The Romantic Challenge

by Francis Chichester

  This was bad, but there was little I could do about it now and I had all my work cut out to get to the Geba Estuary. The coast of Portuguese Guinea, low lying and heavily shoaled, has always had a bad reputation among seamen, and many ships were lost in the old days of sail as they tried to take this turning point too close or were driven on to it by contrary winds. Its lack of prominent landmarks makes pilotage difficult, and this was not helped while I was there by thick haze which clung to the sea all day. At night the warm, moisture-laden air condensed to leave a clear, starlit sky, but Gipsy Moth’s sails ran with streams of water, soaking me through on one occasion. There was so little wind about that my heart began to sink at the thought of starting from way up the estuary and attempting to make that magic 200 miles from the very first day. I drifted in at a wretched 2 knots, picking my way through the maze of unmarked shoals, and not even the welcoming cheerfulness of Christopher Doll and TV cameraman Paul Berriff when they came out to meet me in a Portuguese Naval patrol vessel could shift the black dog from my back.

  Gipsy Moth anchored off Caio at the mouth of the Geba Estuary three hours after midnight on 7 January.

  In the morning Christopher and Paul persuaded me to visit Caio so that I could pose for their cameras with the black residents and their shy, crinkly-haired young. There could hardly be a stronger contrast than between my port of departure, Plymouth, and my port of arrival with its ninety inhabitants, the heated atmosphere, the sun-baked reddish soil of the dirt roadway, and the dark green tropical trees. Just before midday Gipsy Moth weighed anchor and we set off for Bissau: it was a long, long passage which ended at daylight next day, and Gipsy Moth was not at anchor off Bissau with the sails stowed until 1030. After a brandy and a sleep for a few minutes I was visited by Commodore Bastos of the Portuguese Navy (he was also the Vice-Governor of the State), Commander Rodrigues the Chief Naval Engineer, the electronics specialist, the Police, Customs and Health Officers (the latter’s title was translated to me as ‘Sanitary man’). We had long discussions. The Commodore could not have been more friendly and helpful; he offered to do all the necessary repairs to Gipsy Moth and by mid-afternoon the two booms, the pulpit, and the BBC’s cine-camera, which had had a bashing from the waves, had all been dismantled and taken to the Naval workshops. At midnight I was taken to see four craftsmen working on the boom, which was already half finished and looked to be an excellent job of work. After lunch with Tenente Luis Nogueira, a handsome man with a magnificent black beard, who had been detailed by the Naval commander to look after me and who was excellent company and surely a social lion in Cascais, his home town in Portugal, I returned to Gipsy Moth, which in the afternoon was swarming with craftsmen dismantling and taking away the damaged deck gear. Below deck there was hardly turning-room in the cabin because of the cameras and associated gear which Christopher and Paul were handling while they were discussing their problems in a low, quiet tone, brooding like two hens conniving to lay a joint egg.

  At seven that evening I had an R/T date and was apprehensive of getting through at all from fifty miles inland, because the Naval Radio Chief said that their patrol boats had difficulty in getting through from the Geba River to the Cachew River, only a few miles farther north, outside which I had floundered among the shoals the day before I entered the Geba. But to my surprise I got through at once and after waiting my turn and switching to various frequencies before getting one free from interference, I spoke to Frank Page of The Observer at some length—The Observer was to carry an exclusive report from me each Sunday of my speed run. Then I was able to speak to Sheila and lastly to Dennis Morden of the BBC Foreign News Service, which was handling my broadcast reports.

  After this Luis rushed me ashore in the Naval launch to meet the Press. Then dinner, and so to bed. I was glad and relaxed to have the promise of no visitors or commitments of any kind at all until 7 p. m. the following evening. That night I had ten hours of wonderful sleep. I had forgotten when I last had more than two or three consecutive hours during the night.

  3. The 4,000-Mile Race

  On 12 January I was ready to start on my 4,000-mile ‘burn across the Atlantic’as Giles called it. The project weighed me down like lead. I knew I had blundered badly in starting from Bissau. With at least twenty days and twenty nights of continuous hard racing ahead, I had had the stupidity to lumber myself at the start with navigating a long, tricky estuary, with at best the light airs typical of the Tropics and at worst, calms. Since I arrived in Bissau I had been noting the speed of any breezes and they were mostly between 3 and 7 knots. How can one sail at 200 miles per day with ghosting breezes like that? Sheila had said forthrightly that I would be crazy not to start from Caio at the estuary mouth, and I knew she was right. But I had said that I was going to start from Bissau to make up the distance across the Atlantic to 4,000 miles and start from Bissau I would. Meanwhile, at anchor, the hot, humid, tropical air was oppressive; the muddy estuary water made fast sailing seem futile. My only hope was that by starting when the tide began to ebb I might, if only there was a breeze of, say, 10 knots from the north, reach nearly to the sea before the tide turned against me. The distance to the estuary mouth was 47.5 miles, the same as the length of the Thames from Tower Bridge to Whitstable.

  It was a slow start but a very pleasant one; Commodore Bastos came aboard to farewell me and presented me with a little silk pennant flying from a miniature standard which had the device of the Commando unit on it. With him came Commander Rodrigues and Tenente Alves, who gave me a perfect little model cut out of solid brass, of a tank landing-craft, which Tenente Alves had made himself. It would be difficult to find more kind, helpful and efficient friends than these Portuguese officers.

