Free A Voyage For Madmen by Peter Nichols Page A

Knox-Johnston finally designed his own gear, which consisted of two wind vanes, each mounted on steel-tube outriggers on both sides of the boat, the linkage being ropes running through sheaves to the stern. It was at best an awkward arrangment, the outriggers and rope linkage interfering with his movement on deck, but it was entirely in keeping with the boat’s rough-hewn character.
    Though she was only 2 feet longer than Ridgway’s and Blyth’s boats,
Suhaili
was twice as heavy as the bilge-keelers. She displaced double the volume of water; she was, literally, twice as much boat. Some of this greater weight came from her massive all-teak construction
(Suhaili
might easily have damaged the trawler that knocked into Ridgway’s
English Rose IV)
, but most of it was in the form of greater hull volume, into which Knox-Johnston was able to pack an immense amount of food and seagoing stores.
    Divorced and having no one to worry about his lonely dinners, Robin Knox-Johnston opted for the standard yachtsman’s diet of the day – tins of corned beef or baked beans, grub the avid weekend sailor didn’t mind subsisting on from Friday to Sunday nights – and then factored a ghastly 300-day-plus multiplication. Such fare reflected the stolid dreariness and paucity of the English post-war diet, compounded by Knox-Johnston’s years of eating the institutionalised food aboard British merchant ships. He loaded
Suhaili
with over 1,500 tins, each one stripped of its paper label, varnished (against rusting by seawater),and coded. This was the time-honoured practice espoused by English yachtsmen long used to sailing leaky wooden boats.
    His staples were:
    216 tins of corned beef
    144 tins of stewing steak
    48 tins of pork sausages
    72 tins each of green beans, runner beans, carrots, and mixed vegetables
    144 tins of Heinz baked beans
    48 tins of Heinz spaghetti in tomato sauce
    216 tins of condensed milk
    40 tins of processed cheese
    And tins of fruit, jam, salad dressing, cooking fat, soup, and much, much more.
    To cram it all in, Knox-Johnston tore out the bunks in
Suhaili
’s forwardmost compartment, the fo’c’sle, and built shelves and lockers. More food was packed in 5-gallon jugs and containers, until there were jugs, drums, crates of food and drink filling the floorboard space between the main cabin bunks, jammed into the cockpit, and packed into every conceivable space in the boat. He also took aboard a small ship chandler’s warehouse of stores, including tools, extra sails, lines, rigging wire, anchors, jugs of kerosene, diesel, and petrol, and spare parts for every device aboard. The boat was prepared for an almost indefinite stay at sea.
    Despite being a bookworm, Knox-Johnston’s reading of the classics had been spotty. He now had the ultimate opportunity, that unlikely ‘someday’ suddenly looming before him. Dr Ronald Hope of the Seafarers’ Education Service provided him with a boatload of such works as
Tristram Shandy, Vanity Fair, War and Peace, Crime and Punishment, Tom Jones, Clarissa, History of Western Philosophy
, and instructive works like
Chess in a Nutshell, A Textbook of Economics, and Elementary Calculus
. There was much more, but like his diet, it was unrelievedly solid stuff.
    He also brought along a correspondence course for the Institute of Transport examinations. This was a conscious decision to give his mind additional exercise. In the same spirit, his sponsor, the
Sunday Mirror
, sent him to a psychiatrist so that his state of mind could be compared before and after his voyage. The psychiatrist declared him ‘distressingly normal’.
    His ‘normalcy’ was no doubt a distress to the psychiatrist, but the diagnosis was fundamentally mistaken. Normal people aren’t driven to try to sail alone around the world without stopping. They don’t stop their lives midstream and embrace, with single-minded effort and every resource