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  Contents

  Francis Chichester

  Author’s Note

  1. The Romantic Challenge

  2. Down to the Starting Line

  3. The 4,000-Mile Race

  4. Nicaragua

  5. Escape from the Caribbean Sea

  6. Ambling Eastwards

  7. The Equator Dart

  8. The Homing Run

  9. Knockdown

  10. Can It Be Done?

  Appendix: Reflections in the Sea by Argus of Yachting Monthly

  Francis Chichester

  The Romantic Challenge

  Francis Chichester

  Aviator and sailor Sir Francis Chichester is best known for being the first and fastest person to sail around the globe single-handedly in The Gipsy Moth IV. Following this achievement he wrote several books and made films about his sailing experiences.

  Born in Devon and educated at Marlborough College, Chichester emigrated to New Zealand at the age of 18 and spent ten years in forestry, mining and property development. On his return to England he learned to fly, and in the original Gipsy Moth seaplane he became the first person to complete an East-West solo flight across the Tasman Sea, for which he was awarded the inaugural Amy Johnson Memorial Trophy.

  Chichester wrote many popular books on his air adventures, and during WWII he wrote the manual that single-man fighter pilots used to navigate across Europe. In 1964 Chichester published his autobiography, the bestselling The Lonely Sea and the Sky, and was knighted three years later for ‘individual achievement and sustained endeavour in the navigation and seamanship of small craft’.

  Chichester used his navigation experience to create a successful map-making company, Francis Chichester Ltd, which today still publishes pocket guides and maps which are sold throughout the world.

  Author’s Note

  There are so many people to thank and not enough space to do it adequately:

  First, and always, Sheila my wife, for her strong, unstinted support and wise counsel, as well as such practical help as stowing and cataloguing the stores for my voyages. Also for her work as vice-chairman of our map-publishing business while I am away.

  Giles, my son and great friend, though kept fully stretched by our business, has always happily lent a strong hand on Gipsy Moth as an excellent crew and ‘good companion’.

  Monica Cooper, friend and co-director, who copes so ably with the sales and distribution side of our business and in her private capacity gives so much help in an enterprise like this; also Michael Lewin and Douglas Johnson, our other co-directors, for their advice and support; and Ann Champion and all the other members of our staff.

  George Greenfield, for whom the words ‘literary agent’seem so inadequate a cover for his fertile activities on our behalf.

  Robert Clark, who designed Gipsy Moth V, and Denis Doyle, whose Crosshaven Yard built her so well. The quality of the work of designer and shipwrights—I remember particularly the skill and care taken by Paddy O’Driscoll—can be judged by the miraculous outcome of the events described in Chapter IX. In Cork, Denis and his wife Mary were ever hospitable hosts, as were the officers, members and staff of the Royal Cork Y.C., which did me the great honour of making me an honorary life member.

  Max Gunning invented my self-steering gear and Tony Morriss made it the best possible for Gipsy Moth. In the Beaulieu River my thanks are to Edward and Belinda Montagu; Pat Russell, who worked on the engine, propeller, electrical and plumbing installations; Stan the rigger and Frank the joiner; Mrs Martin who provided the greater part of the stores; and Enid Shortridge who started me off with the brownest, hardest-shelled eggs ever seen.

  Those who helped so generously in fitting-out: John Shaw of Shaw’s Wire Ropes; Perkins Engines; Richard Gatehouse of Brookes and Gatehouse; Marconi Marine; the Avon Rubber Company; Bill Whitbread, Raymond Seymour and John Fox of Whitbread for crew’s comforts, in keg and on tap; the Rolex Watch Co.; Kelvin Hughes; Norman Ellis and H. C. Hebard of Aladdin; Electric Power Storage Ltd. (Exide batteries); Lewmar Marine Ltd.; Henri-Lloyd Ltd., and many others.

