1975. Incredibly alive! We don’t know how we did it

Welcome to the special section “GdV 5th Years.” We are introducing you, day by day, An article from the archives of the Journal of Sailing, starting in 1975. A word of advice, get in the habit of starting your day with the most exciting sailing stories-it will be like being on a boat even if you are ashore.

How’s it going Gerard? Jerome, how’s it going?

Taken from the 1975 Journal of Sailing, Year 1, No. 05, November, pp. 4-7.

The legendary Damien in the Australian seas capsizes three times in two hours. The story of Jerome Poncet and Gerard Janichon who, through their adventures, became heroes of French sailing.

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1976. Killer whale sinks Giorgio Falck’s Guia III

It feels good sitting under the Plexiglas dome with your back resting on a pillow, steering the Damien with the rudder wheel placed inside. The rustic stove pulls pleasantly and distributes a gentle warmth, such that it gives this sailing on the edge of 56° south latitude, far below, that is, the average limit of ice and icebergs, a serene atmosphere of quiet bourgeois cruising. Thoughts of the night watch gallop to the rhythm of cigarettes and water running along the keel. Memories crowd and overlap. Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the world of which nothing can be said except that it must be beautiful in winter under the snow…

The five days of detention due to the Chilean Navy in Port William, five days that convinced us to forgo sailing to South Shetland with winter now too close. On our return, it will be seen…

And these last eight days, eight days of rapid sailing between Tierra del Fuego and here where we are, not far from South Georgia: 1100 miles of not-too-aggressive and favorable airs in the company of black-and-white spotted dolphins, with albatrosses, with the worry of stray ice that wasn’t there…

No, we will not encounter any this year, of ice, after all, one neither knows nor can predict. They say, that ice smells. Perhaps the old sailors of old, with their experience of the polar seas, were able to locate it, to smell it long before it showed itself in front of their prow?

We are newbies in the business. We pray that there will be no ice ahead with this snow…. From time to time a gale of snow staffs these first still safe hours of March 26. The wind strengthens from 6-7 to 8. This is the time when you really feel your boat galloping as if running away with a bone in its teeth. Wind in the wire, mainsail reefed but with the genoa heavy on shore, “surfing” the wave without reefing or pulling over. It takes maximum concentration, though the boat remains perfectly maneuverable. The “pang-pang” of a badly rigged pot disturbs me, but nothing in the world would induce me to move. I feel myself vibrating: and living. Then the gloom passes and the round of wandering thoughts of a quiet guard returns….

That Cape Horn, unbelievable!… Will I ever see anything more beautiful? What conquest will ever give us as much satisfaction? Tomorrow I will bake a semolina cake to celebrate our arrival in South Georgia… But who knows South Georgia? Who has any idea of its location on the nautical chart?….

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2022. Rondetto. The incredible barge that won’t die

I have to finish reading the Southern Courier, Saint-Exupery writes just … strange, he belongs to the race of prophets … but no, it’s just an extreme lucidity of thought, a lucidity that comes from wisdom and meditations on the world around us …

Toward the end of the shift the weather worsens; it must be the beginning of a gust of wind. “Let’s reduce the canvas,” Jérôme decides. I would have liked to wait for the day and gain some more miles to redouble to shelter Georgia: but we must not forget that we are below the Fifty Screamers. We continue under trinchetta (12 sq. m.) always on the run. Going to sleep. It is Jérôme ‘s turn to enjoy his boat. But my rest is disturbed by the wind whistling from the gradually more furious breakers.

When my shift starts again, Jérôme admonishes me, “You have to get used to it. There are real mastodons around. I’ve seen wave cables that must have been close to 15 meters. They generally vary between 10 and 12 meters. Try not to start in “surf” just now the boat started and I wasn’t holding it anymore. “Shall we anchor?”, I ask. “We would be more comfortable under a small jib or storm jib,” Jérôme replies, “but if the coast or rocks suddenly appear you need to be able to maneuver without delay. Better to keep going like this.”

The spectacle of this westerly wind gust, force 9 or 10, is quite frightening but fascinating. This is the first time we have seen such a unleashing, and our previous experiences of bad weather pale. Yet we have suffered considerable flailing in the northern hemisphere. But this time the game is different; it is the southern latitudes that are holding sway. The Damien runs on the Australian leapfrogs, with their cycle of vast troughs and formidable breakers. The wind is relatively moderate and we estimate it at 60-70 knots. But the sea is much worse than the wind; it seems to have risen in level and its breath is wheezing. It is mottled with white and the spray runs wild, ripping away from the crest of the waves, mingling, during the squalls, with snowflakes. Occasionally some rather large waves move obliquely to the breakers and almost always fringe. The albatrosses we used to find at every sunrise have disappeared, but other smaller birds flinch before the storm, holding their beaks to the wind.

