentally, Tony, who is my watch captain, has been down sick for about thirty hours with a really bad cold and just before that the skipper had it, and two or three people are looking as if they are really full of a combination of laryngitis, stuffed heads, flu or tonsillitis. The radio operator is Ray Smith; he does nothing much else as he is considered too old!!. The electrician is a twenty-one-year-old apprentice electrician called Rob Wiles but he is also on the foredeck. We have a fellow from the Brazilian navy whose name none of us can pronounce, Osvaldo Bighi. We have also got Keiran Smythe, a school teacher from New South Wales, and ??? from Curtin who lives next door to a friend of mine. We have Simon Drew, and an American who got a black eye the night before we left in a brawl in King’s Cross, an American called Tim. The guy who mainly looks after the engines is called Mark also a foredeckie on his watch. On my watch is a fellow from Western Australia, a vegetarian, a very nice fellow called Morris. I am feeling so sleepy now I am going to sleep.

Today is 3^rd February, 3 o’clock in the afternoon. The seas are remarkably light and we have a head wind about 40 degrees off the bow. As of noon today we have travelled about 2,400 miles from Sydney. We took advantage of the light weather today and Rob Wiles went up the mast and tried to drop a mouse (a weighted string) down to feed a new line, but we were unable to find the mouse at the base, so sail repair is continuing and the flanker is about three-fifths complete. I am off mother watch as of 4 o’clock.

Apart from a little flurry in the early hours of this morning, we got a spinnaker in after the wind change came ahead, we have had a relatively quiet twenty-four hours with, as far as we know, no sail damage, no instances worth noting. The sea temperature is eight degrees, the air temperature is nine degrees.

We have been fairly slow this past couple of days but we are still averaging over 200 miles a day and we are hoping for a bit of good weather, slightly higher winds to keep this average up. At the moment it looks as if we will be in Rio for the first week of March.

Well it is 10 p.m. on February 4 and I have just come off my watch, my 7-10 watch, and we had to change a couple of sails. The wind which has been very light has piped up a bit now and we are getting 20 knots across the deck. I think I mentioned earlier on that we had the first head winds in the Southern Ocean that we have had for the whole trip. These have now swung more northerly and we have got just about a beam reach. We have all plain sail up—a large no. 1 and full main and we are making 10-12 knots in this 20-knot wind. The 20 knot wind has not been around long enough for any sea to build up, so it is ideal sailing conditions—a fairly flat sea, good wind, we are fairly steaming along. At this time we have done approximately 2,600 miles since we left Sydney. It is very cold up on deck tonight and I am wearing three sets of long-johns with the outer set the polar set. This is just about comfortable when you are standing still but it is extremely difficult to work sail dressed in this amount of gear, and now that I have just put my wet weather gear on I can feel that everything I have got on is very damp from perspiration. So I am hoping to get into my bunk now, zip up, and hope my body heat dries it all out ready to go on watch again at 1 a.m.

Well we are today half way from Sydney to Cape Horn, which means we have accomplished round about 3,000 miles since we left Sydney. It is now 5^th February, so we have done the 3,000 miles I think it is in 12 days. This has not been accomplished without moments of high drama. We had one this morning.

We had for quite a few hours been moving along under spinnaker and full main. The winds were freshening. We hung on and hung on—we were sitting around 15 knots. Then, when the wind was about 20 knots from astern and we were doing 12-15, which makes it 35 knots altogether, we then did a little bit of a broach. We would have been fine but the lazy brace was caught around the cleat on the foredeck, and being very stiff wire, it just caught in somewhere and jammed and over she went, and we just about put her flat down. Anyway, we had to race along the foredeck. My hands are very stiff and both my wrists are sore from pulling frantically along with half a dozen guys up to our waists in water trying to get this spinnaker in—and we did—with just two tiny holes which will be pretty easy to fix.

I am off watch at the moment. It is 2.40 in the afternoon and I am on again at 4. I have just been having a little sleep, relaxing a bit, trying to get dry. It has been really quite cold, it was very cold last night. The actual air temperature is 5 degrees Celsius which isn’t all that cold, but it sure as hell feels cold. I can hear a lot of furious activity going on on deck. I can hear people running around, ropes flapping, winches being operated, obviously some big change is on. As the watch that has just come off duty we are the last to be called and we are only called in an absolute dire emergency which has happened twice to us. The watch normally called is the mother watch which means we can put out a total of ten people other than the just-relieved watch to attend to an emergency. Most emergencies can be catered for by those ten. We are not sure of our position vis-à-vis other yachts at this time, mainly because the chief competitor, Anaconda, has not reported for a day or so, and also the skipper of Anaconda reportedly has a habit of trying to slip past people without alerting them that he is coming down on them. He couldn’t have done very well until just recently if his position reporting is honest. We did have a light spell which has ended and we have our usual 30-35 knots back. There is nothing really spectacular so far that I haven’t seen before except that it is quite cold and it goes on day after day after day. It is a lot colder than the Bight but I am a lot better dressed and have a lot better bunking conditions to meet it.

