The Romantic Challenge

by Francis Chichester

  At 1645 I adjusted the pole height and the guys staying it in position so that the wind pressure was even over the sail; then I hardened in on the halyard of the poled out sail to straighten its luff, and trimmed the three other sails—the No. 1 jib, the mizen stays’l and the main stays’l. This seemed to pay off and Gipsy Moth was doing up to 13 knots with the new windvane fitted to the self-steering gear doing splendidly; this vane was much larger than the standard size recommended for such a wind, but was necessary because of Gipsy Moth’s speed. Since I had poled out, Gipsy Moth had sailed 28.7 miles in 3 hours 12 minutes, an average of 8.95 knots, or 215 miles per day, which showed what she could do if given the wind.

  From then on I was experimenting with trim, rig, and headings all the time. For instance, at midnight that night, after some try-out settings of the poled-out jib which were not right, I clapped a handy-billy on the outhaul of the boomed sail, using a rope-end stopper because the tension was too great to haul it out by hand. This took some of the curve or sag out of the jib and I thought it was then not banging so much as before when a wave slueing Gipsy Moth’s stern to leeward brought her up to the wind, and the leech and the foot would collapse. My handy-billies are what the old squarerig seamen called watch-tackles or tail-tackles, brought up to date. I fasten a single block with a snaphook attached to it to an eye in the deck, and a double block at the other end of the tackle has a rope tail to it which I clip on to the boomed sail outhaul by means of a couple of half-turns and a hitch.

  I cooked a good supper but I felt so queasy by the time I had finished it that I turned in without eating it.

  The wind was easing through the night and by the time the sky was lightening at dawn, I decided to hoist the tops’l. At noon on the 22nd Gipsy Moth had sailed 212.8 miles during the past twenty-four hours. I was delighted; this looked really promising. The position was now 150 miles NW of Cape Finisterre in Spain.

  In the afternoon I decided to drop the boomed-out jib. For one reason it was coming aback too often as Gipsy Moth slued to windward; also, the poled-out sail could not be carried if the heading was brought 18˚ nearer the wind to set Gipsy Moth on the course required to pass westward of Madeira. An even more important reason for dropping it was that I wanted to test the effect of the change.

  It took me about 1½ hours to drop and bag the jib and dismantle and stow all the running gear. To my surprise dropping the sail did not seem to have made any difference to the speed. The log read: ‘I guess there is wind to spare and I daresay I could drop the tops’l too but I would like to keep it up for experiment.’

  The sea was roughing up as the evening came on, slueing Gipsy Moth broadside to the wind at times. I noticed on the dial speeds of up to 14 knots. The true wind was now a few degrees N of E and 31½ knots.

  By midnight the wind was gusting strongly and waves were crashing on the deck; two hours later I wrote in my log: ‘So ends a mad ride. I lay in my bunk getting more and more tense and rigid but wanting to find out what would happen. A series of big breaking waves seemed to coincide with freshes of wind of up to 40 knots. Gipsy Moth would gripe to windward and heel over until I wondered if the sails would go into the water. Time after time the self-steering would end by bringing Gipsy Moth back on course. What a game beggar! It seemed miraculous that eventually it could bring back the heading through 75˚ with a gale forcing the boat up into the wind.’

  The only snag was that the 40 knot gusts had to ease back to 25 knots before the Gunning self-steering gear could manage to do that. In the end I could not stand the strain any longer, so I hopped out and dropped the tops’l. The tops’l seemed to be the cause of the trouble: sheeted right to the stern of the boat as it was, it was pulling the stern round. For any speed run I would badly need the pull of that 370sq.ft sail, but it looked as if I could only get the extra area by poling something out. I waited to see the effect of dropping the tops’l on the speed, which had kept remarkably steady in the 14 hours since noon, the average only varying half a knot between 9.2 and 9.7 knots. For 2½ hours with the tops’l down the speed kept at 9.5 knots, but the going was so rough that I turned 30˚ down wind, and although the wind was still gusting up to 40 knots the speed dropped to 8.75. At 0930 I set the tops’l again, this time hoisting it only part of the way up the main mast and sheeting it to the forward end of the sheet lead track 15ft forward of the stern, hoping that it would not pull the stern round to leeward so much. However, I found that I had to alter course more to windward before I could get the speed back to 9 knots.