Sky and horizon are capped, but from time to time the sun sneakily appears behind the sail.
– “Hey, the ‘cables we saw after the scull south of Greenland were dwarfed by some of the monsters around here!”
– “You can say it. We must have reached the shallows and found ourselves on the underwater platform surrounding Georgia, that’s the reason. We should not be far from being redoubled from the island. If you see the sun, call me: so I can get a line. It will always give us an idea of the position.”

Twenty minutes later it goes less well. A frightening bump shakes the Damien as if someone had dropped it from great height on an immense drum. It sounds as if it has burst and resounds with a thousand noises at once: a moment of darkness then immediately water, above the level of the dunnage. We leap out and lower the foresail. The fragile autopilot blade has been blown off, not a major failure: it is only a very delicate piece of plywood, while everything else in the device is undamaged. Instead, the left lower spreader sheared off flush with its hardware, which is very dangerous given the stresses to which the mast is subjected. While I maintain the boat as best I can with the stern to the wave, Jérôme climbs the mast and, using the foresail sheet, secures the spreader as best he can. A stern locker hatch has ajar, although its watertightness had been reinforced: water has probably entered from there. We return down below after fixing it.

– “Christ, there is more water than before, don’t you think.”
– “I would say yes.”

Later we find out the origin of all that water: a connection between the freshwater tanks had broken and nearly 200 liters had been added to the water that had seeped in through the locker. But in the meantime I pale, I have the disturbing impression that there is a bad leak. We disgorge buckets of the frozen liquid and get to the bottom of it.The mess below deck could be worse: the bunks, the dunnage, the lockers, the chart table, and everything else that is usual to move during a scull is neatly rigged. Only a few everyday items and wood and coal are scattered around.

As he lights a restorative blaze, Jérôme gasps:
– “Holy crap, a low cross shouldn’t split, on this particular boat. It’s unbelievable, man! Stuff to blow up the mast! Good thing it’s sturdy!”

The
Damien
seems to behave best in dry cape with no fetters and in its natural position with the wind and sea to the side. We regain confidence. When a breaker comes she lies on her side with the mast horizontal and, resting on the dead work, releases at a speed hard to estimate…. 10-12 knots?…and then rises again. It then re-enters the wind and regains its traverse position. For a heavier boat with a greater draft it would be, under present circumstances, a most dangerous position. It would brutally resist the impact, would not slip as easily, and would regain its trim much more violently. A nutshell, no matter how tossed about by bad weather, has more safety qualities and a better chance of pulling through than any ship. By the way, when one is on board the aforementioned nutshell, one is not always aware of the situation:-

What happened. Did we scuffle?
– Not really. We certainly made it around, but we more likely swamped, although that’s not exactly the case. The wave was incredibly high and steep. We were in its breaking part, longer than the boat, there was still water above with a chasm below. When it “boarded” us, I believed we would never be able to get out of it. It seemed impossible. The boat flew with its butt overhead. So it didn’t sink but was projected ass-over-head into a real chasm.
– This is unbelievable!
– If you had seen the wave, you would understand…
– Christ… I’m going to make some coffee and treat us to a shot of whiskey.

When will this blast of wind with its periodic, abominable howls ever end? The Damien continues its dry hood. One waits hoping for an improvement. There is so little way to Grytviken, north of the island, so close in turn. The wind whistling angrily between the rigging hurts. When a breaker wave takes a chase it sounds like a noisy big man running at great stride, mad with rage and intent on inflicting as deadly and sonorous a flail on us as possible. We stop breathing, all of us cringing without even trying to defend ourselves, as we are not sure where he will strike. And the flail comes…