As you can hear in the background the Onan Generator is running again. This is the noise that I have as my little lullaby to send me off to sleep and I have just come off a very cold watch—quite an exciting watch. We have 25-30 knots of wind and a small spinnaker up and we have been surfing along anywhere between 14 and 17 knots. I think I have already mentioned that we have covered half the miles from Sydney to the Horn in eleven days so it looks as if we will be at the Horn in 22-23-24days. We are at 55 degrees 40 south and 155 degrees W so we are almost on the latitude of Cape Horn which is about 56 degrees. It has been very cold today. It was remarkable for seeing the Southern Ocean, a great, seething, heaving mass. There was some sunshine around but all around the horizon you could see squally fronts: black fast-moving clouds that came in with a real zip. We got one of them, it was about 50 knots and we really had to do some fast work with that spinnaker to keep ourselves all in one piece. We were pressed over a couple of times but we fought our way back up on each occasion.

All of the bread the long-life stuff that we had has now gone completely mouldy and has gone overboard. We have started to eat ship’s biscuits. Ship’s biscuits are a bit like Sao crackers but much thicker, made completely without salt and they are very hard but quite tasty. My own health is very good apart from pimples around the bum and on my wrists and forearms. There have been three very seasick prone people on board, but all have permanently recovered by this time. This is the end of Tape 2.

There was an incident the other night with one of the guys. We got a spinnaker half way up, then got a really big gust and he couldn’t hold enough turns on the winch. It started to go and he tried to hold it without gloves and his hands were very severely burned. He is on my watch and he is almost unable to do anything. He comes up but his hands are so sore he can’t turn a winch, hold a rope, swab out the bilge or do any of the chores we have to do. I paint his hands with Friar’s Balsam when we come off watch. Anyway he is company to talk to. We have at last finished sewing all five of the sails ripped in the early days of the trip. Crossing the Lower Tasman has been our worst weather so far apart from a couple of very short squalls that we have had on our way to the Horn in the Great Southern Ocean.

It is a lonely place, a very lonely place. There are a few birds; there are petrels, terns and a small and large version of the albatross. I am back on duty at 10 and it is already 7.45 so I am going to turn in and get good and warm to begin the watch and get an extra layer of clothing to go out there in the dark. It is amazingly cold. The actual temperature (as confirmed by the thermometer) is 5 degrees C which has got to be about 42 degrees F which is a pretty ordinary kind of temperature in England in autumn—a very pleasant temperature for wandering through the woods with a sweater on or something like that—but here it seems bitterly cold. It must be just the wind and the high humidity.

Our position is 55degrees 23 south 147 degrees 45 west. This is the third berg that we have sighted. It is quite a large one and it is almost on our course. We are going to divert slightly and have a look at it. The skipper took a horizontal sextant angle and estimates that it is 3 miles long and about 200 foot high. To me it seems gigantic, but I believe that much larger pieces break off in the Antarctic. That is all from me this day which is 5^th February 1982.

Well, it has been quite an exciting day today. For a start we have seen the Southern Ocean to some extent in all its magnificence. We have had quite a lot of 45 knots today. It has been quite bitterly cold. Everybody on board has been complaining particularly about their feet, and we have had front after front come across. The yacht has been racing along. It is never less than about 10 knots and anywhere between 10 and 20 knots depending on whatever waves we could catch and surf down the fronts of. The swell is fairly large and there have been large breaking seas. We have been trying to capture them on camera, but I don’t think when we see these pictures that they are going to convey anything like the power and the fury of the waves that are built up in just 45 knots. I am really looking forward to seeing what happens in 60 knots, which we are assured that we will get at least a little burst of before we reach the Horn. What has been fascinating as well today is that we have seen a total of four icebergs and this is very unusual for this time of the year. We have been having a look at the ice chart. We weren’t expecting to see icebergs at our position this time, which, incidentally, is 55degrees 20 South by 147 degrees 40 West. We are about 35 miles away from the same latitude as Cape Horn. We are about 88 degrees of longitude away from it.

I am cook tonight and managed to find some custard powder and scared up a bit of custard made with dried milk to have with our tinned fruit, which created quite a nice change and plaudits from the crew..

It is now February 7 and it is 6.30 in the afternoon. We have been at sea now for over fourteen days and we are past halfway to Cape Horn. We expect to be off Cape Horn in about two more weeks as long as we don’t break any more gear or tear more sails than we can keep up the sewing with. We keep having to sort out sail tears and sailing gear trouble. Particularly with the spinnaker poles which are forever firing when they shouldn’t do and this creates an enormous amount of work to get a spinnaker ready to be rehoisted. Also, because we are pushing the vessel very hard, we are always getting little tears in sails—we haven’t had anything really big since the five sails in five days that we had at the beginning of the trip which caused us to spend many hours sewing. My fingers are still covered with healing sores from those sewing sessions. We saw one more iceberg again today. It is extremely cold. I am not suffering from cold at all except for a little bit on my feet but tonight for the first time I had to go on iceberg watch. Just stand still, right in front of and clipped to the mast. With no shelter whatsoever from spray or wind, so that was the testing time to find out if my gear is really as good as it ought to be. In the dark and noise I sang loudly every song I could remember and towards the end (4 hours later) I seemed to be in a sort of trance. It felt as if I was all alone on a yacht that was sailing itself We are having a bit of a celebration tonight as it is Sunday. We have a big piece of scotch fillet steak and we are having that tinned pate someone brought and a can of beer and a glass of wine to celebrate passing the halfway mark. We are doing very well. I think we are ahead of the other vessels but radio communication, particularly with Anaconda who is our chief rival, is pretty poor at the moment and we don’t trust the position reports their owner gives, so whether in fact we are the leaders I cannot honestly say.

