Once Is Enough. Miles Smeeton

one on top of the other, upside-down. The bottom of one was of moulded fibre-glass, light and fast and easy to handle. It has stood up to an immense amount of rough use for several years, and was easily pulled on board by one person. On top of this was a plywood pram, also light and seaworthy and with a high freeboard, so that it fitted down on the deck. Stowed upside-down it looked splendid and conformed to the lines of the doghouse. Moreover, it had two handrails running along its bilges. In the water and the right way up, it looked rather like a pale blue bath, but it was a great load-carrier and a good seaboat, and provided there was no head wind and a light load, it was easy to send through the water. John had carried an outboard engine on Trekka, and during the Pacific crossing, and in New Zealand, we had done some great trips with it and John’s outboard.

      We undid the lashings and prised the boat off the fibre-glass dinghy, to which it was clinging like a limpet. Then we unfastened the life-line and dropped it over the side. John jumped in and we handed him his movie camera in a plastic bag. He took the oars and rowed away from the ship and as the wind had dropped altogether now, we saw that he could row faster than we were sailing. He rowed on ahead of us, working hard, and was soon far enough away to leave his oars in the rowlocks and start filming. Completely alone, in a pale blue bathlike boat, and on a vast and slowly heaving sea, he looked like something out of a nursery rhyme. An albatross landed beside him and pecked at an oar. Tzu Hang rolled slowly past him as he filmed, and when he was about a hundred yards behind her and had taken a shot as she went behind a swell, he rowed up after us. We all had a go then. It was a fascinating sight to watch the ship rolling slowly along in this big smooth swell. The motion, which we had become accustomed to, looked tremendous from the dinghy. She was showing a vast amount of copper paint as she rolled, and it was still very clean, with only a few goose-barnacles visible here and there. Nothing seems to be able to defeat goose-barnacles. I believe that they would grow on pure arsenic. When we were sailing up to Canada, the log-line became so fouled with them that we had to change it. We left the old line in the stern so that they would dry up and we could then rub them off, and the cat used to eat a few off the line every day. Above the copper there were some signs of green weed clinging to the bottom of the white paint, but otherwise Tzu Hang was looking quite yachty. She had had a complete refit in Sydney. As I was thinking about all this, she drew away from me and I had a sudden panic feeling of being deserted, and rowed as hard as I could after her. Although there was no wind, she seemed to be going quite quickly through the water.

      Beryl got in the dinghy and rowed away as if she had spent her life on the open ocean in one, but when she was back on board, I understood exactly the feelings of an old hen foster mother, when the last of its ducklings is back again from the water and safely under its wing. Tzu Hang seemed to do so too.

      Next day was Sunday and we were becalmed. We were busy with all kinds of work on the deck. John painted the washboards, I finished the rigging-screws, and Beryl was still hunting for and recaulking small deck and skylight leaks. It was warm on deck and not at all the weather that we expected so far south. It didn’t seem to go with this sea, which the great grain ships used to cross. I wondered how often, just in this bit of water where we were sitting in the sun, a square-rigged ship had flung past, down to her topsails, and wondering whether she was south of the Snares and north of the Auckland Islands. A number of sailing ships were wrecked on the Auckland Islands, and although there are 140 miles between them and the Snares, they are better behind than in front, when visibility is bad. We were approaching the dotted line on the chart, which is inscribed, ‘Icebergs and loose ice may be met with south of this line’.

      We had lunch on deck. Lunch was always cold and consisted of twice-baked bread, which was holding up well, butter, cheese, jam, salami or sardines, fruit cake, and an orange. Sometimes we had soup, and we had orange juice or grapefruit juice to drink. We also had a large supply of onions which we ate raw with our cheese.

      During the morning John had taken some shots of all the activities on deck, while Pwe spent her time hunting the albatrosses with her usual ineffective procedure. I remembered the reporter in Seattle who had telephoned me for a story, and who had said, ‘Say, Captain, will you tell me what you folks do all the time, just laze around and lounge about on deck?’

      After lunch I upset the linseed oil over the newly painted washboards. John didn’t even say, ‘Some mothers have them,’ as he was heard to do when I pushed a screwdriver through my finger in Honolulu. He said, ‘I’ve got to paint them again anyway,’ and Beryl thought that it would do the deck good. It was quite obvious that everyone was determined that ‘crew trouble’ wouldn’t mar the trip. The washboards never did get painted again because this was the last of the paint-drying days.

      Next day we had a wind from the north-east and we made sail after breakfast, under full sail and the Genoa. The sea was calm and there was the same long swell. Tzu Hang sailed along unattended all day. I did ‘laze around all day’, but Beryl and John must always be at something. John had persuaded Beryl to knit him a Fair Isle jersey, and they were now busy trying to work out the pattern.

      Pwe was full of activity also. She kept dancing up to us sideways, her ears back and her body arched, daring us to do something. It was about this time that she invented her main game. Siamese cats are not very original in their ideas about games, and this was inevitably a mouse game. She would fly up into my berth, a canvas bunk on two poles, and then stare over the pole at her victim. If he did not respond she would complain vocally, but none of us could resist her. The game consisted of running a finger along under the canvas, while she pounced on it. There were two variations; one was to run a finger along the side of the pole, while she hid inside and tried to grab it by putting her arm over the pole, and the other was for her to sit at the end of the berth and await for a finger to appear from under the canvas. This was extremely tense work and as the finger approached the end of the berth, excitement grew to fever pitch with both participants. She never let it get the better of her, and although she always caught it, she only dabbed the finger with a paddy paw. After she had caught it, she would swagger away, like a boxer who has floored his opponent.

      In the afternoon we heard a soft sigh come faintly through the hatch, and then another, and another, and knew that we had a school of porpoises with us. We went on deck and John filmed them, crisscrossing in front of the bow and breaking water together in threes and fours. Sometimes they would haul off to one side or the other, and one of them came leaping along almost continuously out of the water, and falling over on to his side at each jump. They stayed with us for some time, but eventually tired of the play, and dropped astern, lazily rolling a dorsal fin out of the water, before they went off on some other business. Pwe stood with her forefeet on the cockpit coaming to watch them, with her ears pricked and in a rather alarmed and elongated attitude. They are horrible animals, she thinks, and will never venture further on deck if they are about. We always love their visits, they are such merry creatures, and feel strangely gratified by their attentions, and sorry when they leave.

      The blue whale also seems to be a friendly animal, and is the only whale that likes to accompany us. We have seen quite a lot of them, sometimes longer than Tzu Hang, and they have often steamed alongside, to the delirious excitement of Clio’s small brown dog.

      We were now 200 miles south of the south-east corner of New Zealand, in longitude 170° east and latitude 50° 30´ south, and the wind was freshening from the north-east. On January 8, with the wind still blowing freshly from the same quarter, we were nearly down to 52° south. We could not make much headway against a roughish sea, and the starboard tack would take us back to New Zealand, while the port tack would take us further down towards the iceberg zone. I felt that there were enough hazards without going further south, where we risked the chance of meeting up with some ice, and I didn’t want to lose any sea that we had gained. So we hove to and waited for the weather to change. For the last two days of the second week we lay hove to. It was the dreariest period of the whole trip: cold, and grey, and uncomfortable.