Gipsy Moth Circles the World Read online

  Almost every week Sheila and I went down to Portsmouth to talk about the boat and to see how things were going, chiefly in the hope of getting things done. The summer dragged on; often there seemed to be no change whatever from one week to another. It became obvious that the boat could not possibly be finished by autumn. We then got another promise that it would be finished by January.

  According to John Illingworth, Gipsy Moth IV was going to be a very fast boat indeed. I used to lie awake at night imagining her steering down the faces of the great Southern Ocean rollers and, with surfing, perhaps, going so fast that she would be able to challenge the great runs of the clippers. Her waterline length was 39½ feet so that her theoretical maximum speed should have been in any case close to 200 miles per day. (The theoretical maximum speed of an ordinary boat—that is, one that does not rise half out of the water and plane—is a function of the waterline length.)

  One of the things that worried me was that John insisted on having a specially big, powerful and heavy self-steering gear designed for the boat. I could not understand this because Colonel Hasler’s standard self-steering gear had brought about half the competing boats across the Atlantic safely in the 1963 single-handed race without any problems, or breakdowns. But John argued that the heavier gear was essential for the bigger boat. If I had insisted on Hasler’s standard gear, changing the design of the boat, if necessary, to accommodate it, I think now that I might have saved myself a great deal of worry and grim work.

  After reading Lubbock’s books on the clippers, I came to the conclusion that their average passage time from Plymouth to Sydney was 100 days1 I could try to equal this, an average speed of 137½ miles per day, or so I thought then, basing my calculations on my original rough measurement of the distance to Sydney. Actually, it entailed a daily speed of 141 miles, or nearly six knots, day and night, for over three months. I decided that when the time came I would give out that I was trying to equal 100 days, a good round number, which people could understand. What I was really after was a voyage round the world faster than any small boat had made before; but I did not want to say anything about this; I still had the feeling, inherited from the early flying days, that disclosing a particularly difficult objective was to invite failure.

  What fast small boat circumnavigations was I competing against? Vito Dumas, the Argentinian, had circled the world in a year and ten days, and during his voyage he made the longest solo passage that had been made until now, 7,400 miles. But his circle was round the bottom of the globe, and while this does not diminish the fine achievement of his voyage, it gave him a route of some 20,000 miles only; a circumnavigation where the vessel passes through two points on the earth’s surface which are diametrically opposite each other would be more like 30,000 miles. No other small boat seemed to have completed a circumnavigation in any time approaching that of Vito Dumas.

  I begged Camper and Nicholsons to get the boat finished by the end of January 1966, so that I could see her in the water before I left for a month’s get-fit visit to the South of France. However, she was not launched until March. There was a launching party—something I don’t approve of, because I think that the time to celebrate is after a boat has done something, not before. Sheila launched the boat. Sheila has a sure, almost uncanny, instinct concerning ships and boats, and if she had been left alone on this occasion all would have gone well; unfortunately, she took advice from Charles Blake, the manager of Camper and Nicholsons. Now Charles is a most delightful person, amusing, friendly, kindly and knowledgeable, a man that any boy would give a term’s pocket money to have as an uncle. But in this small matter he slipped up; he said to Sheila, “You don’t need to throw the bottle of champagne—just let it drop down to the stem.” Sheila did so, and the bottle did not break! I was horrified; my heart sank; I thought. What a terrible omen. At her next try, she did it her own way, and the bottle smashed against the stem perfectly. Then the hull stuck on the greased ways, and would not move towards the sea. I had a cold despair of premonition in me. I jumped down, and pushed with my shoulder against one of the launching cradles. I knew that this must seem odd to the people watching, but I was determined that if any slightest effort of mine could make that boat go, she should have it applied. Slowly, she began to move, and finally floated off on the water. There, the hull floated high on the surface; she didn’t look right. Then, two or three tiny ripples from a ferry steamer made folds in the glassy surface, and Gipsy Moth IV rocked fore and aft. “My God,” Sheila and I said to each other, “she’s a rocker!”

