From Strength to Strength Read online

  My husband was not sympathetic. He told me firmly that it was all in the mind. I told him if that was the case, my mind was in a strange position.

  ‘You’re only seasick. Take a few pills and you’ll be right in no time. Take your mind off being seasick, go to the galley and cook.’

  After more seasick pills than recommended, I still could do nothing in the galley except heave so violently that I had to hang onto something or I would fall over. I finally collapsed and that was how Charles found me when he came below expecting his dinner.

  Eventually Charles wedged a mattress on the deck between the side of the heavy weather cockpit and the hatch opening. That way, I was under his watchful eye while I was heaving and he was steering, and, also, when I did throw up, a bucket of water would just wash it overboard, keeping belowdecks livable.

  By now, after six continuous hours of throwing up in any position, even Charles was looking a bit worried. He kept assuring himself that it was the first wave of seasickness and it would pass. He was wrong, it didn’t. Twice during that voyage I was not sick and one of those times was approaching. The sun was setting, the sea was very calm, too calm, and I could not understand why Ernesto was charging around the deck like a demented chicken. He changed sails at least twelve times.

  ‘Why all the sail changing?’ I groaned.

  ‘We’re getting too close to shore.’

  At this stage I should point out that this enormous boat, along with no radio, had no motor of any description to drive it. She was wholly at the mercy of the wind. Just like the sailing ships of the last century, except that they were better off than us—at least they had crew. I craned my neck around, expecting to see beach or rocks looming large. ‘Oh, we must be two miles away.’

  ‘Yes I know,’ he said, frowning. I knew by now that this man did not worry about trivialities, and since the danger was not being beached on the rocks, it had to be something else. I then remembered the cruiser escort that stood off shore at the entrance to Hong Kong harbour channel.

  At that time Red China was not a very hospitable neighbour and any vessel out of Hong Kong that strayed over into their three-mile limit was accompanied to Peking by patrol boats for an extended holiday! We were now one mile inside that three-mile limit and cruiser escort help was about twenty-five miles away.

  For the next four hours I was not sick. I was too scared. I steered while Charles and Ernesto tried to find a sail combination that would defy the current and the inshore breeze. We were, at one stage of this hair-raising adventure, only five hundred yards from shore. We were just about to step ashore and give ourselves up when the wind changed. Charles quickly reset and trimmed the sails and we took off. We were all busy silently praying not to meet a Chinese patrol boat when we saw lights ahead. Charles studied the lights for a while and decided they were fishing boats. This did not make us safe—most of the fishing boats were lookouts for the patrols and some had radios on board.

  Our predicament was this: if we changed course we would lose the wind, and if we stayed on the wind we would pass very close to the fishing boats, very close indeed. Ernesto suggested we disguise ourselves. He was fine, but we stood out like sore thumbs. I crawled below and pulled out a pair of black pyjamas, an old straw hat and a jar of make-up, then went back on deck to help Charles dress and cover his face with make-up. It was decided that there wasn’t much that could be done to disguise me. I was the wrong shape to pass for a man and I had red hair. So I was to go in the bilge.

  ‘What! I’m not going in the bilge. And that’s final.’

  ‘Would you rather go on board the Chinese boat and be at the mercy of those fishermen? You know they’re fascinated by redheaded white women and . . .’ I didn’t want to hear anymore. I made my way to the bilge.

  When we were almost in the middle of the fleet, Charles put me in there. It was dry, a little smelly and very stuffy, but I wasn’t too uncomfortable. I certainly didn’t want to spend a moment longer there than necessary. Ernesto was to sail the boat and Charles was to sit on deck splicing rope with his head down, way down.

  I heard the first exchange of conversation between Ernesto and the fishermen. I couldn’t hear exactly what was said but I wouldn’t have understood anyway. Ernesto later told me that he hadn’t understood a word either. The babbling went on for a few minutes. I was having a battle with my stomach. I was in its favourite horizontal position, but the stuffiness was causing problems and I was fighting to gain the upper hand.

  When we had sailed out of sight of the fishing fleet, Charles released me and they told me what had happened. Ernesto had told the fishermen that he was delivering this captured sailing boat to one of the committee members in a nearby province. Considering he hadn’t understood a word they had said and knowing Ernesto’s knowledge of Chinese, I am quite sure the Chinese hadn’t understood a word of Charles’s carefully planned story. But the important thing was that they had let us go.

  The moment the danger passed, my seasickness returned. I was quite sure by now that my stomach had a mind of its own. It was back to the horizontal position.

  My stomach’s stubbornness actually saved my life. Wedged between the framing of the sea cockpit (a four-foot-high canvas affair, rigged when at sea to prevent the helmsman from being washed overboard) and the hatch coaming, I could not be seen from the port side, the side from which the Chinese patrol boat approached.

  We knew it was not a fishing boat by its large searchlight. The men quickly decided that Ernesto would stick to the same story and steer, and Charles disappeared to the bow to coil rope and stay out of the searchlight’s beam. Whoever heard of a Chinese person with a Roman nose?

