The Romantic Challenge Read online

  Records reveal that big clippers put up terrific one day runs. But fast running often meant blind running, when no astronomical fix was possible at the beginning or end of the run, and when the big ships simply ran with the weather, not caring where it took them. And I could not help wondering, as did Captain James Learmount in Mariner’s Mirror in 1957, how often a day’s run claimed as a record was followed by a meander-pace run on a dog-leg course the next day, giving an ‘ordinary’average over the two days or the week. In those squarerigger days the fastest ship attracted the best cargoes and the most passengers.*What I had in mind was not distance sailed or logged in one day but a sustained run of at least 1,000 miles at 200 miles a day, measured in a straight line across the earth’s surface on a Great Circle route.

  Long-distance singlehanded sailing for distance alone has lost its pristine romantic appeal. At almost any one time now there must be several singlehanded yachts on passage across the Atlantic east to west or west to east—and who would have thought that twelve years ago! Even a singlehanded circumnavigation can never again have the same attraction now that several have done it. But to go after speed records in a singlehanded offshore sailing yacht was an entirely new conception in sailing and a challenge that appealed to me enormously. The more I thought about it, the more I became convinced that this would be the next and a continuing phase in sailing—and nothing that has happened since my return has made me change my mind. One of the problems of offshore yacht racing as a sport in which non-participants can take an interest is that the complicated handicapping systems mean that the final result of a race may not be known for hours, even days, after the first yachts home have crossed the line and the excitement of the race has died down. The singlehanded sailor has a natural handicap that keeps him near or at the same level as his fellows. In theory, the bigger boat is always the faster boat, so the singlehander wants to go for the biggest boat he can manage. But he has to manage her in all conditions and if he is too ambitious she will soon exhaust him to the point when he can no longer race her, and his smaller competitors will make up time against him; on the other hand, if he has a boat which is too easy to manage, she is probably too small, and a competitor with even a slightly bigger boat will probably beat him.

  In search of a speed record a lot will depend on the wind and the sea, but even these will tend to even themselves out; five days hard racing in the Roaring Forties might be too tough for a singlehander, while five days in the Doldrums will not get him very far. I can foresee an intelligent search for point-to-point Great Circle stretches of ocean giving distances of 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 or 4,000 miles with the best sailing conditions, and these becoming familiar, named courses along which the singlebanders will set out to better the existing record.

  So this was the broad basis of the project I started scheming and planning for. It would need hard sailing and careful, constant navigation; an ideal combination from my point of view. It was a wonderful challenge, a romantic challenge with the added attraction that I would be out to break that 200 miles a day barrier for the singlehander not once, but over a sustained period of five days.

  My first task was to obtain the most suitable yacht I could for the race. Gipsy Moth IV did not belong to me but to my cousin Tony Dulverton, who had presented her to the Greater London Council. They had put her on permanent exhibition alongside the Cutty Sark at Greenwich, so she was not available. Even if she had been, I knew that she was not the right craft for the job I had in mind. The winner of the third Singlehanded Transatlantic race in 1968 was Geoffrey Williams in the 57ft Sir Thomas Lipton. She had exactly the kind of hull design which I had originally wanted for my round-the-world speed dash in 1966, but I had been talked out of that and into Gipsy Moth IV. Afterwards I regretted this and when Sir Thomas Lipton turned up exactly what I had in mind, I decided to ask her designer, Robert Clark, to design Gipsy Moth V on the same lines. Robert had designed my Gipsy Moth III, the winner of the first Singlehanded Transatlantic race in 1960 and second boat in the 1964 race. Gipsy Moth III was a conventional cruiser-racer, similar to the long line of successful such yachts that Robert had already designed, and I believe that he might never have broken so radically away from it had it not been for Geoffrey Williams. Geoffrey is a clever, single-purposed, ambitious young Cornishman who had carefully read up model yacht design while teaching in New York, and he succeeded in persuading Robert to design a boat like a fast model racing yacht. I am convinced that model yacht designers are far ahead of ocean racing yacht designers. They can watch their designs sailing in every and all conditions of wind and water with great ease and can quickly make changes to the design, or can experiment with it, in a way which is impossible for the ocean-going yacht designer.