  Captain Jagoe said later that 100 days was the average of the fastest clippers, that 127 days was the average of all the clippers.

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  2. Frustrations

  At the first trial in the Solent, the very first thing that we noticed was that the mainsail fouled the lower shroud while the yacht was still on the wind, so these shrouds had to be fitted with levers, and every time I wanted to sail slightly off the wind on a close fetch I had to move up to the mainmast, release the leeward lever, and tie back the shroud to the mainmast to prevent it from chafing the sail. One of my first demands for a singlehander’s boat is that there should be no levers or runners—I had had the rig of Gipsy Moth III changed to get rid of the back stay levers. Yet here I was with this boat, which had to carry me round the world, with not only levers on the lower shrouds, but also another pair of levers on the back stays, which were clumsy to operate every time I wanted to set a mizzen staysail. The next thing that happened, far more serious, was that a puff of wind, only Force 6, heeled the boat right over, so that the masts were horizontal, parallel with the water surface. John Illingworth and Colonel “Blondie” Hasler were on board for this trial. We all had different views on how far over Gipsy Moth went. John said she was nowhere near horizontal. Blondie said, “I thought at the time she went over 80 °, but afterwards I thought to myself one probably exaggerates, and that she probably did not go over so far.” I was sitting on the edge of the cockpit, and I kept watching the mast and never took my eyes off it as I particularly wanted to see how far over she would go. Campers’ men told me that she lay over with her toe rail under water when on her mooring in a moderate puff of wind. Here was a boat which would lay over on her beam ends on the flat surface of the Solent; the thought of what she would do in the huge Southern Ocean seas put ice into my blood.

  John decided to slip her again as soon as the tides were favourable, to cut away chunks of deadwood in the keel, and to fill the holes thereby made until 2,400 pounds of lead had been added to the keel. But as she could not be slipped until April I had her to myself to do some preliminary solo sailing in her for two or three weeks. One day in the Solent I was furling the mainsail. With only the headsails and the mizzen up she would still heel 30–40°. On the deck which I had requested to be flush, so that big waves could sweep it, without meeting any superstructure to carry away, there were two skylights-made of metal and armoured glass by a French firm. These were two items of equipment on the boat which always worked perfectly, but unfortunately I had not then got used to having glass in the middle of the deck; it was slippery, wet with spray, my feet shot from under me and, owing to the heel of the boat, I came down a most colossal crash on my thigh. The pain was intense for a while, but eased as I finished off the job and put the boat back to her mooring. I found a purple-black bruise about five inches in diameter on my thigh but the pain went off, and I went about my ordinary business, with no pain or trouble for four days. Then I noticed that this purple-black patch was spreading, and that it was down below my knee, and up into my buttock. Now the pain began, and I found my foot half-paralysed. This partial paralysis, or if that is not the right word, complete loss of feeling and power of movement, attacked one part of my foot at a time—at one time the small toes might be out of action, another time the big toe, another time the outside of the foot, and so on. Like a fool I did not go to my doctor: the truth was, I was frightened that he would try to stop my voyage. I worked h
ard with exercises, trying to get back the movement in my foot and leg. It was a bad handicap, not so much because I had lost all balancing control in that leg, for I knew that I could get along on the boat without it, using my hands, and by pressing some part of my body against the mast or a shroud to keep balance, but because I could not walk, or do my daily exercises which are essential to keep me fit. Indeed, it was to be fifteen months before I could begin to walk enough to get real exercise from it.

