South America

Angus Cater recounts an adventurous circumnavigation of South America that commemorated Bill Tilman’s nal voyage and paid tribute to a lost friend

Harrac goes south

n September 1977, at the age of 79, the famous explorer and mountaineer, Bill Tilman set sail from Southampton on the boat of his young protégée,

Simon Richardson, to sail to Smith Island in the South Shetland Islands, some 65NM o the coast of Antarctica. eir plan was to sail to Rio de Janeiro, and then to the Falklands where they would collect their New Zealand climbers for the ascent of Mount Foster, a hitherto unclimbed peak on Smith Island. eir trip across the Atlantic to Rio was uneventful. Simon wrote to his friend, Christopher Lloyd from Rio: ‘ e day we arrived here was perhaps the greatest day of my life…if everything ended now, life would have been worth that day’. ey set sail from Rio and were never heard of again. When they failed to appear at the expected time in the Falklands the authorities were alerted and a fruitless search of the South Atlantic began.

A perilous undertaking

Simon was my friend and was 26 when he disappeared. We had met as nineteen-year-olds and had sailed and climbed together extensively. He had invited me to go to Smith Island but my wife was pregnant and he took my ice axe instead. During the years that followed I thought of him o en. When the opportunity arose to buy a proper ocean going boat in 2004 I grasped it, and resolved to try and complete the task that Tilman and Simon had set themselves. At that stage Mount Foster had only been climbed once by a Canadian/New Zealand team in spite of several attempts by joint Service teams. e reason is simple. It is at the

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Smith Island, our ultimate goal

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Bill Tilman, whose nal voyage inspired our trip

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Rio, a stop o on our route back north bottom of Drake Passage, a 600 mile stretch of water south of Cape Horn, where the depressions roar around the globe without any land mass to obstruct them. Derek Lundy in e Way of a Ship describes its perils for seamen as follows: ‘ e reputation of the Horn as a place of tribulation is based on a few facts of physical geography that can be expressed in six words: compression, thin water, ice and mountains’. Smith Island is also all mountain and ice and there is only one very small landing place. Harrac, the boat I bought, is a 44 foot classic yawl. She had been built in 1981 by the West Country rm of Curtis and Pape and had been designed by Alan Pape. She is a big boat, very solidly built of iroko on oak frames. However, the survey I had done threw up a multitude of issues so she spent the winter of 2006 in the shed at the Elephant

boatyard on the Hamble having a major re t. We needed to make sure that she was ready for everything the Southern Ocean could throw at us. e standing and running rigging was original so with the assistance of the late Ed Burnett, a talented designer in Dartmouth, these and the spars were all renewed as well.

While this was going on I turned my mind to the crew. Mostly they were people I had run with (I am a long-term member of Ranelagh Harriers in Richmond, Surrey) or sailed with , or run and sailed with. (I had taken a group down to Alderney in 2005 to run in the Alderney Half Marathon). e major decision was to take a gap year student on each leg. I was then Managing Director of an insurance broking business specialising in insuring independent schools and we thought it would generate good publicity. It did and, mostly, they were a great success. I took them on a trial week-end where we sailed in a force ve out into the Western Approaches for twelve hours and then turned round and came home. Apart from some minor seasickness they all did well.

Yachtmaster at last

My major concern about the crew was the Skipper. I had been sailing since the age of eight, starting on Moths at the Salterns in Lymington, and had graduated to big boats in my twenties. Simon had joined me on a number of RORC races and I had been taught to navigate by my brother-in-law, an experienced army sailor. Since then I had navigated and skippered a variety of boats all around the Channel, down the coast of France and across to Ireland. However, I had no formal quali cations and I could only

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e dramatic mountainscape of Smith Island

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Harrac at rest imagine some of the press headlines if something had happened to us or to one of our ‘gappers’. ‘Unquali ed skipper risks the lives of 18-year-olds’ might have been one of the kinder ones. I therefore completed all my RYA quali cations up to Yachtmaster Ocean and spent a week doing a Ship’s Captain’s Medical Course at Warsash. e latter enabled me to purchase an enormous medical kit which included a lot of prescription drugs including morphine. My only requirement before dispensing these was to take ‘Radio Medical Advice’ from a doctor on shore.

We le from the Hamble in September 2007 amidst much fanfare. e route was di erent to the one that Simon and Tilman had taken. We planned to go down to the Cape Verde Islands, then head straight across the Atlantic to Grenada, through the Panama Canal

