made by aircraft manufacturers.' She added with a touch of anxiety, 'You're going to try and make time, aren't you? Sail her?'
'My brief is to reach Gough Island within a week. I intend to.'
She considered my statement for a moment, then answered, 'You'll need all the luck.'
'Isn't it a tradition that any sailor who has sighted Cape Horn will have good luck for the rest of his – or her - career?' Her face became expressionless. 'It didn't bring me luck.' 'Meaning?'
She shrugged and was silent. Then she resumed in a different tone altogether. 'It's also a legend that anyone rounding Cape Horn has the right to have a pig tattooed on the calf of the right leg.'
Her amusement had an infectious quality, contrasting with her serious, sombre air of a moment before.
'I did.' She reached down and pulled up the leg of her corduroy pants. 'There. It's mainly gone now. It wasn't a real tattoo, only a kind of self-eradicating transfer.' Her mood changed mercurially. 'Louis thought it was disgusting. How could a lady go out to a party in London with a pig tattoo showing through her stocking?' 'Louis?'
'Husband. Ex. I did it for a laugh. Strangely, it was one of the things he battened on for the divorce.' 'I expect it was only a symptom.'
The colour now in her cheeks had nothing to do with the effort of climbing the ladder. 'Why shouldn't I? Old grandfather Fenton -I remember him still – had his whole forearm tattooed…' 'Is that where your sailoring genes come from?'
'He wasn't a sailor – he was a prospector’ she replied. 'Believe it or not, he went and lived on Gough Island between the wars prospecting for diamonds! Those were the days when a ship might have called once in a year – or never.'
'I never knew Gough was anything but a weather station.' 'Grandfather's expedition was long before it was inhabited. Maybe I'm a throw-back to the old man Perhaps it's his same spirit of adventure which brings me here, or made me sail round the world. Anyway, it'll be interesting to see Gough.'
Her remark brought me back to the hard realities facing Jetwind.
I replied a little offhandedly, 'I don't intend to stop. If you do see Gough, it would only be a glimpse. From there I'll be high-tailing to the Cape like a bat out of hell.' Again she asked eagerly, 'Then we're sailing – soon?'
'I didn't say so. But the race against time, the week, starts tomorrow.'
I sensed that by being non-committal I had lost her. She said distantly, 'John said you wanted to know about the sails?'
I felt I needed her on my side for what lay ahead. 'Listen, Kay,' I said. 'I intend to wring every knot, every half knot, out of this ship every mile of the way – and it's a long way. I'm a rule-of-thumb sailor, you're the specialist. I want you at my elbow to give advice when I hell-drive Jetwind. Automatics aren't the answer as far as I'm concerned. It's the human flair which counts in my scheme of things.'
Her response was to draw up her knees to her chin, squatting on the tiny circle of steel. It made her look more sixteen than twenty-six. I looked down at her, gripping an overhead cat-walk which gave access to the yard and rollers.
'Then you've got to appreciate how different Jetwind is from any ship that has gone before,' she said. 'First, I don't like the term sails. I prefer aerofoils.' 'Sails mean – sails, to me.'
'I'll stick to sails, then. Take a scientific look at the shape of the sails of an old racing China clipper and you'll see the resemblance to an aircraft wing – a slender trapezoid or triangle with a curvature parallel to the longitudinal axis. Therefore those ships were fast…' 'Stick to one-syllable words and I'll follow you.' 'Those early clipper sails were efficient aerodynamically. However, as soon as ships became bigger, the sails had to be split in order to be handled physically by their crews. That destroyed their aerodynamics. Later windjammers looked super but aerodynamically speaking they were a nightmare – hopelessly inefficient. And as for that spider's web of rigging!' She gave a shudder. 'It does awful things to one when you see them under test in a wind-tunnel.'
'They worked, Kay. They also put some of man's most beautiful creations on the face of the ocean.'
