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degrees south, in the loneliest wastes of the Southern Ocean, the barometer began a steep fall and the wind started to blow hard from the northwest. By 6 a.m. the next morning, they were running downwind under bare poles (all sail stowed) before a whole gale – winds of 40 to 50 knots. The barometer was still falling, the wind still rising. The wind vane steering gear had become overpowered, no longer able to keep
Joshua
’s stern to the wind and sea, so it had been disconnected and the vane stored below; steering was now by hand, and would continue so as long as the storm lasted.
    Moitessier knew, he thought, exactly what to do under such conditions. Before leaving Tahiti he had met and spoken with American sailor William Albert Robinson, who had run his 70-footbrigantine
Varua
under bare poles through these same seas, in what he had described as the ‘ultimate storm’ in his book
To the Great Southern Sea
. Robinson had followed the accepted storm technique of dragging lines towed astern with anchors or ballast attached to them to slow the yacht down as it runs before wind and seas and prevent it from going so fast that it becomes unmanageable and broaches, possibly capsizing. The technique had worked for Robinson. Moitessier had read Robinson’s book, and another,
Once Is Enough
, Miles Smeeton’s thrilling (and even funny) account of his two separate and disastrous capsizes aboard his yacht
Tzu Hang
in the Southern Ocean west of Cape Horn. All small-boat sailors heading south into these seas (and many enthralled armchair adventurers) have read these two classics, profoundly hoping not to meet the same conditions and to learn what might possibly help them if they do. Smeeton too had towed lines, but that hadn’t prevented
Tzu Hang
from being hurtled forward to bury her nose in the sea when her stern was lifted by a giant wave that pitchpoled the yacht, snapping both masts off clean and ripping off the entire deckhouse, leaving a gaping hole in the yacht’s deck. Smeeton wondered, in his book, whether any precautions or techniques could have made a difference to the great sea that flipped
Tzu Hang
, but a sailor was conscientiously bound to follow procedure. (Under jury-rig, with a short mast made from floorboards,
Tzu Hang
limped into Valparaiso, where Smeeton and his singularly adventurous wife, Beryl, spent the better part of a year repairing their yacht. They sailed south for the Horn and
again
were rolled over in a storm, suffering the same damage.)
    Moitessier had prepared; he was all ready to slow
Joshua
down. He soon had five thick lines, between 16 and 55 fathoms (96 and 330 feet) long, trailing astern. Three lines were weighted by two or three 40-pound lumps of pig iron. A fourth line dragged a large net as a sea anchor, and the fifth trailed freely with nothing attached to it. This tremendous drag certainly slowed
Joshua
’s progress; breaking seas now swept over the decks and the boat appeared to be standing still or going backwards.
    Moitessier was steering from a small wheel inside the boat, beneath a turretlike hatch he had cobbled together in Tahiti from a steel washbasin and Perspex windows, which allowed him to look out but stay dry. He and Françoise had taken turns steering, but the lines astern had made the boat sluggish to respond and now only with difficulty and intense concentration could he alone keep the boat on course – the ‘course’, in this extreme, being to keep
Joshua
’s pointed stern, its least vulnerable aspect, dead before the enormous breaking waves. They could no longer move around inside the boat except by crawling and gripping on to handholds. Moitessier clung to the wheel at his perch, Françoise burrowed into their bunk. Food, except for what was easily grabbed in one hand, was out of the question.
    Another entire day and night wore by and morning came again; the barometer continued to drop to a rare low and the storm