and down the west coast of South America, before crossing Drake Passage and landing on Smith Island. I chose this route because I wanted a secondary objective. I was aware just how di cult a task we faced even to get to Smith Island, let alone climb Mount Foster, so I wanted to complete a circumnavigation of South America. If we had gone down the East Coast of South America we would have had to beat back against the prevailing westerlies for 600 plus miles in some of the most forbidding water on the planet. Not a good idea. e book I have written, Harrac Goes South In the Steps of Tilman and Richardson, describes our adventure. We had everything: boat damage, storms, gear failure, medical crises, and navigational issues, but above all else it was testing on the crew, and particularly on me. All the crew came for about a month each, ying backwards and forwards to di erent locations en route. I was on the boat the whole way round, apart from popping home from the Canaries for a while before the start of the second leg, to attend to business issues. I do not think the trip turned out as any of us expected. As I say in the book: 'In today’s world we are used to having our own space and a great degree of personal freedom. If we don’t like our job, our boss, or even our partners, we can leave them. We roam the world by jet aeroplane and have comfort, appliances and technology in the home that our parents or grandparents didn’t even dream of. On a forty-four foot boat all that is taken away from you. You live in cramped surroundings, o en wet and cold; you have your sleep disturbed – not just occasionally but every night; you eat what you are given; you have an autocratic skipper who tells you what to do and doesn’t brook much argument; and nally, you can’t get o . You are stuck even if you hate the people and the ship is sinking.' is is the brutal reality of long distance ocean cruising and it a ects di erent people in di erent ways. Mostly I was very lucky. e crew just got on with it without complaint. I only had one mutiny, perhaps a mass crew exodus a er twentyone days beating against the North East trades back to the Cape Verde Islands a er going through the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone (the Doldrums) might better explain it, and who would blame them. A er six months at sea, with very little proper rest, I was at the end of my tether. I could barely manage myself and my own motivational issues, let alone anybody else’s. Bill Tilman summed it up pretty well at the end of his description of his rst abortive attempt to get to Smith Island in Mischief Goes South. 'A voyage like this naturally entails the endurance of small privations and wearisome duties, and obviously all were not up to it. A man however must do his best with the tools provided and if he himself provides the tools and nds them unsuitable then so much the worst for him!'

It wasn’t all gloom and doom! We had some extraordinary meetings with whales and dolphins; we saw nature at its best, in particular the ‘canals’ of Southern Chile and we met some amazing people who helped us along the way. I was blessed with having some very down to earth and practical people as crew to supplement my de ciencies. is was particularly true in the South Atlantic, on the way home, when we went through a major storm. Rob Slinger, one of the crew members on that leg describes it: 'Amazing fun sur ng those thirty-foot waves during the a ernoon…until it went dark, pitch

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e Panama Canal

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Callao in Peru

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Our crew for leg two in Grenada

black, the moon hidden behind thick clouds. en riding those unpredictable three-dimensional monsters with all your senses on high alert was certainly intense. 'Standing there at the helm, feeling every movement of Harrac; working with her to nd the optimum line, then boom, a rogue wave. Now I was standing in sternum deep water, frothing all around. No sign of the boat deck in front, just a glimmering light from the galley below the water as the wave passes by….deep breath, focus. 'Harrac, who displaces fourteen tonnes, had been picked up like a toy and dumped on her side. We had no sail up, but had still been doing six knots with the force nine wind on the starboard quarter, so she came straight up, and continued, unperturbed, on her way. Jo Tracey and I were down below with the washboards in and were upended on the far side of the cabin. Rob was unharmed, if a little damp. is is just a taste of the adventures enjoyed and endured during this epic trip. It was a steep learning curve and a humbling experience. Fortunately I had the time and opportunity to recount my adventures in full in my book.

Itinerary

The Hamble L’Aberwrach La Coruna Madeira Grand Canaria, CanaryIslands Cape Verde Islands Grenada Aruba Panama Callau (Peru) Coquimbo Higuerillas Valdivia Porto Aguirre Puntas Arenas Piriapolis Rio de Janeiro Ilheus Recife Cape Verde Islands The Azores La Coruna L’Aberwrach Alderney The Hamble.

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e south Chile coast

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(top to bottom) trade wind sailing; a happy gapper on leg one; netting removed from the prop; essential reading; exhausted crew on leg three

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Departure from Grenada at the start of leg three

Harrac Goes South In the Steps of Tilman and Richardson can be purchased at www. anguscaterltd.co.uk or on Amazon.

Lessons learnt

So what did I learn from this 18,500 mile trip?

Do not be overoptimistic about your average speed. We had to tack the whole way down the East coast of South America with the Humbolt current pushing against us at 1.5 knots. With a boat that tacked through 110 degrees this made nonsense of my forecast 5 knot average. Make sure you know your crew well and that they like and respect you. I suggest you do not take an untested crew out for long trips on the ocean. It is not for everyone although many people have a romantic view of the sea. It is not romantic, it is brutal and unforgiving and if it can find a weakness in the boat and the crew it will.

Ensure that your practical skills are up to speed and that you know every inch of your boat and have the spares to fix things if they break. This was a weakness of mine which was only made up for by the practical skills in my crew. This applies particularly to the engine. We motored far more than we expected to – often motor-sailing to try and hold our course and speed. The engine did a lot of hours and it was only in Peru that we purchased additional fuel containers.

Allow enough time to recharge your personal batteries. I was continually under time pressures to meet the next crew and got progressively more tired as the trip went on. A couple of days is not enough, particularly when one is restocking for the next leg, cleaning and doing maintenance. This undermined my ability to manage the crew e ectively and positively. It also meant that I did not see as much of the countries we stopped in as I would have liked. Finally, do not underestimate the e ects of sleep deprivation on you and your crew. People will make mistakes and you need to cut them some slack.