'You're wrong!' she retorted vehemently. 'It's Jetwind that's beautiful, more beautiful than the best of them! Don't you appreciate the beauty of this sail plan – an unbroken aerofoil from deck to truck? Not individual sails slopping about on their own but a single entity with all the grace and power of proved mathematics behind it! As for Jetwind's masts – there's never been anything seen before on the high seas like the Prolss mast!
'You have to regard them and the sails as one propulsive unit. We found by tests the optimum speed for a quite definite trim of the sails. We also had to determine the optimum curvature of the yards, by comparison with the sail force curves.' 'It's the end result that concerns me.'
Kay seemed to have more data stored in her mind than a computer memory bank. But however fascinating all this theory was, my first problem was a practical one, the logistics of Jetwind's break-out. I cut in on her rarefied theorizing. 'Kay, what's Jetwind's best point of sailing?'
She answered without hesitation. 'With the wind on the beam or slightly abaft the beam?' 'Best strength?' 'Gale. Force nine.' 'Reefed down?' 'Naturally.' 'Relative course angle?' 'One hundred and thirty-five degrees.' 'Speed?’ 'Twenty-two knots.' I said, 'On paper.'
She burst out passionately. cIf anyone can get that out of her, you're the man to do it! You thrashed Albatros across the face of the ocean as no man has ever thrashed a ship. We heard it on the radio’
I added., 'I intend to flog Jetwind until she makes Gough in a week or she falls apart at the seams.'
Provided you first manage to break out, a voice nagged at the back of my mind.
Kay's voice vibrated still. 'At her maximum, the aerofoil sail-plan delivers forty thousand horse-power. You've only got to have the nerve and the guts to use it!'
Twenty-two knots, under ideal conditions. The Almirante Storni could bullet along at thirty-five at full bore, depending on the state of the sea. She must never get the chance to use her speed advantage. That was my scheme.
Linked to my plan was the need to deploy all Jetwind's power rapidly. How fast could she accelerate from anchor to the ten knots I considered the minimum required? Could she work up to that speed in the mere kilometre and a half which separated her from where she lay now to The Narrows? 'Did you ever carry out any flying start tests in your wind-tunnel?' I asked. 'I don't follow you.'
'Say, for example, I wanted to accelerate Jetwind from a moored position to the maximum she could achieve under the wind conditions then prevailing, how would I set about it?' 'What wind velocity are we talking about?'
That was the kicker. At its worst, I must assume that the wind would be blowing only a moderate breeze of about sixteen knots by the early hours of the following morning. Anything above that would be a bonus in Jetwind's favour. 'Say, Force Three to Four.' 'And the sea?' 'If she was moored, it would be calm.' Her eyes became abstracted, and she murmured something to herself about side and thrust forces and angles of wind inflow. Then she asked incisively, 'She would naturally be carrying all sail?' 'You bet.' 'I make it eleven knots, at her best point of sailing.'
Eleven! I had hoped only for ten. If the wind were stronger than Force Three or Four, I'd have thrust in hand for my purpose.
Yet Kay still had not answered my question – how soon could I draw on that amount of Jetwind's speed? I couldn't be more specific without revealing my plan. I had no intention of doing so – to anyone. 'As for acceleration?' 'It's not the sort of thing we tested for.'
I changed the subject. 'Kay, what's this curious waxy smell in here – like furniture polish? Is it the hydraulic fluid?' She indicated one of the giant 'rolling-pins'. 'Dacron doesn't smell.'
'It's not the sails themselves but what's on them,' she explained. 'To protect them against infra-red and ultraviolet ray sun damage, they have a special kind of plastic coating. You can imagine what a suit of sails like this costs. Mr Thomsen asked the Schiffbau Institut to find some substance to protect the sails so a new flexible plastic was specially developed.'
I looked about me. 'This is where- Captain Mortensen was killed, isn't it?'
The animation went from her face. 'Right here in this bay. He's supposed to have been trapped between those two rollers.' 'Supposed?'
'I can't understand how such a thing could have happened,' she said vehemently. 'First, the sail was supposed to have been jammed on its yard-arm runners. How? At the Schiffbau Institut we carried out thousands of
