Wreck of the 'teignmouth electron'

[MASH]

It seems hard to believe in our world with no hidden corners that a man could lurk in the Atlantic for months while pretending to be elsewhere. What surprises me is that he was not rumbled sooner. The only means of communications he could have had was HF so why did the usually highly experienced operators recieving his calls not notice that their antennae were aligned in completely different directions to that from which he claimed to be, there is after all a huge difference in direction between the S Atlantic and Brazil than from central Pacific.
I'd have thought this would be very obvious and ring alarm bells immediately.

 

[Keen_Ed]

[cough] Lisa Clayton [/cough]

 

[snowleopard]

why did the usually highly experienced operators recieving his calls not notice that their antennae were aligned in completely different directions to that from which he claimed to be, there is after all a huge difference in direction between the S Atlantic and Brazil than from central Pacific.
I'd have thought this would be very obvious and ring alarm bells immediately.

Firstly HF antennas are not normally directional so there would be no reason for Portishead to wonder why the bearing was wrong.

More importantly, for a transmitting station in the South Pacific below 60°S, the most direct great circle path to a receiving station in the UK is over the pole so if say he were pretending to be in 65°S 177° E but really in 50°S 3°W the bearing would be identical. Any small discrepancies could easily be assumed to result from variable propagation conditions.

 

[toad_oftoadhall]

why did the usually highly experienced operators recieving his calls not notice that their antennae were aligned in completely different directions to that from which he claimed to be, there is after all a huge difference in direction between the S Atlantic and Brazil than from central Pacific.
I'd have thought this would be very obvious and ring alarm bells immediately.

For much of the time he went incommunicado, citing a need to seal off the compartment the radio was in for some reason.

 

[VO5]

Ultimately it is very very sad.
Anyone who sails single handed in deep water out of sight of land must know all about the potential pressures, being tired, being sick, being disorientated, being lonely beyond lonliness, being uncomfortable with all these potentials, making mistakes, hallucinating, etc.,
So ultimately not having the right boat and the right mindset cannot help.
So ultimately it is very very sad is all I can say.

 

[Boo2]

[cough] Lisa Clayton [/cough]

[cough]Who?[/cough]

Boo2

 

[MASH]

Thanks, Mr Toad. That explains a lot.

HF antennae are of course directional which is why I asked the question. (whips excluded - which aren't appropriate for long range use).

The kit used by even moderately well equipped hams will include, or perhaps more accurately depend upon a rotatable high-gain antenna array that often needs to be pointed towards the transmitting station in order to get a decent signal. This is a reasonably good indication to the operator of the bearing on which the other station lies. The kit used by Portishead is far more sensitive and capable of accurate pointing than a mere three element ham setup so they would be far more likely than a ham to pick up discrepancies, quite apart from being professional operators and far more likely to notice anomalies like this. Having said that any half awake ham would be all too likely to spot the signal wasn't coming from where it ought to, and a recurrence of this should set alarm bells ringing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yagi_antenna


This would be why he didn't want to transmit more than very irregularly.

Shame he wasn't honest and brave enough to retire gracefully when it all got too much.

 

[Elessar]

and a cluster of unused flares she discovered in a secret hatch on the bottom of the boat’s hull. So great was Crowhurst’s fear of capsizing that he had these compartments custom-designed.

apparently he had designed a system to detect imminent capsize and inflate a buoyancy bag aloft. The relay control system was one of the many things he never finished due to his rush to depart, and the weight aloft of course just made capsize more likely. Not that that would ever matter.......

 

[nmeyrick]

Anyone interested in this story - and who that has ever set to sea in a small boat can help being - really should read the recent "a race too far" by Chris Eakin mentioned earlier. It is a fabulous read, and he got unprecedented access to some of the key survivors including the widows of Tetley, Crowhurst and Moitessier.

I hope I won't sound like a lunatic when I say that, much as I would like to think of myself as RKJ, the more I read about Crowhurst's story the more I can identify with him. Yes he clearly lost it in the end, but throughout the whole enterprise he was basically a normal guy who had got out of his depth trying to do what he thought was the right thing for his family. he made lots of bad decisions, some of them momentously bad, but I really got the impression he was nothing like as naive as he has often been painted and knew just how poor his chances of returning where before he set sail.

Very sad, and the story of the Tetleys is equally heartbreaking. It's easy in these days
Of round the world races to forget what an enormous achievement this race was.

 

[status]

One could speculate that if he had made it a few thousand more miles, T.E. might be preserved in Britain and viewed by thousands every year.

If he had made it back he would only be a foot note in history as either a cheat or an also ran. Only the story of his unwinding and suicide makes it notewothy so T.E. would not have been preserved in the UK either.

 

[RichardS]

he was nothing like as naive as he has often been painted and knew just how poor his chances of returning where before he set sail.

I remember reading in one of the recent books that the night before he set off Donald spent much of the night in tears, presumably because he knew that neither he nor the TE were ready and that his fate was surely sealed.

Retrospectively, his wife realised that this was almost certainly Donald seeking his family's support in calling the whole thing off but, sadly, she didn't really understand his cry for help and thought it was just last minute nerves.