  At Plymouth there are so many good and helpful friends; Terence Shaw of the Royal Western Y.C. of England; his wife Ruth, and the officers, members and staff of the Club; Vice-Admiral McKaig; Air Vice-Marshal Downey (who incidentally succeeded me as navigation officer of the Empire Central Flying School in 1945); and of course Jack and Nancy Odling-Smee, Percy and Patsy Blagdon, and the Masbfords.

  From the voyage I remember with gratitude the kindness of my Portuguese friends, new and old, at Bissau and Horta; Christopher Doll was, as you will see, ‘in at the beginning’, and has kindly given me some of his photographs for this book; Paul Berriff took some wonderful film of Gipsy Moth V for the BBC film The Romantic Challenge; Chris Brasher was the man—and the voice—behind the film, which I found thrilling and inspiring.

  In Nicaragua the British Ambassador Ivor Vincent and his wife Patricia were more than generous in their hospitality and help. And at El Bluff there was Bart, of whom more in these pages and much more in my memory.

  Throughout the voyage the efficient and ever-helpful GPO operators at Portishead relayed my weak radio signals to the BBC, The Observer, and my family. At The Observer, Frank Page patiently pieced together the jigsaw of my messages to tell the story, as did the reporters of the BBC Foreign Service.

  Kenneth Parker of Cassell’s, my British publishers, for his help with this book. Ken channelled my thoughts and the outpourings of my logbooks into a form which, he convinced me, was exactly what I had wanted anyway. I must add however that after working under his overseer’s whip seven days a week since we got together in June, I finished the book in King Edward VII’s Hospital for Officers. He even pursued me there, but the staff of the Hospital were so kind that I was quite sorry I had only one chapter left to write. My thanks also go to the staff of Grayshott Hall, where I am writing this as I quickly recover my health and strength.

  Margaret Helps deciphered, transcribed and typed the first drafts of the book; Gil Pearson and Erica Redfern produced the final typescript.

  My thanks go also to the production staffs of Cassell’s and Clowes, the printers, who co-operated magnificently to get this book out on the promised date, despite the inevitable delays caused by my illness.

  Lastly, a special word of thanks to Douglas Phillips-Birt, perhaps the only man who truly sensed and understood in advance the difficulties of my speed project, and was completely right in his technical assessment of them.

  F.C.

  September 1971

  1. The Romantic Challenge

  I love life; this great, exciting, absorbing, intriguing, puzzling, adventurous life. But I am sixty-nine; in September 1971, before this book is published, I shall be seventy, and my lifespan is shortening. So for the past few years I have pondered time after time how I can use the remainder of this great gift of life to the full. The Buddha said that life was a gift which any man can take but none can give; I think it is wrong not to use such a gift to the utmost,
wrong to bury it like an unused talent, wrong not to use it to the very end.

  It was in 1959, after what seems a miraculous recovery from lung cancer, a recovery due chiefly to my wife Sheila’s brave and forceful action, that my passion for life intensified and I became vividly aware of its precious quality. It was this that triggered off my taking part in the first Singlehanded Transatlantic sailing race from Plymouth to New York in 1960, and within thirty-two months of being first taken ill, I crossed the starting line for what was then the toughest yacht race ever devised, and was able to finish in 40½; days. It was a great adventure, that first solo race, and the prospect of racing alone across the Atlantic when I had never before been alone in any boat larger than a 12ft dinghy, was formidable. Five of us—five yachts—took part. Critics decried the race as too dangerous and an unnecessary risk of our lives. Before the race they said that my Gipsy Moth III, at 40ft, was too big for one man to handle; after the race they said that Gipsy Moth had won only because she was the biggest boat of the five.

  Today, eleven years later, it is already difficult to understand what a daring, exciting event that first Singlehanded Transatlantic race seemed at the time. Before the race, I said to myself that nothing could better it as an adventure, that I would be content to play it as my last card. And for a few months I was content to think of it as that. But a year later I found myself craving more excitement and I set out on a solo race against time to see if Gipsy Moth and I could make the passage from Plymouth to New York in thirty days. We failed to reach my self-appointed target by 3 days 15 hours, but on reaching Staten Island in New York harbour I recorded that the last thousand miles along the eastern seaboard of the United States may have been the most wonderful sail I shall ever have. These two passages were joyous adventures. After each of them Sheila sailed back across the Atlantic in Gipsy Moth with me. And after the second our son Giles, who was then sixteen, came too.