This blast of wind from the west does not want to let up. When I take a look at the sea, through a porthole or looking out of the dome, I close my eyes straining to believe that I saw wrong, that those masses of foam are born of my imagination or exhaustion. I am afraid. Afraid above all that I will end up hating the sea, as happens after a deep love disappointment. If that were the case, then I would have nothing left to do on a sailboat. How would I listen in this pandemonium to such expressions as “Love me as I am, take me as I am, and if you are not capable of it, give yourself to cycling”? But how does a sailboat get through seas like these? How did Vito Dumas, Moitessier and others get through? And the Smeetons who tried again! At certain moments the sea is crystal clear, pure green all over a large surface, and such an extraordinary sight usually follows the passage of a breaker wave of particular size. At other times the surface becomes all white, seething, and new secondary waves form. When we are down in the reentrant we catch a glimpse of the top of the previous one and the top of the next one: and it seems impossible not to be engulfed. It is very, cruelly beautiful. It has never happened to me, under similar circumstances, to feel this impression of anxious anticipation, and I know that, if there had been no scuffle, I would slip into a euphoric state like a drunk for whom all dimensions change, for whom nothing is difficult anymore. But I am not drunk and the confidence in my boat is justified. We have never seen such a spectacle. Will there be others? The sea has gone mad. the sea no longer exists. The sea. The sea, huge, boundless and then, more nothing, just silence. Brutally.

And the strange journey begins. It is all so sweet after these hours of demented smashing. I know you shouldn’t, but it is so pleasant to let yourself slip, because the struggle is over, because all that was the past and the present is consumed, because there is no more future. This instant does not end, will never end again — beyond enjoyment, beyond suffering. Eternity. Not fear. Not rejection. I lose awareness, a sense of my surroundings and the immediate action that lies at the apex of our lives, of Jérôme probably letting himself slip into the same kind of torpor. At times I awaken abruptly, when the water has gnawed away at some more of our flesh, chilling it: but it is the overawing of a hungover man who opens his eyes without waking up and who brings his glass to his mouth machinically. Only to close his eyes again and fall back into nothingness. Or, perhaps, it is Jérôme‘s voice: How’s it going, Gérard?

Then we “pass” again. Passing, a simple and beautiful term for the end, erasure of existence, sliding without footholds, without bumps to the other void, to the invisible part of the wall. We pass and it is a moment of intense life. This threshold of death is certainly a transcendence.

– …?
– …?

But of course it goes, I answered — I brought the glass to my lips — in the same way as he asked the question. The analysis is progressive, as if vivisecting time. Gérard answered Jérôme. Jérôme is still alive, his voice confirmed it: and my voice confirmed my existence. Yet there is no more hope of life, even far away: the
Damien
is turned upside down, the
Damien
is keeled in the air, the
Damien
is filling with water and we are in it. The moment of the colossal slap suffered by the left side of the Damien only three-quarters of an hour after the first capsize. The furious nature had focused its wrath against our little boat, which had appeared to us, at that moment, too fragile to hope to get away with that end of the world. The roar had been deafening, frightening. How had the hull been able to withstand such a shaking without bursting into a thousand pieces?

And now here we are in the aquarium. The sudden silence of the wind and the roar of the waves increases the impression of death and, at the same time, of ecstasy, The boat seems stabilized in its new position, it does not dive fore or aft and barely moves. We reject this absurdity: 1600 kg of cast iron, the weight in the bilge–a 5-ton boat–no, that’s impossible. Well, are you going to put her back up or not? We got screwed with the ballast, I swear! The water is rising rapidly, invading the cabin. We are sinking.

None of the deck’s Goiot hatches, no portholes have given way but the water level is higher, inexorably, with each passing second. Overhead. Dream. Reality. Everything is jerking along like an old film. Time is now devoid of consistency: reasoning proceeds following the circuitry of cells according to the sensory messages they receive and are deciphered at such a speed as to overwhelm us. Time has stopped. My thought no longer exists, someone else’s whose existence I was unaware of until this instant works: because my thought stopped a minute, a second ago… in short, not even enough time for his question and for mine…. my thought has escaped, I find it again, I find it again, and I observe myself as I find it again and again. It is another Jérome, it is another Gérard those who are dying, we are too hovering — this way or that way. The boat keeps filling up, it will never straighten out again.

The
Damien
goes down. It’s a lousy storm and it’s a lousy ending, an apotheosis that explodes like the brass in Berlioz or Wagner. It’s too dickish to croak like rats…. But no, the rats abandon ship in time…. At that moment I had come to believe that no sailor had ever experienced such a storm, that no man had ever died. Then I realized that death is the most intense instant of life, the easiest instant to grasp. Too bad that then everything must come to a halt and that no lessons can be learned from such essential truth, such as is revealed in a rush of lucidity that is lost forever if one manages to cope in spite of everything. An unsuspected capacity of consciousness.