It is now Sunday 8^th February and our position is 55degrees 42 South 136degrees West, which means we are moving along very nicely, quite quickly and we should be off Cape Horn in somewhere between 8-12 days. This of course is making enormous assumptions about the weather and about the state of the gear on the ship. We hope that everything will hold together, or that whatever we break will be repairable. As an example of this, I was up on iceberg watch this morning at about 5 a.m. (just daylight). I was in the bow deep in thought looking at the horizon which was quite light at the time of day and we were really hurtling along under spinnaker. We had about 25 knots or so right up our tail—moving very quickly—when my reverie was interrupted by a very loud bang and the spinnaker fired itself and dropped into the water and streamed alongside the vessel as we tried to slow down from 15 knots and get people up on deck. We all had to rush over and get covered in icy water as we hauled together to get this thing aboard. We got it aboard eventually with one little 9 inch tear which I then sewed up, and a couple of little places that were looking a bit frayed.

We heard on the radio yesterday evening that Anaconda, our chief rival at the moment is ahead of us now and if this is true, well there you go, we have been sailing fairly quickly, we have had a bit of light wind, but we have got almost ideal winds now for us because we don’t do quite as well in heavy weather as Anaconda does because she is a much bigger, heavier, longer and stronger vessel than us. We are quite good up to about 30-35 knots but after that we have to get a lot of sail off and really be very careful with the vessel. We want to win but we would also like to arrive alive. Anyway, today being a Sunday I get my one can of beer a week which is my total alcohol intake and we have happy hour—we get pate and sometimes a little bit of caviar—some little treat, sweets and stuff like that and I wind up all the ship’s clocks and set them to the new time based on our longitude.

I have got a lot of other ancillary duties to do in addition to crewing. I think I spend most of my hours actually handling sails in and out of the sail locker and repairs because we change sails pretty often. I knew why I didn’t want to be a foredeck hand. If we haven’t got 10 knots of boat speed on this vessel then something is wrong and we have to do something to get it going at 10 knots or more. We have only had one day below 200 miles and we have had a lot of 230s—240s. We are trying to get a 300 and at the moment we are going very well, although we lost about three-quarters of an hour this morning with spinnaker trouble. Anyway it is happy hour in about three hours from now and I am going to have a little sleep. I have just come off watch an hour ago and I am all washed and ready for a good sleep.

It is now 10p.m.on 9^th February and we are in a very unusual situation out here in the Southern Ocean. The wind speed is probably about 5 knots and the sea is flatter than it is normally in Cleveland Bay, Townsville. The sea has been flattening all day. The wind has been dropping and dropping and dropping. We have a lightweight spinnaker up and even that we can’t keep filled. We are forecasting about another ten to eleven days to get to the Horn. It was the radio operator’s birthday today, Ray Smith, and I just happened to be on galley duty and I rustled him up a pretty rough looking cake. Everybody ate it with relish, which shows how hungry people get. I lost my toothbrush overboard today whilst washing and brushing on deck. I fortunately found someone who had a supply of brand new ones. Tony went out on the afterdeck to the stern toilet for the first time, and braved the elements today. In spite of it being calm it is still quite cold, about 5degrees C, but he had a nice sponge bath. I washed my armpits and nether regions down in the security of the port “loo.” We have a barometer pressure of 997, which surely must mean that before very long we are going to have more wind than we can shake a stick at. So with peaceful calm on the Southern Ocean I bid you all goodnight.

I have just come in off the bow after two hours of standing there on ice watch. We are close hauled and we are zipping along at about 9 knots into about a 25-knot northeasterly. This is the 10^th February. We are now having a very good day today; the winds have been light for a while and they have swung round until they are on the bow and so we are now beating into what seems to be a freshening north easterly. The boat is going quite well at about 9 knots and there is a lot of spray so anybody who is standing on the bow on iceberg watch is just showered with buckets and buckets of water absolutely non-stop. My wet weather gear has had a very good test just lately, which it has passed. The only thing which is really cold about me are my feet and they are not wet, just cold from contact with the deck and not moving for a while. My ski gloves are absolutely soaked through but even when they are soaked they are still warm and the cuffs of my shirt are pretty wet, but other than that I am feeling chipper.