  It was after the 1962 venture that I got the urge to try sailing round the world alone. In 1931 I had failed in an attempt to fly round alone and this had been niggling away in the back of my mind; perhaps now I could achieve a solo circumnavigation sailing. The idea developed at about the time of the 1964 Single-handed Transatlantic race, and I became more ambitious. Could I at the same time pull off the first true circumnavigation by a singlehanded yacht round the three great Capes: Good Hope, Leeuwin, and the Horn? By true circumnavigation I meant one which passed through two points on the earth’s surface diametrically opposite each other. It was a most formidable project in itself, and then I developed another ambition. I would race against time, in this case the average clipper time for the passage from England to Australia and home again, which I calculated from the records as 100 days out and then 110 days back. The voyage in Gipsy Moth IV turned out to be another happy adventure, even though I failed in my race against the clippers. In fact I passed Melbourne 99 days out from Plymouth, so I would have made the passage in 100 days if I had landed there instead of going on to Sydney. But I had set my heart on sailing into Sydney Harbour because most of my flying voyages had started or finished there, and that cost me another seven days. Romantic notions have always proved expensive in one way or another. However, in compensation I achieved a bonus in that this was the fastest true circumnavigation which has ever been made by a small craft, either with or without a crew.

  My life had hardly settled down again before the same old restlessness was nagging at me. And time! time! time! was running on. How could I find one more satisfying venture? It would be difficult now to find a solo race or voyage with the thrilling romantic appeal of that first 1960 Transatlantic solo race or the 1966-7 circumnavigation. I looked back over my life to the projects or ventures which had been most satisfying; and began to ask why, and how, they stood out from the rest. I tried to see if there was a pattern running through them which would lead me to a new and perhaps last project.

  The Tasman flight in 1931 was easily the greatest adventure of my life. The Tasman Sea, between New Zealand and Australia, is two-thirds the width of the Atlantic, and I set out to cross it to Australia in a Gipsy Moth seaplane which weighed 1,000lb and had a range of only 750 miles. The crossing was only possible for the little Moth if I could find and land on two islands on the way; the first, Norfolk Island, was the size of a cattle station. In order to find it without any radio aids I had to rely on sun observations with a sextant. No one then had navigated only by sextant while flying alone—and this was over the sea. I had to devise a new system of navigation for the project, a system which has now become universally accepted as the ‘Find the Island’method. When the sun’s altitude was at a certain height, I had to turn hard right and expect to find Norfolk Island an hour’s flight away in the new direction. If my navigation was wrong and I missed the island I was lost, for I had not enough fuel to return to New Zealand, the nearest land, and no means of getting help.

  The appeal of the Tasman venture was its untried newness, the demand on my brain to foresee and be prepared for the unknown snags; and then, the excitement of staking everything on the success of my system. That turn to the right over the lonely sea after flying in a different direction for hours was perhaps the most difficult action I have ever had to force myself to take.

  The attraction and the satisfaction of my solo seaplane flight from Sydney to Japan in 1931 was that it had never been done before and that I would have to reckon with a succession of unforeseeable difficulties and obstacles; coupled, of course, with the romantic appeal of flying over unexplored country and alighting the seaplane at ports and islands and lagoons where the few inhabitants had never seen an aeroplane before.

  The third venture which stood out in my mind was the solo flight from London to Sydney in the little Gipsy Moth in 1929. This was my first serious project and an entirely new sort of experience for me. Although the flight itself had already been made once solo by Bert Hinkler, I set out to beat his time. I failed through over-keenness and through making too big an effort which I was unable to sustain, but it was in the planning for the flight, as well as in the flight itself, that I first tasted the thrill of setting one’s self in a race against time, a thrill which in my later years has become almost an obsession.