  The patrol boat came towards us so fast that there was no time to move, let alone hide me. Charles just had time to reach the bow without running when a strong beam of light swept over the boat. Ernesto apologised and quickly threw a sail bag over me, just in case. There were several exchanges, then silence, and finally there was darkness again. Ernesto sounded the all clear and I peeped out.

  In the darkness we could not see the shore, but apparently we had been making good time and were out of the three-mile limit. Not that this by itself would have made any difference—we had been inside the limit and that was all that mattered. However they were not sufficiently game to touch us, and this was no doubt due to the approach of another light. This one turned out to be a patrol boat from the cruiser escort. As the patrol boat’s crew explained when the Chinese patrol boat had departed, they had heard the fishing boat’s report on the radio, and having us on their list of the day’s departures from Hong Kong, thought they had better take a look.

  With a good wind, we left the patrol boat behind and settled down for what I thought would be a quiet, uneventful sail. No such luck. It was well after midnight and we were tired, the men from changing sail combinations most of the night and me, from heaving. We started the ‘one awake to steer, two asleep’, routine until someone was needed to handle the sails. This peaceful existence lasted almost a day, for it was then that the cantankerous typhoon decided to turn around and see if it had missed anything.

  I awoke to a screeching wind and Charles and Ernesto racing around like madmen taking all the sails down. I do not know enough about sailing to be able to judge what followed from a sailor’s point of view, but from the layperson’s point of view, it was, and still is, the most terrifying experience of my life.

  The Hong Kong Observatory recorded top winds of 128 knots, that is about 147 miles per hour. And Charles, never doing anything by halves, went right through the eye, not that he had any choice, the typhoon was calling all the shots—we were just putty in its hands. One moment we were surfing up and down ninety-foot waves, and the next moment we were sitting in a millpond of dust, rags, and debris, surrounded by an eerie howling silence.

  The only time conversation was possible was when we were in the eye of the typhoon, and even then it was done on screaming level. The vacuum swirling around the edge of the
calm seemed to suck out all sound. It was at this time that Charles told me that if we went back into the surrounding storm in the wrong direction to the wind, we would broach. In other words, if the boat came out of the eye facing the wrong direction, we were finished. For this reason, Charles tied me to the mizzen mast. This would also stop me being blown overboard. The wind was so strong I couldn’t stand by myself, and the men were too busy to help me.

  Apart from no radio and no engine, we also had no life jackets and no life raft. The dinghy was awaiting us in Manila on the mooring buoy. Of course I knew nothing of this at the time. I had put my complete faith in my husband.

  The calm of the eye was the opposite of calm for us. All the damage to sails and rigging had to be repaired or lashed in order to face the rest of the storm. The trouble was, there was so much to repair and put in order, it would take weeks, not the few hours we had. The most urgent of our problems was that the steering wheel was slowly seizing. It was taking all of Charles’s strength to move the wheel, and in a storm like we were encountering, you need a free steering wheel that can spin in any direction at great speed. This we did not have.

  The hours passed rapidly with emergency repairs, cutting away and lashing damaged sails and rigging, and a hurried meal for the men. But before we could complete a quarter of the work, we were back in the fray.

  Waiting to leave the eye and enter the storm again was completely terrifying—not knowing whether in the next few seconds you were going to live or die. Obviously more strife was planned for us in our future because we came out close to the mark. That, plus Charles’s superior helmsmanship, had us before the wind surfing up and down those ninety-foot mountains of water again.

  The boat would ride to the crest of each wave and then surf down the other side. She would gather so much speed surfing down the side that she would bury in the bottom of the trough up to her steering wheel every time. After about three of these breathtaking rides, I had attained the state of complete screaming hysteria. Then this passed and I moved onto silent, staring hysteria, as silent as the mizzen I was tied to (well, the mizzen did make a funny squeaking noise), while I awaited the end.

  Of course this great dramatic performance was not seen or heard. If Charles or Ernesto had looked in my direction, which they didn’t, they would have just seen a lot of head-shaking and eye-rolling. With winds of 128 knots, give or take a few, nothing, but nothing could be heard. In fact, seeing was near impossible. Charles had to wear diving goggles so he could keep his eyes open, not that there was anything to see. Down in the troughs it was black as death, on top of the breakers, there was about a ten-foot collar of thick yellowy-white foam. It felt rather like going through a carwash with the top down.

  Some of the breakers did not behave normally and the boat, instead of surfing down the side of the wave, would catapult off the top and into the middle of the next wave. We would crash right through the wave and come out gasping for air only to fall into the trough to be buried up to the wheel again.

  In the troughs the air was hot and humid; on top of the breakers, the wind was so strong it blew the foam and rain horizontally. The rain hit us so hard it felt like little needles sticking into us, and we had to turn away from the wind to breathe.

  Horrified, I would watch as the bow disappeared under water at the bottom of that roaring black descent. The rest of the boat would follow in quick succession, till the water nearly reached the steering wheel. Then there would only be the stern, with the three of us holding on for dear life, sticking out of the water. She would pause in this unbelievable position for a few seconds, shudder, as if deciding whether to go on, and once more lift that graceful bowsprit to fight the next mountain of water.