It is really marvellous to slide open that door hatch when your duty is done and slip into this different world below. Ten feet away there is some poor sod standing on the bow right now being showered with freezing water and he is standing there gripping the foremast hanging on, buckled on of course, but he has to also hang on and the bow plunges and bucks as you race into the night at 9 knots looking for icebergs that never appear. It is a serious business down here. We certainly know that icebergs exist: we have seen quite a few by daylight and we presume that they don’t disappear at night. It would be the end of this vessel and probably any vessel if we struck one.

Earlier this evening we discovered the loss of two out of four tanks of water. It’s not quite catastrophic, but it is a situation having serious implications. We were fairly tight for water on the basis that we had all out tanks full. We have now found that due to a mechanical problem two of the tanks, which we thought were full and which would have lasted us through to Rio, are empty. At the moment we are on an extremely strict allocation of water and I am not quite sure what our ration is going to be but it was 1.5—1.6 litres per man per day including water used for cooking and that is now going to go down by a half and I don’t think that one can live on .8 of a litre of water a day but anyway we shall see. Right now we have got the bucket rigged to the mains’l runoff, it is raining, but there is so much salt spray around that the water that is coming off the mast is brackish but we are still collecting it. What we need is a good steady shower and the water situation will suddenly become okay. Right now we are on very heavy rationing and that is the way it is going to stay. I was thirsty that first day and only sipped my ration to make it last through the 24 hours.

Well, we have made up the greater part of the lost water today, 11^th February. It had been raining heavily; and has been bitterly cold making it very unpleasant on watch, and working in the rain. Handling the very heavy sails we have had up, fold them either on deck or down in the locker, depending on how rapid the change has been. We have only about 25 knots of wind , and it is beginning to seem that we are going all the way to the Horn without seeing any really bad weather. We have now only got I think about 1700 miles to go to the Horn and we haven’t had anything worse than about 45 knots and very little of that. The wind has been, strangely enough, just off the nose nearly all day today. It has just swung around from the northeast to the north so now we are on a broad reach as we streak more or less due east. We are on the latitude of the Horn pretty well. Anyway, that earlier north-east wind brought us some rain and after the disaster with our tanks we have collected today 180 litres from our makeshift rain funnel and one of the duties of the watch has been to guide this sort of rain chute into the tanks pretty often so there has been a lot of clambering around and going above and below ferrying cans and everything is so very difficult when there is a bit of motion on the vessel as she goes into these 12-15 foot waves that we have got. Everyone has drunk fresh water to bursting point.

sailing gloves. Wet sailing gloves are no cold protection at all and very soon your hands feel quite painful. There are lost and lots of fancy gloves on board but all of them have got to be shed when it is time to do any work and the only thing that looks as if it might be semi-successful at the moment are oddly enough washing up gloves which we have on board and which do insulate the hands to quite a large extent and still have enough friction to enable you to wear them whilst bringing in sail or doing work out on deck in the night. It is a thought that future Cape Horner’s should bear in mind that the problems we have found have been with gloves and either footwear or socks.

I have been working quite hard on the ship’s written log, which is a massive and extensive tome, which I fill in with great labour. It is quite difficult to write neatly at sea and I have columns of distances, figures, bearings, fixes and the like and also there is a narrative side to this log which we are submitting this in some sort of prize competition and we’ll have to keep our fingers crossed. I am on mother watch this 12^th February. We have just had the evening meal and I am going to go and get my head down. It is a beautiful evening, still calm with a bit more cloud around than there was. The sea is fairly flat. We have got a very nice spinnaker up—about 4,000 square feet—and we have what passes for a big boy. We are scooting along at about fourteen knots. If anything happens I will be called out to help get spinnakers down and new sails up. Otherwise I get the chance to sleep for six to seven hours. I hope my luck works out.

It is now about 2300 hours on 13^th February and the ship is stopped and facing the wrong way. This has come about because we have got absolutely no wind and an incredibly flat sea that one wouldn’t have believed would have happened. We are certainly having a little bit of everything this trip. The vessel has no steerage way so she just can’t be controlled and she is just slopping around. The sails are slapping and we are rolling slightly. We are just sitting here unable to do anything. It is very frustrating and tempers are frayed a little bit tonight and I don’t think there will be any improvement until we start the ship moving again. Eventually, the wind picked up and we got sail back on her.

I am sitting in the cockpit now and it is 15^th February and we are about 900 miles from Cape Horn. We have carried a spinnaker for the past 24-36 hours. Early this evening we dropped the spinnaker in order to fly the No. 1 regular. We are doing a reach and we have a wind from the south about twenty knots across the deck. We still have full main up; the sea is fairly flat and there is a little bit of swell building up from the south. It is a half moon tonight and it is pleasing to note that by the time it gets to become new moon we will probably be very close to Rio.

It is now 15^th February and today it has been cold. There is a bit of sunshine—a very unusual day. We had the spinnaker up all day, and have been ghosting along at 4-5, as much as 7 knots—not a very satisfactory speed. The seas have been amazingly small but this evening there has been a larger swell building up which may mean that something will build up in the night. Today is Sunday: the day to wind the clocks, have our can of beer and happy hour, meat on sticks and onions and stuff like that. We are only about 750 miles from Cape Horn at the moment. I changed into my third set of clothing and I still have lots more to go. The weather has been so mild and light that my underclothing is not wet—I am just sick and tired of wearing the same set.

