At other times, such as when a crewman goofs, he can turn as volatile as Bols gin. Sometimes he is as stolid as Dutch cheese. When he is aboard, Bruynzeel commands his vessel from a spacious after cabin like an omnipotent Captain Ahab. Nevertheless, Stormvogel is South African by name, build and, most of all, spirit. Wherever she goes, Stormvogel always flies a Dutch flag of convenience since occasionally she has to stop at ports where a Republic of South Africa ensign would be an invitation to trouble. Then she goes down to the South Seas, New Zealand, up to Australia to keep an appointment with the Sydney-Hobart Race, on to Japan, Hong Kong and after that Bruynzeel alone knows. Rio race, then up to Panama, through the Canal, up the Mexican coast and on to Los Angeles in time for the Transpacific Race. Next January, Bruynzeel plans to cruise her to Buenos Aires for the B.A. Thomas, South America and Rio, where she will lay up for a month or two. Helena to Recife breezed up through the West Indies to the Bahamas, Miami, New York did the Bermuda Race rested there four days and right now is on her way back to St. This year, for example, Stormvogel (the name means stormbird in Afrikaans) left Cape Town crossed the South Atlantic by way of St. Only Huey Long's Ondine has traveled farther. Since the light-displacement ketch was built in South Africa three years ago (she is the biggest of her kind ever constructed in that country), she has averaged 20,000 miles every year, and her logbook reads like a tramp steamer's.
#Heave ho thomas us Patch#
Anyway, here I am."įor most of Stormvogel's complement, the 635-mile run from Newport to the Onion Patch was merely an inch or so on the yardstick of her 20,000-mile itinerary up and down and across the Atlantic. "He was in favor of the idea, but my mother had a few doubts.
"My father's a keen yachtsman," she said by way of explaining how she came to be aboard. Nurse Rosemary Kirkman, 26, is content to wear a bikini and pay $180 a month to cook for the other 12 ever-hungry crewmen. Textile Designer Margaret Macdonald, 26, stands watches, pumps winches, spins the wheel and hands sails. Both joined Stormvogel in Cape Town and will be with her all the way to Rio. Also aboard were a commercial artist, a law student, a shopkeeper from Cork, a bearded English expatriate from Cape Town named Jock Hardwicke-described by one of his friends simply as a "retired gent"-and an ex-assistant manager of London's Savoy Hotel.įor decorum's sake, the two female members of the crew bunked forward in a tiny, two-berth cubbyhole filled with a jumble of sails, bagged and unbagged.
There were two marine engineers, one of whom has become so attached to his freewheeling life that he plans to leave Srormvogel temporarily at Rio and go to sea in a steamer to earn enough money to continue on around the globe with Stormvogel. Other members of the crew were seastruck amateurs from South Africa, Ireland, England, Argentina, Holland and the U.S., whose occupations varied as widely as their nationalities. Two were close friends of the owner, the other was an invited guest who sweated and strained as hard as any but had to sleep on a settee without blankets in the main saloon while bunks lay empty in the master's cabin. Of the 11 male and two female crewmen who labored to get Stormvogel first over the line at Bermuda last week, only three were not paying hard money for the privilege. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this policy is that it works. "But it's a way of getting nice people aboard."
"The money they pay me doesn't nearly pay the food bill," he says.
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