  Luckily, Charles had installed water-tight bulkheads, so with the two doors closed, only the main cabin had taken water. The water sloshed around until we had time to attend to it, which was many days later.

  The boat had been sailing along with not only the rail underwater, but also the walkway and half the cabin house under. The main mast was touching the water many times, and after hours underwater, the portholes and hatch covers began to leak. We couldn’t use the pumps because the portside pumps were completely submerged and the starboard pumps were completely out of water. Charles said the water was no danger midship, as long as it didn’t get into the stern or bow and actually, because of it, the bow pointed a little higher and this was good.

  As the sluggish light of dawn of the first day out of the eye battled through the murk, the wind dropped slightly. The boat kept fighting, but she became noticeably more and more unwilling to lift. Charles had Ernesto go forward and cut away the broken staysail boom, hoping this would correct her sluggishness. To do this small thing, Ernesto had to tie himself to the mainmast and go underwater every time we buried in a trough. Then, when she broke free, he had to cut the rigging and torn canvas away, and hold on for dear life when the boat went into the next trough. Every time we popped up again I would look for that small brown body wrapped around the base of the mast. Somehow he did it—how, I will never know.

  Ernesto was recovering from his underwater ordeal and we were all waiting for improvement in the next trough. It never came. She groaned and shuddered and very reluctantly lifted once more, but only just. Something was very wrong. Charles signalled to Ernesto to go and check below as the trouble had to be there. It was.

  The bow was so continually underwater that we were taking water through the anchor chain hole. Ernesto did not report, there was no time. He had to get the water out fast. He couldn’t open the bulkhead door into the main cabin because if all that water came into the forward compartment from the main cabin we would keep going down. He couldn’t open the portholes, as they were underwater on one side and above his head on the other side.

  The first thing he did was stuff the anchor chain hole with clothes he found in the suitcases stored in the forward hold. In the first suitcase was my wedding dress. Only four months old, it was stuffed in the anchor hole. It did the job, however, and stopped further leaking. But Ernesto was still faced with the major problem of how to get rid of the water. He sat down to think and sat right on the solution. The crew’s now-working toilet. He scooped the water up in a bucket, poured it into the toilet and flushed it out. He reappeared on deck all smiles and screamed in Charles’s ear what he had done. Charles was all smiles too because the effect was immediate—the boat was losing her sluggishness and was lifting better with every wave.

  We continued that never-to-be-forgotten roller-coaster ride for more hours than I would like to remember, and just when we were sure it would never end and we would never survive, the wind eased. We were now down to about one hundred knots and the waves were a little smaller, only seventy feet. Several more hours and we were down to ninety knots and sixty-foot waves. It seemed like an afternoon breeze after what we had been through

  By the fourth morning we were still coping with eighty knots and fifty-five-foot waves. This continued through the next day and next night. Charles and Ernesto had not had any sleep now for at least three days and they were struggling to keep the boat before the wind. The rudder, which had taken a terrible beating, was all but jammed and it took all of Charles’s strength to turn it. I could not even move it. Another day passed and the wind dropped to around forty-five knots and the sea was starting to look like an ocean again. Charles set the course, balanced the boat and lashed the wheel so she sailed herself while he and Ernesto went below for a well-earned rest. By the sixth day, we were through the worst and the sun even appeared for ten minutes at a time.

  The sea was still choppy—so much for the calm after the storm bit—but after what we had been through, it looked like a backyard swimming pool. Now came the cleaning up; even if the calm waters and clear skies didn’t appear, we had to get the boat shipshape. What a mess.

  The boat was now sailing at a reasonable angle and the pumps worked, so we started pumping. The main cabin was soon emptied of water. It was still a
complete mess, but at least we didn’t have to swim to the galley. We cleaned up tins of food, cushions, clothes and boxes. All these things had been neatly packed in the cupboards in the main cabin. The forward cabin was in the same state. The master’s cabin was the only presentable place on the boat.

  We spent the next few days drying the clothes when the sun appeared, and madly gathering them up when the rain came down. The cleaning was endless, but it was nice to eat hot meals again. Well, correction, the men ate hot meals. I had not been able to keep a mouthful down since the day we raised anchor.

  The typhoon had had many effects on the land and the sea. One problem we were encountering was the tides. We had been blown off track a few hundred miles and were southwest of our landfall, Manila Bay. We were sailing into the tides and flood waters coming from the rivers along the coast of Luzon. Our second problem was our main halyard. One and a half inches thick, it had chafed through during the typhoon and we could not hoist the mainsail. The boat, being forty tons, could not buck the tide with only the mizzen and foresail hoisted, so we were standing still and some days going backwards as the tides pushed us away from land.

  The most pressing problem was that I could not keep a mouthful of food down, not in any position, and I was losing weight rapidly. We had now been ten days at sea, with no radio to contact help and only a rough idea of where we were. Even Charles started to look worried. I was so weak I was confined to the bunk.

  Charles had to get a new halyard to the top of the mast to hoist the mainsail, but the mast was seventy-five feet high and the only way to the top was in a bosun’s chair. With Ernesto in the chair, it was impossible for Charles to hoist it more than fifteen feet before the weight defeated him, and Ernesto was small.