  At noon on the 23rd the distance sailed in the previous 24 hours showed as 220.7 miles. Total for the two days, 433.5 miles. This was thrilling—but only until I calculated the fix-to-fix runs for the two days. On the first day of this run, 21/ 22 December, Gipsy Moth had sailed 212.8 miles through the water, but the fix-to-fix straight line run was only 181 miles, 15 per cent less. I was flabbergasted; thirty-one miles lost of the distance sailed was disastrous. How could it have happened? It was true that I had been only concerned with experimenting to get the maximum speed and had not been concerned to keep the track straight: true also that I had not obtained an accurate sun fix at the start of the run and that possibly the six bearings I had taken with the D/F loop of Corunna in Spain, Bordeaux, Brest, Ushant, and Round Island in the Scilly Isles had all contained an error. The two bearings of Ushant had certainly had 37 miles difference between them, but the others had met in a convincing enough ‘cocked hat’triangle. The D/F (radio direction finding) fix was 30 miles ahead of my DR (dead reckoning) position and of course if that DR position had been correct, then the run ‘made good’would tie in with the distance logged as sailed. Such an error was not a worry now, but if the log was going to overread the distance sailed, due to some such cause as riding up and down the surfaces of the waves, that was a serious, depressing prospect for my speed bid, for it meant that Gipsy Moth was a slower boat than I had thought and that many of my calculations were over-optimistic.

  When I calculated the fix-to-fix run for the second day it turned out at 210 miles made good for a distance of 220.7 miles sailed. This was a drop of 4.8 per cent in the distance sailed and seemed more reasonable. Though not so good as the 220.7 miles I had been so cock-a-hoop about, it was nevertheless encouraging.

  I had motor trouble. After the R/T session the evening before I had tried to start up the engine to charge the batteries. It fired for about two seconds quite normally then it turned over in a dead way as though it was sucking in water instead of fuel. The starter motor turned the engine freely enough but seemed to have no load. On the morning of the 23rd I tried the engine again but it had no kick at all. This was a setback because I had undertaken to transmit a report to the BBC every day of my speed run across the Atlantic.

  My experiment of raising the tops’l only half way up the mast in order to sheet it farther forward and keep the stern from slueing round was a failure. To add to this it gave me plenty of sheeting and cordage problems in the 40 knot gusts, because when halfway up it interfered with the wind flow on to the main stays’l and the jib. I decided that it would have to be hoisted fully and sheeted to the stern, and set about doing it. At once Gipsy Moth was nearly out of control, coming hard up into the wind with waves crashing aboard and all the lee deck submarining under the water; I dropped the tops’l and bagged it again and was back where I started. However, this was still my experiment time.

  By daybreak on the 24th the speed had dropped back to 8.7 knots and I again hoisted the tops’l. Once more it took charge, pulling the stern savagely round to leeward and heading Gipsy Moth into the wind. The self-steering gear could not by itself hold her or bring her back and I had to get into the cockpit with my feet against the locker seat opposite so that I could put all my strength to the tiller with both hands to get back on heading. I decided to try sheeting the tops’l to the after end of the cockpit and dropping the sail just a little lower on the mast to see what effect that had. The tops’l was the easiest of them all to set a
nd hand, but it caused most trouble.

  All that day, except when sail trimming or sailing the yacht, I worked hard and continuously at the engine. The log recorded: ‘My fingers be praaper wore to the bone, like, as my Devon friends used to say, working the fuel hand-priming pump, fiddling with nuts in awkward inaccessible spots and working for hours with my head upside down looking at nuts or whatever.’