It is now 3 o’clock in the afternoon of the 16^th and I probably shouldn’t have done my whistling and wind-invoking dance yesterday when we were loping along in a very light breeze of about ten knots feeling that we would never see the rolling majesty of the seas around Cape Horn, but I did do my little dance and whistled up a wind. Today it is a wind of about 40 knots – 30 knots across and the deck and we are doing a fairly average 14 knots with bursts up to 20. It looks as if this weather will stay with us until we round the Horn in about two and a bit days from now. At this speed we will be round there in about 48 hours from now. It is grey, a breaking swell, nice rolling seas can be seen right out to the horizon. The ship is going like a rocket—it is surfing down the fronts of these big grey waves and it is altogether what we would have imagined most of the trip would have been like. It is the first decent day that we have had since the Tasman and entering the Roaring Forties round about Stewart Island.

For about 3,500 miles it has been pretty reasonable, sometimes very calm. Once a complete flat calm, but that has changed and we are battening down. We are expecting these winds to increase and we are storing, stowing, lashing, making the ship ready to survive as far as it can a broach or a good knock down. For the past fifteen hours we have really been having a good joust with the seas around here. It has been the best of the rough weather that we have had. We are 400-500 miles from the Horn and we have had fairly high seas—about 45 knots. We have kept flying our smallest spinnaker and it has been a very hairy ride.

We have been screaming down the wave fronts at 20 knots on occasion, almost what seems to me to be out of control and pushing hard for a broach. These seas would be quite livable and not in any way dangerous to a cruising person but we are always cramming on absolutely as much sail as we think we can carry and so far we have been right. It has not been quite as cold during this bad weather but it has been a bit unpleasant in the spray and working sail is a bit exciting. We have been standing on the bow, which is shot up into the air 25 feet and down 25 feet and back to the centre. You are trying to grasp these very heavy sails which are flogging themselves and you to bits—trying to keep out of the way of warps and sheets and the ends of sails which would brain or decapitate you if you got in the way. I have just come off watch and I think actually the weather is starting to ease and I am hoping it carries on easing and nothing drastic happens so that I can get four hours sleep.

Today is 17 February and I am off for a sleep.

We are now 340 miles from Cape Horn. I have just come in after standing iceberg watch in front of the mast for two and a half hours. My feet are absolutely frozen. It was really quite exciting, exhilarating, standing outside. The boat is doing about twelve knots at the moment. We are flying through the spray and the air and I was standing there in the middle of nowhere in the complete dark peering ahead in my myopic fashion for icebergs that never materialise and singing through my song repertoire. Sitting out there I have been sort of conjuring up the winds just lately and out of three attempts to conjure up wind it just happened that wind has come very soon after I made the incantation to Neptune to give us some wind. When I was out there tonight I started believing, looking at the sea and getting this really strange feeling that I was flying just above it and that I could command the sea and that I could command the wind when to come and when to go. It was a really eerie feeling. I was quite sure when I was up there that I could do it and now that I am in the cabin and have just got out of my wet weather gear and I am feeling cold all I can think about is diving into my bunk and getting warm. So it is goodbye.

Today is 18 February. It is 1.15am. We are about eighty miles from Cape Horn and thirty to forty miles from the Islas Ramiras Rocks or Islands. The sea is moderate—about ten-foot waves on a ten-foot swell and there is twenty-five to thirty-five knots wind blowing.

It is very cold and it has been raining fairly heavily all day. We did a lot of sail changes this afternoon and finally tried to get a spinnaker up. We got the spinnaker up and then we got a sudden gust and the pole hit the forestay and sheared three feet off so that put paid to the spinnaker for a while and we have a yankee up for the moment and full main and we are screaming along as fast as one could reasonably expect. We will be at Cape Horn at around 4-5 a. m. tomorrow.

Today is 19 February. It was quite an historic day. We were abeam of Cape Horn at around 0800 today. We didn’t arrive early enough to see the light on it and we were about ten to fifteen miles off it and there was a lot of mist around so I didn’t get a good photograph of it although I tried.

At the time that we passed it, Old Man Horn was giving us a final tweak and he was blowing about thirty-five to forty knots. A nice bit of sea running. We rounded it in grand style.

Having rounded the Horn we are now heading for the Le Maire Straits and we are about ten to fifteen miles off shore. The water is really remarkable because it is quite a dark black which I haven’t seen thus far this trip. Just handed a poled out sail. We have a 2.2 flanker going and we are going at about eleven knots. In the last twenty-four hours in the bit of weather that we had, we tore our no. 2 reacher right across—a tear of about sixteen feet and having done that we then put up a yankee and caught that in a gust and tore the clew right out of it, must have been an old sail. The winds have been really quite fierce in short bursts. There has been a good big sea running and it has made sail handling quite difficult. I was on mother watch for the past twenty-four hours or so and it has been a very hectic mother watch. I have been woken up every couple of hours, into my gear, up on deck, hassle around with this or that and then back down, gear off, into bed, an hours sleep and off again. Well, we are around the Horn and we are heading north. We will be in the Straits of Le Maire by about 6 this evening. In the Straits you can see the mountains of Patagonia.