  Not least of Geoffrey’s accomplishments was his ability to persuade Robert to carry out the design as he wanted it. I have always found Robert difficult to deal with; he has his own views on what should be built or used and I have the impression that he does not like any suggested change in layout or equipment. For instance, Sheila specifically asked for seats in Gipsy Moth V’s cabin with the comfort and backward slope of a motor-car seat. What turned up? The cabin settee back actually slopes the opposite way so that one sits with one’s bottom outboard under the back of the seat and one’s shoulders pushed forward over the cabin table. As for the galley, the chart table, the navigation area and my bunk, for which I wanted what I considered a modern layout, they turned up without a single drawer for storage among the lot. Why, then, did I go to Robert again, and why am I now, as I write, discussing with him how to get Gipsy Moth going faster next year? Because I firmly believe him to be the best designer in Britain of a hull—and perhaps of the rig—for the project I had in mind. All Robert’s yachts that I have had experience with or know about ‘run true’, which is of the greatest importance for fast singlehanded sailing. Also his designs have always had one most valuable characteristic; over the years it is possible to modernize or modify them without losing their handsome appearance or good sailing characteristics. And lastly, he has the fine record as a designer of having produced the winning yachts in two of the three Single-handed Transatlantic races and the second boat in the other.

  Geoffrey invited me to come for a sail in Sir Thomas Lipton with him and Robert. It was a foggy, end-of-year day in the Solent with scarcely enough breeze to keep the yacht moving, but I saw enough to confirm that this was the basic design I wanted. Sir Thomas Lipton was beautifully balanced. She could not enter the narrow Beaulieu River where my home mooring is, because she had no motor; so we sailed back to Cowes. Here she went aground as she was turning in to the first line of mooring piles. It was fortunate that Robert was at the helm, and not me. I had invited him and Geoffrey to dinner at the Royal Yacht Squadron and as it was getting late we looked likely to miss our dinner. So I took Geoffrey with me to hearten the chef while Robert sat it out until he had floated off and moored up.

  Robert had sketched me a rough sail plan for my new Gipsy Moth on the back of an envelope, and this ‘staysail ketch rig’was completed with practically no change whatever from the sketch on his envelope; at this sort of thing he really has a touch of genius. With the stays’l ketch rig there was no mains’l but a stays’l setting between the two masts, from the top of the mizen mast to the foot of the main mast. His theory was that a normal mains’l for such a big yacht would be too big and heavy for me to handle, whereas if the same sail area was split up into mizen stays’l and tops’l I would be able to handle the rig easily. Unfortunately he carried his theory farther, and without my knowledge some of the other gear specified for the yacht was made extra light for my ease of handling. This naturally meant that its strength was that much less, which had a drastic effect on my project in, for example, the matter of the spinnaker poles. On the other hand, the sails specified for Gipsy Moth V were of stiff and heavy material which used up my energy and strength extravagantly when I had to handle them in stormy weather. Strength shrinks and reactions slow up
with age. Undoubtedly I am much less strong than I was at nineteen when I was working in a coalmine; on the other hand, I believe that with increasing age I have developed cunning and skill in devising means of getting over difficulties without calling on brute strength; but I cannot recall Robert ever asking my opinion about heavy sea sailing, in which I have experience. If only our temperaments had allowed us to work together in 1969 and 1970 as we are at present, I think a faster and more efficient Gipsy Moth V would have resulted.

  The design was thrashed out, contracts were drawn up, and everything was ready to start building the new yacht at the end of 1969. I thought that Rodney Warington Smyth’s boatyard at Falmouth would be the yard to build it. Sheila and I like Rodney and he has a fine reputation in the boat-building world. Robert agreed but later said he feared Rodney would not be able to complete in time and produced another offer from the Crosshaven boatyard at Cork, in Ireland. The price was lower, which would compensate partly for the greater expense of flying to Cork periodically to look at the building. Also, Gipsy Moth III was built in Eire at Arklow, south of Dublin, and I had found that I liked working with the Irish, so I agreed.

