Free A Voyage For Madmen by Peter Nichols

the Atlantic lay to the west. He steered in that direction. Five days later he saw and correctly identified the French Ile de Ouessant at the western end of the Channel. He sailed on into the Atlantic.
    Three weeks later, on 1 July, having found his way to Madeira and beyond, he sailed into an unseasonable gale and got his first taste of the bilge-keeler’s behaviour in bad weather. Running before the wind, the self-steering vane would not hold the boat on course. Steering by hand, Blyth couldn’t do much better. The two shallow bilge keels lost their grip in the tumbling water near the surface and
Dytiscus III
began broaching uncontrollably: slewing sideways out of control with one wave, to be smashed into by the next. The boat became unmanageable. Nothing Blyth did seemed to help.
    So I lowered the sails … and once I had lowered them there was nothing more I could do except pray. So I prayed. And between times I turned to one of my sailing manuals to see what advice it contained for me. It was like being in hell with instructions.

    As the two paratroopers got under way, Robin Knox-Johnston was nearing his own departure date. He had hoped to sail on 1 June, the earliest date allowed under the Golden Globe’s few rules, but the thoroughness and difficulty of his preparations delayed him. He did most of this at Surrey Commercial Dockson the south shore of the River Thames on the outskirts of London. It was a rough but practical location, cheaper than any yacht yard and close to his parents’ home in Downe, Kent, where he was living.
    One of the most crucial jobs for any single-hander is the installation of self-steering gear. If sailing meant sitting in a boat’s cockpit and steering day and night, eyes glued to a reeling compass, with only quick dashes to the galley for food, few people would ever go to sea for pleasure. Even on a fully crewed boat, a two-hour watch at the helm is the most onerous and boring task afloat, and sailors have brought all their ingenuity to inventing and rigging systems to avoid it. Today, most yachts employ battery-powered automatic pilots, but the batteries needed to drive them weren’t available in 1968 and the Golden Globe racers couldn’t hope to use them without carrying large generators and enormous tanks of fuel. Instead, they employed mechanical, wind-powered self-steering gears. These often look like small weather vanes designed by Rube Goldberg, but when there is any wind at all they manage to keep a boat heading in approximately the right direction. The wind is natural and free, and a device that makes such clever use of it has something of a serendipitous wonder to it. It’s not surprising that sailors, particularly single-handers, tend to anthropomorphise their wind vanes, give them nicknames, and talk to them with affection – and sometimes irritation.
    They are simple in principle: a wind vane, rotating on a vertical axis like a weathercock, is linked to a small trim tab attached to the aft (or trailing) edge of the rudder, like the flap on an aeroplane’s wing. When the boat is on course, the wind vane is set so that its leading edge points into the wind, offering no resistance. When the boat veers off course, the wind vane presents its side to the wind, which then pushes it around its axis, and this movement is transferred by linkage to the trim-tab, which, like the wing flap, moves the entire rudder, steering the boat back on to its original course. The engineering of such gear can be crude and inexpensive or elegant andcostly, but the arrangement is simple, generally robust at sea, and, to the single-handed sailor facing a voyage of tens of thousands of miles, a vital piece of equipment. *
    Normally, this gear is attached to a boat’s stern, directly over the rudder. On
Suhaili
, however, this couldn’t be done, because her mizzen sail and boom stuck out over the rudder and would have interfered with a wind vane there.