Free A Voyage For Madmen by Peter Nichols Page B

available to them, a hair-raising stunt never before attempted and which has every chance of killing them. None of the Golden Globe sailors could have been called normal, but alone among his rival competitors, there seemed to be no dark streak of introspection in Knox-Johnston’s forthright personality. He was what might pass for normal in some sunny world where human nature is not best defined by its aberrations from a hypothetical model.
    On 3 June he sailed from Surrey Commercial Docks. Waving good-bye to him from shore was his 5-year-old daughter Sara, the product of his marriage that had crumbled in India under the strain of a seaman’s absentee lifestyle. He had got to know her well since returning to England, and they had spent his last weekend ashore together. It was a wrenching moment for him, and he hoped it wouldn’t be too bad for her. But she was used to him departing for long periods, and he was relieved when she stopped waving and began playing with a small radio.
    Carried on the tide down the sea reach of the Thames,
Suhaili
presented a curious sight: with her two wind vanes (which Knox-Johnston had painted Day-Glo orange for visibility) mounted on steel outriggers on either side of the hull, she now had the appearance of some strange homemade fishing boat. And loaded with a year’s supply of food and water, she floated low in the water and was sluggish under way, heralready slow hull-shape slower. Knox-Johnston could only hope she would pick up speed and buoyancy as he neared the Southern Ocean and ate his way through his cargo.
    He took with him a crew of three, including Bruce Maxwell, a reporter from the
Sunday Mirror
, and a
Mirror
photographer, to give him a hand on one of the most perilous sections of his entire voyage: the English Channel, which is so congested with shipping that traffic through the Strait of Dover is monitored on radar screens by controllers just as it is at airports.
Suhaili
was bound for her final port of departure, Falmouth, Cornwall, the most westerly harbour of any size in southern England, a traditional port of departure in the age of sail because of its easy access to the open Atlantic. A pretty town tucked inside the wide mouth of the river Fal, protected from all weather by the sheltering arms of green hills, Falmouth has a long association with ships and the sea. It’s a good place to do last-minute work on a boat and an auspicious port of departure.
    Knox-Johnston and his crew reached Falmouth on 9 June. There they spent five more chaotic days in port attending to a mass of final details.
    He sailed on 14 June (a week after Chay Blyth), giving further evidence of how far his normalcy deviated from centre: it was a Friday. This was a remarkable flouting of a seaman’s superstition. Luck is an acknowledged but unquantifiable factor at sea; Knox-Johnston clearly believed in making his own. He was ready, the weather was fair, his boat was slow, and he didn’t want to waste a single day, so he sailed.
    â€˜Rifle-and-Bible Seaman Sails’ reported the
Sunday Times
, noting that just before he left Falmouth, his churchwarden father handed him 100 rounds of .303 ammunition for the rifle he carried aboard, and the port chaplain had taken him into town to replace the bible Knox-Johnston had left at home.
Suhaili
was still ‘a bit of a bog inside’, Knox-Johnston told the reporter, who wrote that the boat’s crude outrigger wind vanes gave it a ‘wallowing, trawler appearance’. But a canny harbourofficial, wittingly or otherwise perceiving
Suhaili
’s Nordic antecedents, observed that she was ‘a real old ice-breaking boat. If she hit England, I’d be concerned for England.’
    Launches carrying the press and his family followed
Suhaili
for a few miles beyond Falmouth before turning back. The wind was light and from the northeast, and the boat crept slowly southwest away from land. During Knox-Johnston’s first