Today is 20th February, 1 p.m. We have just had a fairly tough eighteen hours or whatever. We were kind of thrilled when we got round the corner from Cape Horn. We thought things would improve rapidly. It certainly appeared to do at first. We were sailing in a little bit of sunshine now and then and fairly smooth waters, but as this evening wore on the weather got up, up and up and it blew about forty to forty-five knots. We tried to take a reef in the mainsail and there was so much wind pressure that we could not get it down quickly enough and the sail flogged itself into really bad tears before we took it down and cleared up the mess. We were fortunate in that the sail we are flying is a small spare mainsail and the big new beautiful mainsail has just been got ready and will be going up this afternoon. We are well on the way to the Falkland Islands. They are about forty-five miles ahead and we are making quite a nice course. We understand, from the Chilean Navy, although it is more or less unconfirmed, at this time due to poor radio communication, that all the other boats have not yet rounded the Horn. We have good radio communication so we can contact ham operators in New Zealand so we are able to report our position but we can never hear any of the other boats reporting theirs and when we ask we are told that not many other people are receiving them either. Based upon a bit of hearsay through the amateur network, we believe we are in fact truly in the lead at this time. We don’t know for sure though as you can’t trust Josko to report the truth…

We had a celebration party after going round the Horn. We had balloons and a cup of champagne and things like that. Funnily enough I have got more wet clothing out of this last sixteen or eighteen hours than I have got on the whole trip so far. The seas are short, we are on a close reach and we are throwing water up very high and everybody on board has just been soaked. I have been working hard all morning stitching bands in and repairing sail, and moving sails in and out of the locker. The sheer weight of the sails and the sheer energy needed to work this ship are really quite remarkable and is responsible for the tiredness that everyone feels. On a smaller vessel we wouldn’t be going half as fast of course but nobody would feel as tired as simply dragging a 400 lb. sail around inside a sail locker which is bounding up and down eight feet, rolling sideways through thirty degrees, and then back the other way. It is impossible to describe—it is certainly very tiring. I have had enough of it for today. I have had a good lunch and a cup of mixed Horlicks and cocoa and I am off now for a snooze, hopefully until about 3.30.

Today is 20 February. We are close to the Falkland Islands. In fact we should be abeam of them in about one hour’s time, but we won’t see them as they are too far East of us.. We are moving along at about fifty miles off the coast of South America, steadily north north east. It has been quite cold today but for the most part it has been sunny and I have just watched a spectacular sunset. It is about 7.40pm local time.

I am trying to dry out some of my clothing. I throw some of the wetter stuff that I don’t really want overboard. I have had a good meal of rice and canned chicken and I am now off for a little snooze before I am due on watch at 10 o’clock.

21^st February. Well the weather has been really kind and calm to us today. We spent most of the day out on deck sewing. When it has been my turn on mother watch I have been out cooking. Because my meals are better, I cook all the time when our watch has cooking duty. Some cooks can even foul-up instant mashed potato ! I have just finished cleaning up; it is now 9.15pm on 21 February. We are going quite well on the course and we expect to finish somewhere between eight and ten days from now, given reasonable winds and an average of about 200 miles a day.

Today has been notable for some of the tensions that have been on the boat to come to a head and there was a bit of an altercation between one of the crewmen and the skipper. The vegetarian and long-haired Maurice (Morris) (on my watch) has been disliked by the skipper since the start and the skipper’s needling eventually provoked Maurice to tell him to “get fucked you old fart.” The boat has been divided as a result of the strictures of eating by himself placed on this crewman and we are waiting to see what the developments are before we find out what action we are going to take. It is a pity because it is beautiful weather; it is calm; it could be something of a nice quiet sail for the next few days until we finish. Instead there is a lot of atmosphere throughout the vessel even though everybody is putting on a lot of bonhomie trying to cover it, the atmosphere is still there and it underlies things. We hope that within a day or two it is going to be resolved. With a bit of luck I am going to get a good long sleep tonight. It could be as long as six to seven hours, which would be very welcome. I am developing a couple of boils, one on each wrist, and the doctor (a vet, but quite good) tells me this is because I have been sleeping in a soaking wet sweater which has been wet from the elbows down and he thinks they are salt water boils due to this. One of them is really quite painful; the other is not very big yet. That is what has happened today. Goodnight.

It is Sunday 22^nd and we are in latitude 45° south. The day has been very beautiful, calm, about ten to fifteen knots from the south. I went on deck and had a naked bath. It was a bit cool for that but it was standable and very enjoyable. Once I was finished and dried off I glowed and felt warm. Of the two boils I was getting on my wrist, one has disappeared completely and the other one seems to be declining so I am trying to keep my wrists dry and clean. This seems to be an effective treatment. Beautiful sailing at the moment in a bit more breeze. We have got around twenty knots and are sailing at about twelve to fourteen knots. The wind is slowing from the south towards the east. We are going to be dropping a spinnaker very shortly and putting on a reaching sail. Today is Sunday and we are reasonably confident of being in Brazil by this time next week. If not, we shall certainly be in by the Monday following. Perhaps the good progress has put people in a better humour. We got Maurice to apologise to the skipper, and the skipper to promise not to go on about his vegetarianism and long hair and peace has been restored.

