Chapter Twenty Seven Roaring Forties on Agitator Cycle
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Chapter Twenty Seven Roaring Forties on agitator cycle It was times like these near-disasters that forced me into dreaming of better places. It all began in my teens when I was training for 100 mile races in New Zealand logging up to 400 miles a week on my racing bike. My daily schedule was to bike the 20 miles to work, have a swim in the tide to refresh myself, work all day boatbuilding, have another swim before biking home, have dinner and then I got to go out and do my training. One week end I biked home on the Friday night, had dinner then biked the 72 miles to Nelson over two great mountain climbs, raced a two stage club race to Motueka and return on the Saturday then rode a leisurely 72 miles home with the lads on the Sunday, sprinting into every town’s speed limit sign as if it was an imaginary finish line.. Building up to the big races it was more important to get the miles in the legs than sleep, so often when riding on the homeward stretch on a cold winter’s night I would ‘hit the wall’ having 5 to 10 miles still to go.. This weekend was a particularly hard ride and I found myself spent of every available energy factor, tired and having trouble keeping up with my training mates. A pint of milk and a Mars bar would help in those cases but being unprepared and out there in the whop whops there was nothing. So as I had learned to do when I “hit the wall” under extreme physical duress I resorted to dreaming in my mind of already being home, envisioning myself taking my clothes off, throwing on PJ’s and climbing into a warm bed and pulling the covers up around me. I had learned that by doing this before long the miles would pass without my body being focused on its agonies and distress and suddenly I would be in that warm safe place called bed. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was creating my preferred reality by mentally visualizing and overlaying another one over the current environment. Nor was it something I ever did willingly. I had to be pushed or forced into it to escape the discomfort reality I was in. For people who are into the bible it is also there, article, so we assumed the French were keeping it a secret for reasons we could easily imagine. Rapa was now an even more forbidden place, because the French had been testing atomic bombs at Moruroa, and had prohibited entry to a zone of 600 miles radius of the atoll. Rapa lay within that zone. But a bomb or two was not about to deter us; instead it would add a little spice to the venture. For a sailing vessel the shortest route between two places is hardly ever the quickest. Choice of route depends on the predominating winds and instead of a straight line the course is an arc, known as a Great Circle course. When choosing a route for a passage the modern yachtsman uses the book “Ocean Passages of the World” containing information on winds gathered over the last two hundred years. In the days of sail, commercial sailing ships discovered the quickest routes according to the prevailing winds at the various times of the year, and these were passed from skipper to skipper till they were gathered together in books. For some of them the mileages might be half as long again than for a more direct route but the longer one would have favorable winds and so be faster. The captains of clipper ships taking wool and grain to Britain from Australia and New Zealand found the quickest way was eastwards towards Cape Horn, in the latitudes of 40 and 50 degrees south. Down there, the books said, westerly gales blew almost continuously. So even though Rapa lay at latitude 27 degrees 35 minutes south, the quickest way there for us would be by going south from New Zealand well into the forties, catch those winds westwards to about longitude 148 degrees west and turn left and "up" to Rapa rather than to travel there more directly through the ‘variables’. There was another reason for the venture. Those westerly gales in the forties whipped up huge seas, waves that were all the larger for having fetches of thousands of miles to build up in. Some say they are the biggest waves in the world, and the fastest moving. It was these legendary and formidable seas that Arthur Piver wanted to try out in the original ‘Lodestar’ trimaran. He believed a light trimaran could surf on these gigantic waves that paraded endlessly around the world and "quarter" them as a surfboard rider does, so gaining an additional 25 per cent speed. He said the waves had no landmass to impede their endless march around the world, and it might be possible to ride one for miles at a time. In this way he predicted trimarans could achieve runs of 1000 miles a day. In the Pacific we had surfed on the normal trade-wind seas, waves that moved at about 15 knots. These were set up by winds blowing at about 15 or 20 knots. (The speed of a wave depends on the strength of the wind and distance the wind has to build it up — known as “the fetch”. Gales of 60 knots blowing over a fetch of 1300 miles will eventually produce waves, which travel at 60 knots.) In the force nine winds (about 45 knots) which we were led to believe were common in the forties, the speed of the waves would be about 40 knots. If Piver could have ridden these waves continuously — and had managed to quarter them — -it might indeed have been possible to achieve 1OOO miles a day. In Piver’s theory anyway. At that time the fastest known day's run under sail was 438 miles, recorded by one of the clipper ships, and it just didn't seem possible that anything could equal that. Our antique by now Lodestar class trimaran was prone to broaching but overlaying that we had youthful exuberance on our side, the fact that we knew no better…and neither did anyone else..., like many others, we were inspired by Piver. Well . there was only one-way to find out. Storms around the New Zealand coast that autumn were the worst in living memory. One of them as I mentioned had sunk the inter-island ferry ‘Wahine’ in Wellington Harbor with the loss of 51 lives. Yet it was as common for the ‘Wahine’ to enter ‘Windy !"#"$"%&' Wellington’ harbor in 100-knot winds as it was for school children to dart from shop front to shop front to get home in 100 knot winds. Cook Strait had seasoned us too. But unworried David Pat and I set off on May 16, out into Cook Strait then southwards, with the wind behind us. As usual we were all miserable for the first few days getting our sea legs and preferred to steer in the cockpit rather than below in our newly rigged cabin’s helm because we reckoned the fresh air was good for our health. In four days we were on the latitude of the Chatham Islands, 500 miles off the eastern coast of New Zealand's South Island, It was a pretty remote spot, and we decided to pay the islanders a visit. Mainsail reefed and waters getting colder, the dark outline ahead of the Chatham Islands. We approached the main island late in the day but our small scale chart which sort of covered the whole of the Southern ocean did not list the harbour and the only township of Waitangi, so we hove-to overnight. By morning we had drifted so far back that we had to spend another day tacking towards the island again. This happened twice and then we decided to hell with it and sailed off eastwards along the rocky southern coast. The Chatham Islands are rugged and cold, and a hardy group of people and remnants of the original Moriori’s remain loyal to them, eking out an existence from farming. According to our school lessons the peaceful Moriori had populated New Zealand before the Maori arrived with their cannibalistic habits and some time later the last of them escaped to the Chathams. At the time we passed by thick beds of rock lobsters which had recently been found around the islands' rough coasts and the last of the Moriori as well as fishermen from the mainland were risking their lives (and sometimes losing them) to make fortunes catching this delicacy for the highly profitable American market. We passed many buoys marking Cray pots and the wake that they made indicated a strong tidal rip, or quite possibly signs of the westerly current in action. We saw no cray boats in action but as we sailed away from that gaunt and treeless coastline a light plane flew over us, a solitary mechanical bird come to inspect invaders, then return to its dark castle. When it left us we felt curiously alone. We were at about 43 degrees south with light northerly winds, sailing in gentle seas. "Where are the westerlies?" grumbled David, and plotted a course that would take us even further south. Down and down we went, steering southeast in winds that came from every direction it seemed but from the west.