  Most of the time Gipsy Moth was tearing through the water, lee deck under, and there was hardly a place to put a foot down in the cabin among the boxes, gear, engine casing, and tools, besides the usual boots and clothing. The fuel supply system was full of air, I expect due to running the engine while Gipsy Moth was bouncing about or excessively heeled so that air was under the fuel in the tank and got sucked in. I had taken a three-day course on this Perkins Diesel engine at the Peterborough works before my circumnavigation in 1966, but now I found I had forgotten everything. So I sat and looked at it between whiles for nearly two days and studied the handbooks before making any move. ‘Well,’ I logged, ‘I shall be better able to do it another time. I must say this was rather like a sport, like fox-hunting in a small way, chasing the air bubbles from one opening to the next around the motor while trying to undo the right nut to make the right opening. However, it was wonderful to hear the motor kick again and run smoothly after it all.…I want to have another go at that tops’l and try sheeting it in a fresh place.’

  The run to noon of the 24th was 210.9 miles sailed. Again I was to be disappointed; the calculated fix-to-fix run turned out at only 195 miles, a loss of 7.55 per cent. It was disheartening; the conditions for speed had been excellent and more than 9 knots had been averaged during three periods of the day. The lowest speed average for any one period was 8.52 knots and according to the hydrographic chart Gipsy Moth had been in a favourable current throughout the three days, which should have given her an extra kick along. Of course the fix-to-fix run for the two days, noon of the 22nd to noon of the 24th, at 406 miles, came to more than 200 miles per day, but conditions could hardly be better for making speed and on my 4,000-mile run I would need to be able to clock up a considerably better daily surplus than 1.5 per cent. I consoled myself with the thought that I was experimenting with different sail trims all the time, concentrating on trying to get the maximum speed and not taking much care over position fixing. I only observed the sun on two occasions to obtain two separate position lines, whereas during the actual speed run I intended to get three separate position lines to ensure accuracy in the sun fixes.

  Gipsy Moth continued to sail fast; the instruments showed an average speed of over 9 knots for eight of the twelve periods in the log, and the lowest speed for the remaining four was 8.9 knots. It was rough going. At 0820 on the 25th the log read: ‘I suppose it is a rough line squall passing through. A series of squally gusts up to 40 knots. Gipsy Moth still goes out of control of the self-steering with the tops’l up in winds over 30 knots when she has a good slap on the stern from a breaking wave. I was lying tense in my bunk at 6.30 a.m., so tense in one fierce squall that I got cramp in my neck. I had to brace myself against the side of the bunk to avoid being chucked out. Gipsy Moth in the worst squall heeled over 40˚ on her side and griped up 45˚ towards the wind until she was pointing 60˚ off the wind instead of 105˚. The whole boat was shaking due to sails and gear flogging and slatting and banging, waves crashing the hull, seas racing along the lee deck. I stuck out several of these squalls but in the end there came one and I reckoned Gipsy Moth was not going to come out of it back to her normal heading and heel, so I got up. One has to move with great care to avoid being thrown across the cabin. I put oilskins on over my pyjamas and dropped the tops’l. It was very impressive up there in the pitch dark with the sea rushing wildly past like a cataract, dazzling white in the pool of light round the boat from the spreader lights shining down. The tops’l is pretty easy to hand and bag except for the difficulty in standing on the steep deck. After that I rigged a handy-billy tackle to the tiller so that I could haul the tiller to windward from the shelter of the companion when the self-steering was unable to control any longer. This is like I had in Gipsy Moth IV and needed constantly. I think it is not only the tops’l sheet pulling the stern round but also the self-steering skeg and rudder are nearly out of the water at a big angle of heel and so have greatly reduced power. Well, this is a good start to Christmas Day. I was lying thinking of boyhood Christmases, waking and emptying the pillow case “stocking” by the dim light of a small oil lamp. Also wondering how Sheila felt spending our first Christmas apart.…’

  The run to noon of the 25th was again good at 217 miles sailed. I confidently expected as much after the consistently high speeds clocked throughout the 24 hours; but when I calculated the fix-to-fix run it was only 188 miles. This did not seem possible and I measured the distance carefully on the chart between the two fixes; the dividers made it 189 miles, a drop of 13.3 per cent in the distance sailed. So, although Gipsy Moth had sailed 861.4 miles in the four days, the four point-to-point runs totalled only 778 miles, which was 22 miles short of the 200 miles a day average I wanted. The position was 36˚10’N 19˚00’W, 205 miles WNW of Madeira.