– “Jérôme, how’s it going?”
– “You know, I think this time…”
– “The little boat goes by eye!…”

We accept the fact, we have already accepted it. Without panic, without regret. For a sailor it is a good end. Finishing with one’s own boat. We said our goodbyes, words of friendship. Long sentences are useless between us, and we are not here to make movies. The minutes tick by, those of our eternity approach. The red-filter navigation lamp that has not worked for months now has turned on by itself and seems either a useless warning sign or the first stage of the other world. Gradually the numbness envelops us. I feel less and less able to understand, to know if I am still able to think: the brain seems frozen, gradually receding from my being. I fall asleep. We cannot act or react because there is nothing to do with a sailboat that has its keel in the air, with water that penetrates from nowhere, with the will that no longer exists already. As long as one does not see death in the face, one can believe in one’s immortality: but when one stands on the bell tower of one’s own life, the bell tolls, undoubtedly.

In the cabin of the
Damien
there is an increasing sense of foreignness. An upside-down sense. Try to imagine your everyday world, turned upside down: and you walking on the ceiling, in the dark. Everything becomes difficult, every corner, every object becomes hostile. I have been bloody struggling to locate my position in this cramped space. Now I know: I am leaning against the side of my bunk, my feet propped up against the ceiling. Jérôme is a little further away…. He seems far away but I realize the trap set for me by the illusion. He is leaning against the tip of the inner steering post. He has moved. A little while ago he was closer, leaning against the stove.

To the stove. To the stove? Still not affected by the deep burn on the shoulder. The water keeps rising. Everything is black around or rather greenish. We don’t talk anymore. We should try to measure time. How long has the
Damien
has been with its keel in the air, how long has this time lasted, how much is left for us to measure? It is complicated, since the clear messages of normal consciousness are mixed with the confused and incomplete ones-or complete at the unconscious level-of sensations: the frozen water, the cold, the lack of light, the paralysis that gains terre- no. And the relief of no longer feeling the unleashing of the gust of wind.

When later Jérôme and I recall these moments, when we reconstruct our gestures, our vain attempts to provoke the righting of the boat, we will be amazed at the absolute parallelism of the advance of our thoughts, analysis, sensations, cravings, anxieties. The narrative says “I,” but it is clear that there were two of us, two of us suffering, two of us on the threshold of the Underworld, two of us passing through. The
Damien
was no more: he was but a wooden shell overturned by a breaker wave more frightening than the previous ones (which had already shaken his safety with their furious assaults). But, in truth, what can you do when a sailboat finds itself with its keel in the air, its mast in the water, in a very balanced position, with icy water slowly seeping in, and when, with death progressively invading you, you don’t actually feel any sense of rebellion other than that related to the technical-mathematical absurdity? How can a sailboat equipped with a ballast of 1600 kg, to which are added. 300 kg of weight in the bilge, refuse to immediately recover its normal balance? The rifle. Yes, the rifle! Not as a weapon but as a security, like a puff of heat that would make the strange dream sweeter. To find it would require orientation, and the effort was too great. Certainly it was the last big wave of the storm that gave us the final blow, since none of the subsequent ones were able to help the boat right itself. A light tap would probably suffice. A trifle!, for the ballast lever arm to kick in and make the hull regain its logical center of gravity.

And the awakening: all that grayness beyond the porthole. It is absurd: I would rather have drowned without seeing the light of life again. The boat churns: the water inside starts lapping and this whispering undertow is decidedly sinister. And then the tumult and
Damien
becomes again.
Damien
And straightens up on the left. It lasted for only a second, and everything unfolded with wild aggression as with the cry of the newborn baby at the moment of birth. And it is a birth! We struggle feverishly against the objects we gathered in the first moments of the capsize, in the vain hope of causing a heel and helping the boat right itself: objects that now fly dangerously and try to bury us. We struggle against drowning, against icy water seeping everywhere. It still takes us a few seconds to realize that we are alive, that the boat is floating though very low on the water, still in the normal position.

