How Bill and Josephine got into trouble, and Aileen came to the rescue
A reflection on Bill Belcher’s story by Nick Grainger
Shipwrecked on a coral island! A romantic notion for some. Desert Island Discs anyone? But a lot less so in reality.
It nearly happened to us aboard The Aegre. Our plan was to thread our way through the Tuamotu chain of coral atolls on the way to Tahiti. Just on dawn mid-ocean, we were heading for a gap between two coral atolls, Rangiroa and Arutea.
Long before GPS, it had been a cloudy night which meant that on our approach, since our initial landfall on Manihi atoll to the north, we had no star sights and relied on our distance run, the course steered and our estimation of tidal flow and currents around the atolls. A guess at best. Just in time in the dim early morning light we saw a line of palm trees dead ahead. It was a close thing as I tell in The Voyage of The Aegre book. You can also read more about it on this website in the Notes to Chapter 16 : Marquesas to Tahiti
But back in those days, others were not so lucky. One who narrowly escaped with his life was the experienced solo yachtsman, Bill Belcher. He wrote a book about it, Shipwreck on Middleton Reef.
With GPS today it wouldn’t happen, you might think, but we all know things can go wrong, and what if they do, and you wake up with the boat rolling over in the surf and smashing down onto the coral? No worries, you might say. Set off the EPIRB. Put out a MAYDAY, we’ll get picked up before we run out of pizza.
Well, maybe.
Belcher’s story is worth reading if you’re out there, thinking of it or just a fan of sea disaster stories. How he survived the loss of his boat and was eventually rescued. There was no dry land above the high-water mark, certainly no palm trees, and no one came looking for a month. When they did, he was gone.
Belcher was a crusty 66-year-old, competing in the 1978 Trans-Tasman Single-handed yacht race. Australian-born, a childhood in Uganda, a Cambridge educated, Glasgow apprenticed, engineer, he brought a tough-as-nails, ruddy down-to-earth, no-time for fools attitude to a career that spanned engineering, driving trucks full of medical supplies during the Spanish Civil War, flying in the RAF as a Mosquito navigator during WW2, then twenty years on engineering projects in Africa.
By 1970 he was back in Britain and set off to sail a small yacht across the Atlantic with his wife Aileen, and then the Pacific, ending up in New Zealand. Always the innovator, along the way he designed and built his own wind vane self-steering system. Interested, but too far from the UK to compete in the first OSTAR, he entered the Trans-Tasman equivalent in 1974 in the small yacht he’d sailed out from the UK, a heavy wooden 3o ft boat.
No-one gave Belcher a chance of doing well in this race from New Plymouth on the west coast of the North Island NZ, across the Tasman to Mooloolaba just south of Brisbane, 1,300 nm (2,408 km). But that year storm-force winds decimated the fleet, while the stubborn and wily Bill Belcher, the oldest competitor, just ploughed on regardless – and won.
Four years later he was back to defend his title. With a custom-built light-displacement plywood racer, Josephine, and an attitude to go with it. He was the man to beat.
7 days into the race he was well positioned amongst the leading four boats, but bad weather and overcast skies had precluded sun sights, and his RDF (radio-direction-finding) receiver was on the blink. Ever the diligent navigator, he’d been maintaining his DR (Dead Reckoning) position from course and distance run and adjusting it with his estimates of leeway and current, to determine his more likely EP (estimated position). But then the log, measuring distance run through the water, started playing up and he was estimating that as well. That evening, as every evening, he joined a radio sched to report his position, by then just 415 miles from Mooloolaba. He expected to arrive in 2 to 3 days. But it was his last radio call.
On Day 8, lunch over and the boat going well, albeit in severe conditions with extremely poor visibility, he lay down for a quick nap, only to wake with Josephine rolling over in waves of surf and crashing down onto coral. It was all over.
He had two early versions of an EPIRB, so set them off. Their signal, if it was ever sent, was never heard. His radio was underwater and useless. Having joined the radio sked every evening up till then, he thought his subsequent absence would be quickly noticed. They’ll soon realise I must be in trouble, he thought. I must be on Middleton Reef or the nearby Elizabeth reef. But I gave them ample clearance. Ah well, Search and Rescue will soon be alerted by the Race Officials and come looking.
