Somewhere between Cape Town and Marion Island, Totorore capsized in a storm and lost her mast.
Gerry Clark was born in England and spent G his early years in the British Merchant Navy. By 1958 he was looking for a more stable life for his family and so the Clarks emigrated to New Zealand, purchased an orchard in Kerikeri and became pioneers in the organic growing of citrus and subtropical fruits.
To help support the struggling orchard Gerry occasionally undertook delivery voyages of ships, fishing boats and yachts. On these brief sojourns at sea, he began to hone his love of birds into a particular passion for seabirds.
In 1968 he completed building a 7m engineless yacht named Ketiga. Anyone else in that situation would have cruised the Hauraki Gulf, but not Gerry. He entered her in the first solo trans-tasman yacht race and then completed a circumnavigation of New Zealand which included the subAntarctic islands.
This later voyage seems to have been a turning point in his life as it had exposed him to the violence, beauty and seabird paradise that is the Southern Ocean. Upon his return he began to plan for a larger boat strong enough to withstand the rigors of a long-distance voyage in the deep south.
Over the next seven years he constructed an Alan Wrightdesigned 11m cutter in kauri timber, selling some of the orchard to pay the bills.
The boat was called Totorore, the Māori name for the Antarctic prion, and launched late 1982. Barely a year later, Gerry embarked on a 38,413-nautical mile, three-year easterly circumnavigation of Antarctica. His aim was to gather information about the seabirds of the Southern Ocean. It was to become one of the most remarkable small boat voyages of all time.
The book – The Totorore Voyage – chronicles this adventure and, while it is no work of literary art, the story that it tells is staggering in its ambition and courage.
Totorore and Gerry managed to achieve things that very few have done since. He departed New Zealand in the approaching winter and dove down into the Southern Ocean with the first of his many crew, Ken Black.
For most of his voyaging Gerry would have companions like Black who were of an ornithological bent and who were prepared for the sake of the birds to endure the privations of seasickness, close quarters and the ever-present possibility of peril.
There were birds and storms aplenty, but it is perhaps the image taken on the dive down to the Antarctic Peninsula in winter that says it all. No one had ever dared sail that far south in winter and the photograph Gerry took of Totorore’s rigging completely iced up will send a chill into any sailor’s heart.
After three days desperately chipping at the ice with hammers and screwdrivers, he and his crew managed to save the top-heavy Totorore from capsizing and slipping into cold oblivion.
Somewhere between Cape Town and Marion Island, Totorore capsized in a storm and lost her mast. Clark continued on with makeshift masts and a sail made from an orange tarpaulin, but even worse was to come.
East of Heard Island the yacht was rolled 360o on five separate occasions, in seas that were extreme even by Southern Ocean standards. Gerry’s usual optimism deserted him. He recorded in his log: ‘A night of terror has shattered my confidence and has left me in a serious doubt as to my chances of survival.’
The fear might have crushed a lesser man but Gerry kept going and managed to keep Totorore afloat. For the next 68 days the boat drifted and sailed in a general north-easterly direction, the tarpaulin strapped between bipod masts made of spinnaker poles.
As Gerry approached the Australian coast near Fremantle he noted, ‘I could see some beautiful big yachts, all obviously of the same class, sailing around Gage Roads and several passed close by to see what strange craft was coming into the harbour with its little orange square sail.’
The yachts turned out to be those of New Zealand’s America’s Cup team, which was training for the 1987 regatta. Not only had Gerry survived the worst of the Southern Ocean, he had stumbled into the embrace of New Zealand’s best sailors. They would help return Totorore to her finest form for the voyage home to New Zealand.
Gerry loved the Southern Ocean and returned several times after the Totorore voyage to ferry scientists and ornithologists to the remotest corners of this wild ocean.
In the heart of winter 1999 with crewman, Roger Sale, he transported two albatross researchers to the Antipodes Island, 415 nautical miles south-east of New Zealand.
After dropping the researchers ashore Totorore anchored in nearby Alert Bay to avoid a northerly gale. This was the last that was seen of the sailors and only small pieces of wreckage from the Totorore were ever found.
What remains is a fantastic book from an exceptional sailor. BNZ