We chatter our teeth, we tremble, we stutter. The inside of the dome is covered with frost, the contact of which with our fingers increases the chills that shake us. Outside the sea breaks less, the wind has let up. The stern locker hatches are in place and so are the thongs and the anchor well up on deck on the eyebolts provided. But the Damien is no longer a sailboat; the mast has disappeared. Or, rather, it rubs against the hull, probably broken into many pieces, held in place by the Sarma rigging, none of which has given way. The spectacle below deck is infinitely bleak, nipping the flare of revival in the bud. Water reaches the level of the bunks while objects scattered everywhere and the contents of burst lockers hinder us in our laborious trudging through that slush. “Let’s get busy,” encourages Jérôme. The
Damien
sinks. Less stable than when she had her keel in the air, she congeals aft. The peaks are semi-submerged and go under when a wave rocks our poor boat, despite the height of the deadrise at that point. Let’s hope it doesn’t increase the tilt! We have about 10 tons of water inside the hull and during the first two hours spent shelling we barely manage to keep the level from rising. We don’t venture yet to peel through the cabin door; the danger of another breaking wave cannot be ruled out. Much of the water must be shelled through the sink. Let’s get busy, all right, but the first scull and especially four or five minutes underwater have drained us of all energy. My God, how heavy is a bucket with 20 liters of salt water! With every movement it is a martyrdom of locked joints, of parched muscles, of helpless will: when we bend over, it seems we cannot straighten up. Night falls quickly, light, fire are needed…. Fire? With our reserve of flint for the lighter that was exhausted….

Miraculously, the chart table was not submerged: everything at a certain height on the starboard side was spared from the dripping water, as we were lying on the starboard side and surfaced from the port side–the 360-degree turn. We find two matchboxes intact. It will be necessary to economize. The lamp works. Jérôme works like an ox, lowering the bucket, filling it, lowering the bucket, filling it, emptying it, filling it, emptying it…. It’s all about, he affirms, finding the rhythm. We often have to devote ourselves to unclogging the sink, clogged incessantly with bits of paper, fishing line, nylon thread, magnetic tape, bits of coal. We are shaken by paroxysmal tremors and work in a state of semi-consciousness. The water level seems to keep up with the height of the bunks. Splashing around, I go in search of the bottle of whiskey: it would give us the lash we need. Eventually we unearth Sister Carrère‘s bottle of rum, given to us in Ushaia. Around 9 p.m. we win the battle with water. How much is left under the dunnage we will deal with in due course. The
Damien
is saved! A little oil, a few bits of damp wood, and the stove hums again. We tremble more than before, the nervous reaction adding to the fatigue of hours of effort endured in a sub-human state. But this blaze is our salvation. Jérôme finds the Amazon tobacco and enough to roll himself a cigarette.

“We are saved!” exclaims Jérôme. It’s true, damn good this first cigarette. Like the sip of alcohol just now, it has the taste of life.
– “What does the barometer do?”
– “966! Keep going down.”
We look at each other.
– “Gotta go!”
– “Courage.”

It is hardly a pleasure trip to recover what was once our beautiful Nirvana tree. The night is frosty and, although, the wind has let up, the sea is still big and rolls us 90°. We struggle like dogs to hoist the two logs aboard, the boom with the mainsail attached dangling miserably. The mast breakage occurred at the high spreader and we quickly find the explanation: three out of four spreader hardware broke. Only the one on one of the high spreaders held. The solidity of the mast and the rigging had nothing to do with it: the hardware was responsible for the breakage. We believe that any mast would have broken, probably from the first scull. Our mast was sturdy: 10.40 m, 12 cm x 12 cm section, metal construction to perfection with special internal reinforcements. But the very moment a mast is no longer held by rigging, it loses all ability to withstand tons and tons of pressure. Blame it on three pieces of iron–there’s snickering.

On deck the mess is indescribable. We shave everything that has let go, as sturdily as possible. We go back down below without daring to take too close a look at the barometer: the fall continues. To stop being tempted to look at it, we glue a sheet of paper to the glass of the demoralizing instrument. How far will it fall? It is now at 964 millibars. Sleep. Hopeless to rest, more like trying to forget our surroundings, to make the body believe that nothing has changed. The blankets are unusable, everything is wet, soaked with water. It is a miracle that the chart table was spared and that we found and could immediately use dry matches. Without that match-no, and then who knows. In man, the animal has such resistance….

We curl up like animals in a blizzard, against each other, crushed under blankets so wet we struggle to move them. Less than two hours later we scuff for the third time. It happened while we were in such a state of despondency that we realized it in a delayed burst. Nothing has moved or broken: we accept the fact with the fatalism of a completely deranged boxer who no longer even knows he is still standing and continues to take the blows. No referee will come to break up the fight. When the South Seas get angry, they go to the limit of their fury. We cannot sleep, close our eyes to sleep. Nightmare visions flow through our minds and dance an evil jumble: those elusive snowflakes escaping parallel to a horizon that is no longer there… that wave we did not see, fortunately… it must have been really monstrous… the icy water at chest height that kept rising…

by GÉRARD JANICHON
Translation by Gianni Botassis

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