  Well, the boat was slipped, which cost me a month’s valuable sailing trials. The shipwrights made a fine job, sawing out huge chunks of wood from the keel deadwood, and pouring in molten lead in its place. When Gipsy Moth was relaunched she was better, but still horribly tender, lying over to a light breeze. The discomfort below was great. All along during the building, John had demanded that all the fittings and furnishings must be as light as possible to save weight. For example, he specified that the bunks should not have any lining between them and the hull. As the deck leaked all the way along where it joined the hull, when I got into the open sea, this would have meant that, lying in a bunk, I would have had the water streaming on to my bedclothes. Fortunately as it turned out, Campers thought this was a mistake, and put lining in between the bunks and the hull. While pressing for economy of weight in such ways, at the same time, John suggested a second lavatory, or “heads” as we call it. He said that when the boat was going fast it would be impossible to use the one forward. This surely was a novelty to have two lavatories for a singlehander and I was surprised at his proposal because of his expressed desire to keep the weight down, but I agreed for the one reason that I knew it would provide me with a really adequate cubicle for hanging up oilskins, which otherwise I should not have had. This is a most important feature for long ocean racing.

  On top of all this, there was the tremendous extra weight of the special self-steering gear in the very worst place, aft of the end of the stern of the boat. There was the extra weight of the levers which had to be added, and that was on top of the deck, also in a bad place. To return to the discomfort below, in the autumn of 1964, Angus Primrose, the partner of Illingworth and Primrose, came over to Gipsy Moth III lying at her mooring in the Beaulieu River, and Sheila and I spent several hours with him laying out the interior of the new boat. My principle was that everything should be the same as in the previous boat, unless there was a definite reason for changing it. We measured all the cabin furniture, settees and bunks, also the galley layout, and we noted everything down. Unfortunately, all this was wasted, because his notes and plans were lost. By the time this was discovered, Gipsy Moth III had been stripped and laid up, and the same work could not be done again. However, Sheila had taken over the galley layout, and the general decorating and furnishing, and nearly every week discussed the items with the head joiner at Campers. In addition to that a full size “mock-up” model was made of the galley, and the next section of the boat to it, which contained my swinging chair and gimballed table. Sheila took the greatest trouble over all the details; but in spite of all this she did not get what she had designed and asked for and half the things went wrong.

  For instance, if you opened one of the cupboards under the galley when the boat was heeled, the contents would spill out on to the cabin floor, and when I got out on the ocean I reckoned the stowage of cutlery, crockery, bottles, jars and tins was the worst I had experienced. They all rushed and banged from one side to the other when the boat changed heel, making a noise out on the ocean which I can only compare with a country fair in full swing. One thing that was good was the stowage of the saucepans, frying pans and the like. The cupboards above the galley were set so far back that they were out of normal reach. The plate racks were in an inaccessible well behind the galley sink, put farther back than planned, and the water which splashed into this well stayed there until there was a carpet of mouldy muck at the inaccessible bottom, bits of which were brought up every time a new plate was fished out. When the galley drawers got damp—and they were always being splashed with the water squirting under the ill-fitting sides of the cabin hatch—they jammed, so that it was impossible to open them; for weeks a lot of things I wanted were locked up in this way in one drawer. There was nothing to prevent these drawers, when they were working, from coming right out of their openings, unless they were shut tight, and several times a whole drawer shot across the cabin, emptying the whole lot of cutlery on the cabin floor.

  The main cabin was cramped. Sheila did not have enough room to get in and out of her bunk when the yacht was heeled, and the side of the bunk had to be cut away and hinged. There was not a comfortable seat in the cabin, and although the table was too small for my needs, it was difficult to squeeze past it if the yacht was heeled, even when the flap was down. Very little came out as we originally planned. Time was short.