It has been champagne relaxing sailing today. I have been in the galley most of today. It has been my turn again as cook. I did a little bit of clothes washing—I sorted out clothes that I am going to throw away and others that I am going to put into my dirty washing bag and hope to get them clean in Brazil. I am on the last of the tape recorder batteries. I don’t know how long this verbal log will continue. I will have to start writing soon. I may be able to do it whilst the engine is on and I can run it on another power system. Unless something very unusual happens it is goodnight from me on 22^nd February.

It is now 23^rd February; it is Monday evening. It has been a beautiful calm day—about fifteen knots of wind and we have been flying along under spinnaker at about ten knots. I spent most of my time on deck sewing sails. I also went up on deck, stripped off naked and had another sponge bath, which made me feel quite good. We did a little bit of sail changing; we changed from a lightweight spinnaker to a heavier spinnaker as we got a few more knots of wind before it went dark. We expect to be in Rio in six to seven days for certain. Surprisingly clam seas for the Southern Ocean. We are in latitude 42° longitude 55°. We have to go to latitude 23°, so there is only 19° of latitude to go. That is 19 x 60, 1140 miles.

It is 24^th February. As far as sailing progress is concerned we have had quite a poor day. It has been beautifully sunny; it has been warm; the water has been 20°, which is unbelievable to us and it has been a pleasure to get the bucket out and have a good wash in it. The sky has been sunny, but alas for the race—there has been absolutely no wind and we have been sitting here lolling around and flogging in the swell, which is very frustrating when you are racing. We believe that we are the leaders. We know that we are ahead of the other two boats. We are line-honours leaders and we were at the beginning of this day handicap leaders as well. If the other boats did not fall into this hole that we are in—there is no wind anywhere at all that we can see—they may be coming up on us right now. We are just starting to move. This evening as the sun went down we got a light breeze of about eight knots. We are creeping slowly northward under the influence of it. It has been a relaxing day for me except that we have had an awful lot of sail changes. We have tried every sail in the locker to get some sort of rag up that will keep us moving. There has been a lot of activity in that way. I am off now. I am on standby and as long as there is no wind I will be doing nothing; I will just be sleeping. As the wind gets up we will have to try every sail again to get us back into this race. It is going to be a shame not to win it on the basis of losing the wind for one day.

Another thing that is a little peculiar is that I have had quite a few run-ins with Joel during this trip. I didn’t think my standing with him was very high and at the evening meal he asked me if I would continue and sail on around the world with him. It is a very attractive proposition, but one that I don’t think I will take up as I am really quite homesick. I am missing Townsville and everything that goes with Townsville. Today is Tuesday and we should be in, God willing, next Monday. We are 1100 miles from Rio at this moment and with our 200-mile a day average, which we have exceeded so far, we should put into Rio Monday evening.

Well it is really rather a shame that we have so little wind. This is now coming up for thirty hours where we have been almost completely without wind, ghosting along doing one to two knots, occasionally four to five knots. What is very disturbing is that we have had a report from Anaconda that puts her about thirty miles astern of us. We find this a little bit hard to believe, but who knows? We certainly believed, according to the Chilean navy, that we were quite a bit ahead some time ago and it will be a great disappointment if we have in fact lost the race due to falling into a high pressure system in the middle of this area.

It is 6pm on 25 February. Very little has happened. It has been mother watch day for me and I haven’t been cooking. I have done a little bit of sail sewing, washing and a bit of tidying up. Packed a few things that I know I won’t be needing any more and read a lot and slept a lot. I am due on watch in one hour’s time. That’s all there is for this day.

Today is 27 February, two days since I talked to the log. The progress has been very frustrating, very slow. We have had a wind exactly on the nose so we have had to take a bar too far to the north or two far to the east and we have never been able to go northeast, which is our point of direction. Real wind has never been above ten knots in the last two days. It has often been much slower. The seas have been flat, the days have been calm, and everybody has been out sunbathing. Although it is pleasant cruising conditions, it is frustrating to be within eight to nine hundred miles of the finish after coming so far and not be able to get to the finish. I was anticipating being in on Monday, and it is now Friday and we have eight hundred miles to go or more. It looks like a Wednesday of next week finish. Just about everybody is recovered from the cold. Few guys have told me that they still have pins and needles or funny feelings in their toes, which they attribute to problems with something approaching frostbite. The only thing with me is that my fingers are still stiff. My fingertips are insensitive because the skin is a little thicker than usual.