  In the end, Gipsy Moth V was not launched until towards the end of June 1970 instead of in March as contracted, but the delay was chiefly due to being unable to get delivery of gear from an English firm for the engine and a feathering propeller. Although Gipsy Moth was designed for fast deep-sea racing, she needed a motor. For one reason, Lord Montagu had given me the freedom of the Beaulieu River and a mooring there for life after my circumnavigation and the river is now so crowded with moorings that for a yacht 57ft overall and 29 tons Thames Measurement a motor is usually necessary for manoeuvring up the river. Secondly, Gipsy Moth’s topsides have too much windage for a singlehander to haul her up to an anchor and then break it out in a near gale in a restricted anchorage without a motor or powered capstan to help. A third reason is that the Marconi Kestrel Radio/Telephone set which I have used on most of my voyages for transmitting reports to a newspaper or the BBC requires a powerful set of batteries and a motor to charge them, and I thought it best to use one motor both for propelling the yacht and for charging the batteries. The engine installation gave me more trouble than all the rest of the yacht and its gear together. To start with, the propeller used to go into forward when the gear lever was put into reverse. This caused me to go aground on the Beaulieu River bank when picking up my mooring singlehanded. It was only a matter of minutes before a Fleet Street newspaper was ringing up the Harbour Master, asking about the ‘stranding’. One man’s mishap may be another’s joy, but in this case I was a disappointment because I got Gipsy Moth off the mud again unaided after a few minutes.

  Another awkward episode was when I brought Gipsy Moth from my mooring to Buckler’s Hard, where Edward Montagu wanted her to remain for a week, moored fore and aft between two piles, so that visitors to his Motor Museum at Beaulieu and the Maritime Museum at the Hard could see her. I motored Gipsy Moth up-river into position to make fast the stem to the; but when I put the engine into reverse to take way off, it went into forward and Gipsy Moth charged ahead. I was faced with rows of yachts moored alongside each other; altogether there must have been fifteen or twenty of them. Although I had put the engine out of gear, Gipsy Moth was moving fast enough for the only alternatives to be either to charge straight into the yachts or to drive into the shallow water between them and the bank, where one or two dinghies and small craft were moored. I chose the latter and with Gipsy Moth drawing nearly 8½ft I waited miserably for the clunk when she struck bottom. I threaded my way through the dinghies; Gipsy Moth behaved as if enjoying the situation and kept going. The owners of all the moored yachts seemed to be watching, so I gave my cap a hitch and tried to look as if Gipsy Moth was always tied up in this way. Providence or Fate was watching benevolently and Gipsy Moth proceeded gaily on her way. She went right round the outside of all the yachts and back again into the stream without touching bottom or another vessel; then proceeded sedately down river where the skilful Harbour Master took the bow warp and secured her to the pile.

  That was not the end of the troubles. While at Buckler’s Hard the propeller shaft seized up altogether when being tested. Gipsy Moth had to be sailed across the Solent to Cowes, the nearest place where a hauling crane able to lift a yacht of her size out of the water was available. It was found that the propeller shaft was out of alignment and that the stern tube which ought to have had grease forced into it until it squirted out at the propeller end, was mostly filled with seawater instead of grease. As a result the white metal bearings had seized up. These troubles with the propeller, shaft, and gear continue as I write.

  I want to stress that these time-delaying, irritating troubles with the motor and the design and finish of the interior accommodation were relatively trivial when compared with the excellent work of the shipwrights at Crosshaven on the hull of Robert’s design, for I am convinced that a better construction job could not have been found. Gipsy Moth is like a big dinghy, 57ft long, waterline length 41ft 8in, beam 12ft, draught 8ft 4½ in and displacement 17 tons. The Thames tonnage is, as I have said, 29 tons. She has a flattish bottom of the skimming dish type like a scow, with a fin keel and a skeg with rudder separate from the keel well aft of the cockpit. The fin is a 7½-ton lump of iron bolted to the wooden keelson. All the frames and stringers are of laminated wood, as also are the keelson and the stem. The hull itself is three-skinned, that is to say it has three separate plankings, two of them diagonal-laid across each other, and the third, the outside skin, horizontal. These are bonded together with glue and make the great strength which I wanted in the hull. I just cannot praise the constructional work by the shipwrights too highly.