This is speculation but I felt that Donald was a very private and insular person, who was not inclined to show his inner emotions to anyone, not even his wife, so she was not used to such displays of insecurity or emotion and, not surprisingly, misinterpreted the uncharateristic outburst.

I discussed this with my wife and we are hopeful that in our more open and equal relationship (more "modern" perhaps?) she would have no difficulty in reading my true feelings and would instinctively know what I was really asking.

However, I hope to God never to have our relationship tested to such limits!

Richard

 

[JayBee]

re:nmeyrick

Absolutely agree with this.

 

[savageseadog]

Anyone interested in this story - and who that has ever set to sea in a small boat can help being - really should read the recent "a race too far" by Chris Eakin mentioned earlier. It is a fabulous read, and he got unprecedented access to some of the key survivors including the widows of Tetley, Crowhurst and Moitessier.

I hope I won't sound like a lunatic when I say that, much as I would like to think of myself as RKJ, the more I read about Crowhurst's story the more I can identify with him. Yes he clearly lost it in the end, but throughout the whole enterprise he was basically a normal guy who had got out of his depth trying to do what he thought was the right thing for his family. he made lots of bad decisions, some of them momentously bad, but I really got the impression he was nothing like as naive as he has often been painted and knew just how poor his chances of returning where before he set sail.

Very sad, and the story of the Tetleys is equally heartbreaking. It's easy in these days
Of round the world races to forget what an enormous achievement this race was.

Agree again. The bankruptcy courts are full of people like Crowhurst who wanted to better themselves and went into enterprises that dragged them down. We exhorted to to work harder, do more provide a better standard of living for our families, it's the old Christian work ethic. There will be people who are swallowed whole and spat out, we are all normal people till the limit is reached. He was Icarus and flew too close to the sun, many do.

 

[AntarcticPilot]

One thing that is interesting is that faked navigational logs have been suspected in other situations. The ones I know of are related to Polar Exploration, and include Cook and Peary's expeditions to the North Pole, and Admiral Byrd's first flight to the North Pole. I won't go into detail, but there is strong evidence that none of these people made the journeys they claimed to have made, and that they faked their navigational logs.

In all cases, these were people who were driven by external pressures to prove that they had succeeded in creating a "first". Modern thinking is that probably neither Cook nor Peary made it to the North Pole, and the jury is out on Admiral Byrd - though he made up for it with later flights!

However, a counter example is that no-one would have believed Amundsen's claims to be the first to the South Pole if Scott hadn't photographed Amundsen's South Pole camp. Of course, Scott's camera and photographs were found on their bodies, documenting Amundsen's achievement. Amundsen's navigational technique was dedicated simply to finding latitude; it was a simple technique dedicated to allowing him to know when he got to 90 South, and as such, reconstructing some critical parts of Amundsen's route to the Pole is actually a matter of conjecture! But because of that, it would have been extremely easy to fake. Scott's navigation - as would be expected of a naval officer of that era - was thorough and would have been extremely difficult to fake.

 

[adrianmorgan]

Nigel Tetley's trimaran Victress disintegrated while being pressed too hard in a storm near the Azores. Tetley believed that he was in close competition with Crowhurst at the time.

Yes, and because Tetley (the first person to circumnavigate solo, by crossing his outgoing track, with no stops in a trimaran) thought Crowhurst was gaining, he pressed too hard, and Victress sank. And because he failed to win the race he deserved to win, he failed also to win the prize money he desperately needed, and because he had no money to complete a new yacht to win the recognition he deserved, and which Crowhurst's duplicity robbed him of, he became depressed, and because he became depressed, he killed himself, aged 48, all because some ill-prepared, electronics nut decided to cheat. This is seldom mentioned in any account of Crowhurst's "tragic" voyage. The real tragedy is Tetley's, an honest man robbed of his moment of glory...

 

[Seajet]

FWIW, I had heard how Nigel Tetley pushed too hard thanks to Crowhurst, this is mentioned in a few books. I doubt that was even considered by D.C, though I get the idea he was sensitive enough that this alone would have led him to jump.

History is full of champions brought down by those lesser mortals around them, Nigel Tetley's loss is particularly sad.

One can see why RKJ gave away the prize money, if the future had been known maybe N.T. would have got half ..?

 

[Keen_Ed]

[cough]Who?[/cough]

http://forums.sailinganarchy.com/index.php?showtopic=20085&view=findpost&p=397847

 

[VO5]

Yes, and because Tetley (the first person to circumnavigate solo, by crossing his outgoing track, with no stops in a trimaran) thought Crowhurst was gaining, he pressed too hard, and Victress sank. And because he failed to win the race he deserved to win, he failed also to win the prize money he desperately needed, and because he had no money to complete a new yacht to win the recognition he deserved, and which Crowhurst's duplicity robbed him of, he became depressed, and because he became depressed, he killed himself, aged 48, all because some ill-prepared, electronics nut decided to cheat. This is seldom mentioned in any account of Crowhurst's "tragic" voyage. The real tragedy is Tetley's, an honest man robbed of his moment of glory...

Yes, agreed, and over lunch at Vega in Trafalgar Square with Francis Chichester in the mid seventies his comment was "the whole affair is just too awful", and that was that.