  As for the construction, the shipwrights’work was superb. The shipwrights were responsible for the six-skinned hull, and all the laminated frames and stem and stern pieces, and the keel. This hull stayed watertight throughout the voyage, and stood up to all the stresses and strains the boat was subjected to. The rest of the construction was a different matter. An immensely strong cabin doghouse was built of moulded laminations, with the armoured glass windows firmly bedded into it. But all round this doghouse, where it was joined to the plywood deck, leaked badly when I got out into the ocean. Similarly, the deck leaked all round where it was joined to the hull, with the result that the lockers were nearly all running wet. It became difficult to find a dry spot in any locker where I could stow gear which I wanted to keep dry. I tried to stow everything first in a plastic bag before putting it into the locker, but the trouble with these bags is that they sweat, and it is amazing how water from a locker running wet will find its way into a bag. I had trouble with the plumbing, too; the freshwater tanks continued to bring up clouds of fibrous, fungusy matter, presumably due to chemical action taking place on the inside of the tanks, or the pipes. The two fuel pipes, by which diesel oil was fed into the tanks in the keel for the motor used for charging batteries for the radio telephone and electric light, actually shrank and pulled away from the tanks when I was at sea, and presumably all the diesel oil would have spilled out into the bilge when the boat heeled if the tanks had not been narrow and deep, let right into the keel. I never could use the basin in the heads during the voyage, because, when the boat was heeled to port, if the lavatory was pumped out its contents were pumped into the basin, and there they stayed, however much pumping was done, until the boat heeled the other way, or until I mopped out the mess. As soon as I could I jammed the plug into the bottom of the basin, and kept it there.

  When the builders came to fit the engine after the various alterations in plans, it was found that the propeller would be out of the water. The engine had to be moved forward into the cabin, thereby spoiling some lockers, and cutting down the available space.

  I think it is important to mention these things, because they illustrate the sort of thing one has to try to foresee when planning a non-stop passage of more than three months’duration. If things go wrong on a three or six days’race, it is not a great hardship to put into port for mast or rigging trouble, while plumbing trouble, even if it results in loss of fresh water or fuel, would probably not do more than cause inconvenience or discomfort. The same failure of gear might well wreck a 14,000-mile voyage. My old Gipsy Moth III would have done well enough for the voyage, except for some constructional features. First of all, I wanted a flush deck, to give easy passage to breaking waves without risk to deck hamper. Secondly I thought I should have a stronger cabin top or doghouse. This was needed over the galley end of the cabin, partly because the floor rose up there, and partly because I wanted to be able to look around from the cabin. In Gipsy Moth IV this top was made immensely strong out of four skins of mahogany glued together over a mould, and the openings for the windows were cut after the gluing and moulding had been completed. It had rounded corners and edges, and would offer little resistan
ce to a wave. Another feature of Gipsy Moth III that I wanted changed was the single-plank hull. I had a bad leak with this construction in the 1964 Transatlantic Race, which gave me a lot of trouble and cost me a lot of time. Such a leak, in the big seas of the Southern Ocean, might have opened up sufficiently for the boat to founder. Gipsy Moth IV was to have six skins of mahogany, the total only 7/8 inch thick, but immensely strong, and very light for all that strength. I also wanted a watertight bulkhead forward, eleven feet from the stem, which would give the boat a good chance of survival if she had a head-on collision with an iceberg.

  One of the things I had asked of the designer was that the boat should be easily manoeuvrable with only the mainsail set. I had two things in view here; in the first place it is a great boon to a singlehander to be able to manoeuvre his craft easily, no matter how slowly, with only one sail set, and that must be the mainsail. I could take old Gipsy Moth III in and out of the moored yachts up the Beaulieu River with only the mainsail set, and I cannot recall ever touching anyone. The second point is that I reckon that if a yacht will manoeuvre easily with the mainsail only, she is likely to have a well-balanced rig when the headsails and mizzen sail are added, which means that she will require only a light touch on the helm. This is enormously valuable in a single-handed yacht, controlled by a self-steering gear. It means that the load on the self-steering gear will not be excessive. Our first day of trials, by tradition, was for builder’s trials, and I was not expected to take the helm. However, when I returned to the harbour and only the mainsail was set, I was given the helm. I sailed out towards the nearby jetty on the east side of the harbour, and when within 50 or 75 yards of it put the helm down to tack. Gipsy Moth IV would not answer the helm. We were headed right for the jetty and getting closer every minute but I was so angry that I did nothing but call to John about this. He started the motor, pushed it into gear, speeded it up, and got the boat round that way. The design had failed me badly in this respect.