  And after these flights, the highlights among the adventures of my life, came the circumnavigation, and my first two solo Transatlantic races.

  It seemed clear that there were common factors in all I had set out to do in the past. At the head of the list came the attraction of doing something that had never been done before, because of the appeal of the untried, the unknown, and the excitement—as on the Tasman flight. Beyond that the adventure had to be a challenge to my mental as well as my physical capacities; the hard physical slog has no appeal to me unless I am using my brain in active support before and during the event. Secondly, the attraction of a race, and because I am by preference a solo flyer and a solo yachtsman, I preferred a race against time, an unrelenting opponent, to one against other competitors.

  Speed seemed to hold a key. The distance from A to B on the earth’s surface is unalterable, and once man has travelled from A to B the journey is done, finished with. Nobody else can ever know the excitement of being the first; all a man can do is travel faster.

  It would have to be under sail. Flying was out of the question and I have always been intrigued by yacht speed, where travelling at 8 knots, under 10 miles an hour, produces a sensation of speed that a jet aircraft can never match. In addition, there is to me as much difference between racing a yacht and cruising it as between riding in the Grand National and going for an afternoon ride in the New Forest. Ambling around the world in a good, sturdy, seaworthy but slow craft is in its way appealing and interesting; I very much hope to do it myself with Sheila one day. But speed, that demands a tricky, mettlesome steed, and going faster in a yacht than anyone has done before in the same conditions has a romantic appeal all its own. In 1967, while sailing up through the Atlantic on the passage home from Sydney, Gipsy Mo
th IV made a run of 1,408 miles in eight days, 176 miles a day, which I believe was the fastest singlehanded run that had then been made.

  I had hoped she would have been still faster, that she would have made good 200 miles a day in the roaring winds of the great Southern Ocean; but her hull was cranky and I could never let her rip at her top speed down there. She would broach-to, whipping round broadside to the waves and the wind as if daring them to throw her upside down. It was rather like Russian roulette when she lay over on her beam, keel towards wind and waves, surfing on top of a 20ft breaking sea, masts horizontal and pointing to the direction in which she was travelling at a speed I judged to be 30 knots. The mastheads only had to tip into the water of the trough ahead and upside down and over she must go. Only once had I been able to let her go all out at full speed—and that was when making the passage home through the North Atlantic and I felt confident that no sea big enough and rogue enough to capsize her would build up in the 30-knot Trade Winds. So I drove her as hard as I could for eight days and nights. She was so tender that she heeled readily to 45˚ and sometimes to 60˚, while I reckoned that the average heel during those eight days was 35˚. This may not seem much, but tilt your chair 55˚ sideways and you will see that it means a hellish, uncomfortable existence. I would dearly have liked to carry more sail, but when I did Gipsy Moth IV lay over on her beam and slowed down. So although in that wild run 200 miles a day was my secret ambition, I had to be content with an average of 176, exactly a knot less.

  Two hundred miles a day! If I could make such a five-day run at 200 miles a day; a thousand nautical miles in all, racing all the way. I became enchanted by the neatness, the rightness of this speed: 200 miles per day. It seemed as attractive to the solo sailor as the 10-Second Hundred Yards and the 4-Minute Mile had been to athletes before those targets were achieved. Yet the singlehander’s 200 miles per day was a much more distant target than either of those had been. For some time sprinters had been within fractions of a second of the 10, while milers had been nibbling away at fifths of seconds for years. But no singlehanded run had come anywhere near 200 miles a day. I believe, though I cannot be certain, that Gipsy Moth IV’s 176 miles per day in 1967 was 25 miles per day faster than the previous solo fastest over 1,000 miles; but 200 miles a day was 24 miles per day, or 13.6 per cent, faster than that, which was a hell of an increase. But what a grand target to shoot at.