my neck, five days’ grizzled grey beard, and wet oilskins, and as I leant forward to give her a kiss, she felt warm and damp and smelt slightly musty.
Back in the cockpit another black rain squall was marching up from behind, dark and forbidding, and by the time Beryl joined me it was sluicing round us.
‘How are you feeling?’ I asked her.
‘Feeling fine; still I wouldn’t mind a change so that we could fix up the tiller for self-steering.’
‘Me too, everything’s so damned wet.’
Wet or no, it made no difference while the wind lasted. Sleep and feed and watch; too little sleep, enough food, and too much watch, but by the end of the first week, we were still just short of a thousand miles: four miles short. We were also rather further north than we had intended as a northerly current was setting us up and knocking some miles off the run as measured on the chart. On that last day we were close-hauled under jib, staysail, and mizzen and with the wind from the south, but for the first time since we left Westernport, Tzu Hang was sailing herself, and what a blessed change we all thought it was. We were all down below.
‘This is more like it,’ said John. ‘That was really too much like work.’
‘Good heavens, I thought that all you single-handers were gluttons for punishment. Beryl and I never do that sort of thing. It was only because you were there that we didn’t stop and take it easy for a time.’
‘No,’ said John, ‘I suppose that it’s the cold and the damp, and such a long spell of it, but I wouldn’t like to go on indefinitely with weather like that. If she’ll steer herself it’s another story.’
‘The glass is shooting up, so maybe we can fix the tiller tomorrow.’
We all slept a glorious and undisturbed sleep that night, and woke up to find that the sails were flapping uselessly. We took everything down while the porridge cooked, and after breakfast set about changing the wheel to the tiller. At first it seemed as if we would be unable to do so, as the wheel fitting was frozen hard on to the rudder-post, and we had to heat it with a blow torch before we could move it. Wheel, wheel-box and worm-gear we stowed right aft in the counter, and put the tiller on in its place. Tzu Hang looks rather better with a tiller, or perhaps it is just that a change is nice.
While we worked a seal played around us, popping his whiskery nose out of the oily sea, and looking like a bald-headed old man, peering over the morning paper; then he turned over on his back and waved a flipper across his chest as if he was fanning himself. After a time he went on his way. Perhaps he was bound for the Snares, but anyway he didn’t seem to be at all perturbed about his landfall.
While the seal played around us the albatrosses came visiting. They came gliding over the swell, apparently using the cushion of air, raised by the lift of the waves, to support them. There seemed to be no breeze at all, and from time to time they were forced to give a few slow strokes with their wings. They always seemed to look rather furtive and ashamed when they did so, as if they hoped that no other albatross had seen them. It was obviously something that they did not want talked about in the albatross club. They glided so close to the smooth water that sometimes an end wing feather would draw a skittering line across the surface as they turned. One after another they came up to the ship and thrusting their feet out in front of them, they tobogganed to a halt and as they settled down, they held their wings together high above their bodies, until they folded them one after the other, in a curious double fold, against their backs.
They paddled round the ship as we worked, coming close under the counter, and all the time Pwe pursued them on deck. She crouched under the rail and then raised her head, with her ears flattened sideways, so that she showed as little of herself as possible when she looked over. Then she crouched down and crawled along the deck until she thought that she was directly over one of the big birds, when she looked again. But she could get no further, and her jaw used to chatter with rage and frustration.
Sometimes the albatrosses used to dip their bills in the water and then snap them together with a popping sound. They reminded me of the senior members of a Services Club, tasting port. We never found out what they ate. They trifled with pieces of bread, but never swallowed them.
As soon as we had fitted the tiller, John turned his attention to the washboards, which he made from some spare teak that we had on board. He made a perspex window in the lower washboard so that we could look through to see how the helmsman was and if he needed anything. While he was doing this, Beryl was working on some caulking, stopping a slight leak in the deck, and I was greasing rigging-screws.
When John worked with wood, he seemed to caress it. The tools in his hands looked as if they carried out his wishes of their own volition, and even the wood seemed to submit without protest. His movements were so sure that any work he was doing appeared amazingly easy. When he marked wood with a pencil, he marked it with one straight line, and when he picked it up again after laying it aside, he knew exactly what his marks meant. Most wonderful of all, everything always seemed to fit. Now he rebated the two washboards so that they overlapped and made a windproof joint, and when he dropped them into position in their slots they fitted as if the join had been a straight saw-cut.
‘How on earth do you get things to fit the first time?’ I asked him.
‘I reckon that’s what you learn in five years’ apprenticeship,’ he replied.
He was sharpening his chisel on a stone with regular even strokes, the angle never varying. When he finished the light shone on one smooth face, and not on a number of facets, as it would have done if I had been doing it.
‘When I was doing my apprenticeship,’ he went on, ‘and finished my first job, I went to the foreman and asked him to pass it. It was a small cabinet and I was pretty proud of it. He came and looked at it, and then went away without saying anything, and came back in a few minutes with an axe and smashed it. Then he told me to make a proper one. I guess that makes you learn to do a thing properly. Still everyone can’t be a carpenter. You have to be the right type you know.’
He said this as if he was commiserating with me for being blind or a cripple, and he was hoping for some reaction on my part.
When John had been a youngster in Jersey, the Germans had moved in and, owing to some failure of an engine in a small boat, he and his mother and father were unable to get away. The whole family were then taken to Germany and held throughout the war as hostages. John’s father has been described to me as a sturdy and uncompromising Yorkshireman, and I’m sure that John is very much a chip of the old block, so that the Germans must often have regretted their selection. What with one thing and another, John did not have a great deal of opportunity for orthodox schooling, so that when he found himself back in Jersey, he decided to learn a trade. When he had finished his apprenticeship, he went to South Africa with his mother to her people, as there were only two of them then, and after a time he set off by himself to Canada, to work as a carpenter and to build his boat, and to sail her round the world if possible. We were lucky to meet him soon after the beginning of his journey.
If the first week was all that we had expected of the South Tasman, the next week, which was spent largely south of New Zealand, gave us all kinds of variety. After the day of rest and repair in the sun, we had a grey wet drizzling day, with the wind in the north-west and continuous rain. We fixed a plastic water-bottle to the foot of the mizzenmast, and fastened a sail-cover upside down under the mizzen boom. We caught two gallons of water, and on the strength of this I shaved, and decided never again to go unshaven for so long, if I could avoid it. My beard felt dirty. It probably was, and it tickled me when I tried to sleep. From then on John and I kept our whiskers more or less under control.
The next day was warm and sunny, with a light following wind. John was the photographer, and he had about 2,000 feet of 16 mm. film which he intended to shoot. Now he suggested that we should put the dinghy overboard and film Tzu Hang under her twins. There was little wind. Tzu Hang was rolling along very quietly, and there was no white water, only the long easy swell. There seemed no danger in putting the dinghy over, and if he got left behind we would put the