  All this time I was puzzling over what form my speed attempt should take. I kept both the project and my plans strictly secret from everybody but Robert, for I had had an embittering experience of another project and proposed means of achieving it which I had described in the strictest confidence, being passed on and made use of. Robert, I know, can be as tight as a clam about a client’s project. Much of my spare time was spent in studying charts and weather maps, particularly the United States hydrographic pilot charts and the comparatively new British Admiralty routeing charts, which are produced one for every month of the year. Both the United States and the British charts are fine productions, most helpful to the deep-sea yachtsman. They give the average winds for a month for each rectangle of 5˚ of latitude and 5˚ longitude. It was Lieutenant Fontaine Maury of the U.S. Navy who conceived the idea of these charts in the early nineteenth century, but the Admiralty routeing charts were exceptionally valuable for my purpose. They give the average percentage of winds to be expected for the particular month for each different strength for each separate octant of the compass, the percentage expectancy of calms and variable winds, and the number of observations from which the averages have been deduced.

  The 200 miles a day target was so much faster than Gipsy Moth IV’s 176 miles per day that I knew I must get all the help I possibly could in order to have any chance of success; I needed the most favourable site, wind conditions, weather, and current. This was going to be quite unlike previous sailing enterprises, and more like an attempt to set a high speed record in a power boat or a motor car. For these the most favourable conditions are sought after and although my problem was complicated by the timespan involved, I felt I needed exactly the same sort of support from my choice of the time of the year, site, weather, and the rest. At this stage, my interest was simply to be somewhere where I could sail fast for a period or periods of five days during a voyage. I thought that my best chance of finding the conditions I wanted, without going to or even considering the Pacific, which was too far away, was to make another run through the NE Trade Wind belt in the North Atlantic. It was in this that Gipsy Moth IV had put up her fastest run in her round-the-world voyage of 1966-7. The zone of the Trade Wind alters with the seasons of the year but lies roughly between 5˚N a
nd 25˚N and stretches right across from Africa to America. Perhaps its greatest attraction was that it provides the best chance of steady, constant winds which were likely to be fresh but unlikely to be stronger than moderate gale force. January seemed the most favourable month and my first plan was to make one 1,000 mile run down to the Equator and a second run—a copy of Gipsy Moth IV’s speed run in 1967—from the Equator northwards.

  So far all my hopes were based on Gipsy Moth V being swift and sure; they were little more than an optimistic vision at this stage. How often have I made plans with the greatest care, sure that every obstacle and difficulty had been foreseen, only to find when it came to putting them into practice that some vital and perhaps simple snag had been completely overlooked. I had to get Gipsy Moth offshore and put her through the stiffest trials. It would be vital to learn how to get the best out of her. Some yachts have their greatest success when they come brand new from the yard and straight into a race; but I suspect that this success in most cases is because their sails have at that stage perfect aerofoil shape undistorted by hard weather.

  So on 14 August 1970 I set off from the Beaulieu River on a 5,000 mile trial run to Majorca in the Mediterranean and back. I invited Christopher Doll, a film producer who had made a television film about the Battle of Britain and who was now making a biographical TV film chiefly about the voyages and adventures of my Gipsy Moths, to sail with me to Majorca. Christopher caused me a great deal of worry; he had never been to sea in a yacht before, and never seemed able to grasp the hazards, problems, or sailing technique important for an offshore passage, or even to take a serious interest in them. He was only interested in getting good photographs and to do this he would put up with anything, clambering all over the boat and even climbing the rigging in a rough sea while being horribly seasick. Nothing requires more courage and determination than that, but Christopher simply accepted it as part of his job, and seemed oblivious of the discomfort he created for himself for the sake of his film. Sheila flew out to Gibraltar and joined Gipsy Moth to sail on to Majorca. Giles flew out from England when the filming at Majorca had finished and sailed back with me, just the two of us.