Josephine was progressively swept across the coral on her side until the keel jammed in a rocky crevice. Belcher had an inflatable life raft, so blew that up. It provided somewhere dry to sleep. There was barely any coral above high water, and he needed to constantly ensure the life raft didn’t snag and puncture on a coral outcrop. He regarded the life raft not just as somewhere to sleep out of the water while remaining close to his wrecked yacht, but importantly, if it came to it, a way to rescue himself, by paddling and drifting aboard it from the reef to the east coast of Australia, a mere 300 nm (555 km) to the west.
Not far away on the reef was a wrecked Japanese fishing boat, with FOOD painted on the side and ropes hanging down to aid boarding. Should he attempt to reach it and go aboard? But he worried what would become of his precious life raft if he left it unattended. And besides, once he reached the ship, would he be able to board her? Would there actually be any food there? He chose not to risk it.
The days passed. A week with no sign of any search for him. He had saved food and water from the yacht. He was dumbfounded that no search for him had been made of the reef by the race organisers, thinking it was surely the most obvious natural hazard.
Belcher started to calculate how long it might take him to paddle and drift to the east coast of Australia, how many days food and water he should allow for that and how much longer he should or could wait at the reef to be rescued.
Impatience and a strong sense of self-reliance got the better of him. 14 days after hitting the reef, he departed in the life raft, its rudimentary sea-anchor removed, to be blown and drift to Australia. He had basic food and water left for 25 days, that he thought he could extend to 36 or more. He estimated he might make 8 miles a day drifting to the west downwind. If so, it would take about 36-7 days to reach Australia. It was going to be tight, but with luck, he thought, he’d be picked up before then.
The other race yachts progressively finished, and with no sign of Bill, and nothing heard since the radio sked on Day 7, Aileen his wife knew something was terribly wrong. But her pleas to the Race organisers and Canberra for a search, led to much angst. It was up to the Race organisers to request a search, but no one wants to cry wolf. Perhaps Belcher’s reputation contributed to a view that ‘He’ll be right’. But the longer they delayed, the bigger the search area, and the lesser chance of finding him alive.
Aileen kept up the pressure, and finally 21 days after his last radio call, an aerial search for Belcher was instigated. The first place they looked was Middleton reef, and sure enough that same day they found his wrecked yacht there, but of Belcher himself there was no sign. Was he alive or dead? Two days later a Navy team examined the wrecked boat. Various items regarded as important for a self-rescue were missing. Had he set off for Australia in his life raft? A further 5 days went by before a message went out to shipping off the east coast of Australia to look for his yellow life raft.
3 days later, a keen-eyed observer aboard a small freighter, the Einanoiya from Nauru, spotted the life raft with Belcher aboard. Ever the survivor he was in reasonable health, although his mood isn’t mentioned. It was 20 days since he’d left the reef, and 34 since he’d first hit it. The wind and current had swept his life raft much further to the north-west than he calculated, and he was still about 200 miles from Australia and drifting north west near parallel to the distant coast. The outlook would have been grim had he not been picked up.
In his book, Belcher tells his story much more fully and eloquently than I, and then goes on, in the context of the race and the times, to discuss the options he had and the questions that had plagued him since, and with hindsight, about what he might have done. It’s a thought-provoking read and well worth a few dollars. It’s long out of print but there are a few copies around. For instance Abe Books.
Over the years many vessels and lives have been lost on Middleton Reef. In his book Belcher includes an Appendix telling the stories of some to them since the first recorded loss of a ship, Mary Catherine in 1851. For instance in 1964 the yacht Sospan Fach was wrecked on the reef and four crew members spent six weeks living on the wreck of the Japanese fishing boat Belcher mentions, the Fuku Maru, before being spotted and rescued by another fishing boat. See a newspaper story here
Many weren’t so lucky.
On the reef are still the battered hulks of a few steel ships, but only the spirit of Josephine remains. While the reef, like a sleeping giant with an insatiable appetite, lies waiting.
Today, GPS, radar and electronic chart equipped yachts routinely visit Middleton Reef for shelter, a spot of fishing, or just to wonder at this huge semi-submerged reef hundreds of miles out in the ocean. Sometimes they write about it in their blogs, such as Cyndi and Rich aboard their yacht Legacy.
See Belcher B & Belcher A, 1979, Shipwreck on Middleton Reef: The Story of a Tasman Survivor, Collins.
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