These light winds have meant very much sail changing and tacking during the last four hours that I was on watch early this morning. We put up and down the same two sails four times and we tacked ship about six times, so that we were working non-stop for the whole of the four hours. It didn’t do us an awful lot of good: we averaged about four and three-quarters to five knots, most of that not in a favourable direction. I spent the afternoon watch very pleasantly up on deck, sitting there sewing away at a sail. We have also had a little bit of time lately to be reading novels. I have finished two out of the three of the ones I have with me. I am into the third now. The temperature reached an incredible 28° C. The sea has gone from its black colour, through a green, and it is now approaching a tropical blue. A few of the crew have got rather pink from being out in the sun a bit too much today. I had a bath of sorts on the stern. I found the water a little bit brisk but that is probably because I am soft from living in the tropics. Most of the guys swear that it is really quite hot and the sea is quite warm—it seems pretty cool to me.

It is 10.30 in the morning of 28^th and we are still in this high of 1025 or 1027. The sea is flat—we are making between five and seven knots. Unfortunately we can’t sail in the direction of Rio, and we are having to do two miles for every one mile made good. This is a bit of a pity really because with any kind of wind, either wind strength or direction, we could have made it into Rio and got there as fast as any vessel has got there in any of the Whitbread Races. I think forty days or so is held to be pretty fast and we are still inside that. We would have to get a really good blow right up the tail to do 250 miles for us to get there. We are approximately seven hundred miles out at this stage and we could knock that off fairly easily in three days but there is no sign of us getting winds of either the force or the direction to enable us to do it.

I have been washing clothes all morning and I am putting away gradually all the wet weather stuff. This morning I noticed for the first time in the galley it was quite unpleasantly hot, whereas when we were in the Southern Ocean it was a pleasure to get into the galley because it was warm and to wash up because you got your hands into the hot washing up water. That is no longer true, and now it is a bit of a sweatbox. I have almost finished my third novel and will be looking around shortly for something to read. I have been going through my clothes and sorting out the ones I wish to dispose of. I have been putting them in a bag to give to somebody in Brazil it there is anybody so unfortunate that they would like some old clothes of mine. Our position is 36°15 South 48°30 West on 28 February.

It has been another disappointing day. It is now March 1. We have about fifteen knots of wind, but again it is right on the nose and we are having to tack often, so we are really making about four knots over the ground. At this rate we should be in in about six days today, which is unfortunate, as we will fail to break the record by G. B. II by one day. I am almost out of tape so won’t be recording anything more until we arrive in Rio.

[BY HAND WRITTEN LOG]

After four days of virtually getting nowhere we ended up with a bit of wind out of the east, so we are going along at a reasonable speed and we are about 360 miles out of Rio at this time. We have about a twenty-five knot east south easterly.

2^nd March 1982

Now that the wind is favourable our speed is over ten knots and we are urging the yacht on to go faster. Very few people are asleep and there is great enthusiasm for sail changing not often seen during the voyage—anything to get to Rio. We never slowed down again.

All hands are looking for land and AT LAST the first person to sight something, not me, lets out a roar, but it is only Ilha Redonda and Ilha Rasa. But shortly after, the horizon clears and we can see the high land of the mainland. Then we soon hear, and a little later see, a flotilla of small craft, which have either small live bands or ghetto blasters, all playing different tunes but all have a samba beat. We notice that there are many attractive women on the boats, and we are tempted to take the beer or wine they are holding out to us, but must not take anything under the rules. We hear with pride that we are the first yacht to arrive and have won line honours. But we haven’t got the finishing gun yet, and the skipper is bellowing to us to concentrate on the finish and cursing the boats around us to keep out of the way.

We finally hear the gun and after thirty-nine days, nine hours and thirty-seven minutes, we are in Rio and finished racing, and tied up alongside, with a party that has been raging for some time before we arrived. We quickly threw the skipper into the sea (a tradition) and were soon quite drunk, faster than usual being both hungry and tired. Hours later I got into a shower and stayed in the luxury for an hour, gradually sobering up.

Xerox (the race sponsor) had put us up in the Hotel Gloria for three nights and put on lots of parties and visits to nightclubs for us. There were many women around. The best chance for many of the poor is to latch on to someone more prosperous. You knew that the girls were hoping to better themselves financially and were not really attracted to you.

We cleaned up the yacht for three days after arriving, and after arguing with the skipper (who had received ten free airline passes from Aerolineas Argentina from Buenos Aires to Sydney but tried to sell them to the crew), I eventually moved my gear off the yacht, recouped my passport, moved into a modest hotel, and arranged my air flight Rio-Los Angeles-Sydney. My baggage was rifled at Rio airport and I lost every valuable small possession, but given the poverty I saw in Rio, this was not surprising. It was a bit hard to enjoy the luxuries with so many beggars around us and the favellas up on the hills above us. The Falkland Islands war between England and Argentina started 2 weeks later, so I was glad not to have gone home via Argentina.

So it was over. We were line honours winners of the race, and held the yacht racing record Sydney-Rio for a couple of years, but the handicap winner was a forty-five foot sloop from New Zealand, which, although two days and a half behind us, won on corrected time. For me, it was a meaningful trip. I had wanted to sail around the Horn ever since I first read of its existence. It hadn’t been quite like I had envisaged it, but I was glad to have the chance to do it, and content when it was over.