and handed me a bowl of porridge with milk and brown sugar. If Tzu Hang had been sailing herself he would have stayed in bed, and I would have handed him his food into his berth. Now he sat down on the step at the foot of the ladder and Beryl, who almost always does two things at once, sat in the cook’s chair and read, and at the same time fried bacon and eggs. From time to time she gave the cat a piece of fried bacon rind from the pan, and Pwe would pat it about the deck with her paw, till it was cool enough for eating. If we were having cooked bacon, Pwe would not dream of eating the rind unless it was cooked also. After bacon and eggs came burnt toast and home-made marmalade. Burnt toast is the hallmark of Beryl’s wonderful breakfasts, as inseparable from them as her book is from her, when she is cooking.
These typical breakfasts were provided for us day after day for fifty days all across that great Southern Ocean. Perhaps never before had such good breakfasts been eaten so regularly for so long in those particular waters.
After breakfast we could see Flinders Island indistinctly, and soon we began to try to pick out the entrance to the Banks Strait. After a time we could make out a small mark on the horizon ahead which took form gradually. A lighthouse, a black lighthouse instead of a white one, as described in the pilot book, but a lighthouse all the same, on a low flat island. It was Goose Island, and as we rounded it we entered the Banks Strait.
Then came another marvellous day of sailing. Forsyth Island to port and the green Tasmanian Coast away to starboard, and the boom as wide as could be in order to let us get round Swan Island. There was white water showing everywhere as we squeezed past. By noon, when we reset the log, we had done 163 miles. By four o’clock in the afternoon, we had to haul down the mizzen and shortly afterwards we handed the main, running under the two headsails, whereupon the wind began to ease, as it so often does in the evening, and we set the main again.
The Sydney-Hobart race had started on the same day as we did, and we had wondered at one time whether we would have to pass through them. We heard in the evening, on the radio, that the leaders were not yet into the Bass Strait, and were meeting with light winds only. We were lucky to be on the top side of a depression which would, with any luck, carry us most of the way across the Tasman Sea.
By midnight when Beryl relieved me, the wind was right aft with an awkward sea running. It was necessary to steer all the time, and we had rigged preventer guys so that the boom would not smash over if Tzu Hang gybed. As she rolled in the steep following sea, the boom would try to lift against the preventer guy, and sometimes the leach of the sail would give a flap, which set the helmsman to spinning the wheel frantically. There was no need to worry with either Beryl or John at the wheel.
All through the dark and windy night, as the white wave tops marched in luminous procession past the ship, bright green bars of phosphorescence shone suddenly out of the night and fell astern, glowing like emeralds between the black breasts of the waves. They were beacons for Tzu Hang pointing her way to the south.
NEXT morning Tzu Hang was still racing along, with the wind a little too far aft for comfort. The glass was low, and the wind’s grey horsemen, the low rain clouds, came riding up from behind throwing a lash of rain across us as they passed, while the albatrosses ranged like greyhounds in front of them, across the downland of the sea. Wherever we looked we would see somewhere the sudden tilt of an albatross’s wing, as it turned to sweep down and along the moving valley of the sea.
Perhaps I was thinking of albatrosses, but at any rate I wasn’t paying sufficient attention to the steering, and allowed Tzu Hang to slew as a wave passed, so that there was a sudden wump as the boom went over in a gybe. The preventer guy had parted and the boom came over with a bang against the backstay, but the initial shock had already been taken by the preventer guy, and no damage was done, except to my reputation with the rest of the crew. I started to haul in on the main-sheet but before I was finished, Tzu Hang rolled and the boom gybed back again.
Two faces appeared almost immediately at the hatch opening. Neither of them said anything, but I said, ‘I think that we’ll have the main down now and set the twins.’ When it was all finished John said, ‘Thank God it was you and not me.’ The thought of the accidental gybe stayed with him all the day, and seemed to give him ill-suppressed satisfaction, and in the evening he said, ‘You know, I haven’t really felt right since I let Tzu Hang gybe on that rough night going into Auckland, and now thank goodness you’ve done one.’
‘Not one, two, and only a few seconds between. You’ll never beat that.’
‘No, thank goodness. I really feel fine about it now.’
Beryl looked rather smug. I think that she was the most careful helmsman of the three of us.
Tzu Hang was rigged in those days with a topmast forestay from the top of her mast to her bowsprit, a jibstay which hauled out on a traveller on her bowsprit, and a forestay which went to a fitting on her bow. The twin staysails were set on separate twin forestays bolted through a deck-beam half way between the bow and the mainmast, and on booms from a mast fitting 5 feet above the deck. When they were not required, these twin forestays were fastened out of the way of the staysail boom to the pinrails near the shrouds.
When we were running under twin staysails, the sheets from the booms led back to a block, and then to the tiller, so that Tzu Hang steered herself. It usually took us about twenty minutes to change from fore-and-aft rig to running rig, from the time we went on deck to the time we went below, and we were always doing it. We had not yet changed the wheel for the tiller, and self-steering would not work with the wheel, but now there was no further danger of a gybe, and the ship could be left to herself for short periods. It was much easier on the helmsman, but the sail area was reduced and we were not going so fast.
Not going quite so fast, but very nearly, because at noon we had 153 miles on the log, and by three in the afternoon it was blowing force 7, and Tzu Hang was beginning to sit up on the wave tops and to rush forward on them in the most exhilarating way. One wave top climbed on board just in front of the cockpit and we seemed to be wrapped in the breaking crest. We handed the twin staysails and ran under bare poles until after tea, when we set the twins again.
For the next few days we were caught up in a relentless rhythm of the sea. The ship reeled and surged and swung away on her course; the glass rose slightly and fell again, as depression chased depression across the Tasman Sea; rain squall after rain squall followed short sunlight, and we climbed repeatedly on to wet decks for our three-hour watches and, sleepy and chilled, down again at the end of them. The glass stayed low, and everything below decks became damp and sodden. The shifts in the wind kept us busy with sail changes. For most of the time we were under twins, but when the wind came abeam, we dropped the weather staysail and took the pole out from the other, sheeting it home as a reaching sail. Then we set the storm-jib and mizzen, and that was all that we needed. When the wind was aft, and provided it was not too strong, we set the mizzen as well as the twins.
New Year’s Eve, five days out, 750 miles on the log, and a black wet night. We had Christmas pudding for dinner; the first of the six Christmas puddings that we had for celebrations, and which would mark the small achievements of our passage. John and I were always trying to get Beryl to produce them, but they were rigorously controlled. As I sat up in the rain in the night watch, I thought of the previous New Year’s Eve, which the three of us, and Clio, had spent high up on a mountain ridge in Maui. I thought of her in England and wondered how she was getting on, and thought also that however keen I was to make a quick passage back to join her, I would also like to have a break in this wet rushing movement. At twelve I went forward and shook Beryl: ‘Happy New Year!’
‘Oh,