  This really was disturbing, but I decided to give my worries a rest. After all, it was my Christmas lunchtime, so I started to open one of the bottles of Champagne which Giles had given me. I had the wire off the cork when the sun peeped through the clouds. I had been trying all the morning to get a sun shot so I stood the bottle on the swinging primus cooker where it would not fall off with the heavy rolling, while I made a dash through the companion with the sextant. I was half way out of the cabin when a report like a cannon made me wonder what had crashed; of course it was the Champers bottle blowing off and firing the cork at the ceiling, and half Giles’s present had foamed away before I could reach it.

  Some strange things happen at sea which are difficult to explain or understand: in the middle of the night I wrote: ‘Ever since noon yesterday there has been a succession of little cyclones with the wind going right round the compass, sometimes with a thunderstorm or with a rain downpour. At 3.30 a.m. I awoke because of a continuous thumping, just as if someone in the boat was trying to rouse me. I was pretty fed up by this and resisted waking for a while but it must have been “a little man” determined to wake me. When at last I gave in and came to my senses, I found that Gipsy Moth was tearing off for home due north at 7 or 8 knots. I don’t know how long for. My previous entry was 12½ miles earlier.’

  Since I was devoting the run from Plymouth to Bissau entirely to experimenting with gear, sail trimming, rig, and tactics, I ought to have been very grateful for the storm which blew up on the morning of the 27th. I learned a lot, but I realise now that I ought to have learned a lot more, deduced a lot more, from it. Twenty-four hours later, four hours after midnight on the 28th, I was to record in the log that it had been a long, hard day, and that several times I had thanked God that I had the strength and endurance to do what I did.

  The gale really started for Gipsy Moth at 0315 when she went aback through a big and sudden windshift which made it necessary to change from a broad reach on one tack to being close-hauled on the other. Of course there was a lot of resheeting, hauling and handling of ropes, and winch work in the cockpit. It was when I went up after this to use the bilge pump under the tiller at the after end of the cockpit that I saw a dark Mother Carey’s Chicken, a stormy petrel, crouching in the corner. It must have been there throughout the hour when I had been working in the cockpit. This timid, wild-looking little fellow—if fellow it was—with his soft, sooty-coloured plumage, had chosen about the only spot in the cockpit where he would not have been crushed by my unseeing foot in the dark. The bilge had to stay unpumped because the jet of water would have landed right on him.

  At seven I was on deck again to drop the slatting tops’l, but I found that Gipsy Moth had turned right round and was heading north, so I tacked, dropped the tops’l and came hard on the wind on the port tack. The true
wind was now SSE half east, 25½ knots. This gave a relative or apparent wind of 30 knots, 45˚ to port of the heading. (A true wind is like a shower of rain which is falling vertically until you start walking or driving into it, when it appears relatively or apparently to be coming from ahead.)

  Another squall went through at 1100 and at noon I noted that the sea began pouring over the side of the cockpit as I was trying to eat some breakfast and write up the log at the chart table. But two hours later I had the mizen down. It was a foul day, grey with heavy rain squalls and wind gusts of 35 knots.

  The poor little Mother Carey’s chick was still aboard but looking very sorry for himself. I wondered if I should put something there for him to clutch instead of the bare deck. Also was it any use scattering some breadcrumbs? I could try, so I gave him a length of green braided rope to perch on but he didn’t seem to think much of that. Also I scattered pieces of toast and crumbs; brown, of course—only the best. But he was not taking to those while I was there, perhaps because even sea birds can get seasick, or at least feel it, when on a boat. Later I found he had nestled on the Spontex sponge under the bilge pump in the cockpit. He looked less forlorn, almost as if it had made a difference, someone trying to be nice to him.