  I found the start a strain; for one thing a patrol craft of the Naval Commando was escorting me to the starting point. The Commando crew, Portuguese and experts in sea life, were watching my every move. It must have seemed interminable to them. I was much slower and more deliberate than usual after several days of shore contacts, many meetings and many discussions. I always seem to make a clumsy switch from the talking kind of life ashore to action at sea, or vice versa. First of all I had to weigh anchor and get it aboard over the life-line. Then there was the setting of the self-steering and hoisting of sails. As usual after shore repairs, ropes were in the wrong place and sheets unrove. All this required a lot of fiddling. However, a nice light breeze got up and I was full of optimism that I would have a getaway run down to the mouth of the estuary.

  The starting point I had chosen was 11˚47’N 15˚33’ W, which was out in the estuary 5 miles S by E of Bissau. The patrol vessel went ahead and marked the spot for me, using radar bearings; this was a great help because it enabled me to concentrate on sail raising instead of having to take a series of compass bearings to establish the point.

  Gipsy Moth went through the starting point at 11.30 a.m. It was hazy and the land in the offing was indistinct, the water a milky, muddy pale green. Gipsy Moth set off, ghosting towards the sea at 5 knots, with the big running sail poled out to starboard and five other sails set.

  The patrol vessel escorted me for several miles after leaving the starting point; I daresay that they wanted to be sure that I did not charge the string of sandbanks a mile to the south. They approached and gave me a cheer, then left. A couple of hours after the start a helicopter turned up overhead and I could see Christopher Doll, Paul Berriff and Luis Nogueira aboard. It was a lovely day with a light breeze, though hazy. An hour later the breeze died down and headed Gipsy Moth. I had to drop the pole and running sail and Gipsy Moth was committed to tacking slowly into the eye of light wafts of breeze.

  The Geba estuary is a wide stretch of water. At 1430 I was off Ponta Prainha, fifteen miles from the starting point, with no land in sight to the south, though there was a big three-mile long drying sandbank only five miles off. A large school of black fish, pilot whales sixteen to twenty feet long, cavorted around Gipsy Moth, surfacing and diving in all directions in gracef
ul curves. I find that whales always quicken my bloodstream, even small ones like these; I remember the yachts which have been sunk by a flick of a whale’s tail, particularly the yacht racing across the Tasman Sea two years ago, which sank so quickly that all seven crew were struggling in the water before they got their rubber dinghy inflated. With no food on board except a few carrots, they were indeed lucky to be picked up by a steamer days later. The captain of the steamer is reported to have asked: ‘Are you carrying out a survival test?’

  The temperature in the cabin was 90˚F and I longed to cool off with buckets of sea water, but the Geba river water is so dirty that no one will use it even for washing, and all the drinking water I took aboard came from Portugal.

  From dusk onwards I was hard at it until dawn. The current had turned, and with the turn the breeze became flukey from the west, so that Gipsy Moth had to tack every few minutes. All the time I was trying to fix my position in order to avoid the shoal patches down the estuary. There were seven lights along the north shore in the 45-mile stretch, placed so that one would be always in range; but they were so faint that it was difficult to locate them1 I picked up the Biombo light at 2200 and I could see land behind it when I tacked; there was moonlight above the thick haze. The Biombo light was 24 miles from Caio, so Gipsy Moth had not yet completed half the estuary passage. I set off again to the west but at midnight tacked to the north. The Jaime Afreixo shoal, which dries out in one place, lay ahead and I had to establish a position off Ponta Arlete before continuing westwards. I had to do a lot of thinking about how to avoid the unmarked shoals in the dark. My echo-sounder was the only navigational aid I could use and changing depths often helped fix the position; but some of the shoals were steep-to sandbanks and depth-sounding could not give enough warning in the dark.

  At one point I had one of those strange, unaccountable happenings that so often occur at sea. I heard an extraordinary noise as if a million simmering peas were passing along the hull. This, continued for eighteen minutes and was quite uncanny. The only cause of it that I could think of was a dense shoal of millions of shrimps or fry.

  I kept on staring in to the land but could not see the Ponta Arlete light and began to worry. I decided that I must tack away again when I reached a depth of 5 fathoms because of the rocks lying off Arlete. At last, at two in the morning, I saw the light faintly through my night binoculars, though I could not see it without them. I carried on shore-wards until the light was bearing due east, which gave me the security of getting out of the estuary without ramming a sandbank.

  At 0400 Gipsy Moth was due south of the Caio light. My log had forty entries of changes of heading, with distances, depths and different winds. Gipsy Moth had only sailed 53 miles and I had been on the go non-stop for twenty-two hours—except for once, that is, when I fell asleep at the chart table and woke to find my head on the chart. That was dangerous stuff in such waters, but I believe I was only asleep for one or two minutes.

  Immediately the open sea was ahead I flopped down on my bunk and slept.

  By half-past eight the tops’l was up with the No. 1 jib, main stays’l, mizen stays’l and mizen. An hour later I poled Big Brother out to starboard. But I just could not keep awake and had to drop off to sleep for a few minutes. While I slept the breeze slowly died away and I woke with a start to find Gipsy Moth becalmed, bobbing on the sea with much banging of gear. For a few seconds I could not imagine where I was.

  First day’s run to noon fix Wednesday 13 January 1971.

  Position: 12˚06’N 16˚55’W.

  Distance fix-to-fix: 84 miles.

  Calculated distance to finish: 3,918.5 miles.

  Days remaining: 19.

  So after the first day’s run Gipsy Moth had sailed 100.4 miles, but had made good only 84 miles fix-to-fix. Also the 84 miles was not directly towards the target because of the estuary and also because I was keeping north of the direct route in search of more speed. She was 118 miles short of the 200-mile fix-to-fix target. For the remaining nineteen days she would have to average 206.3mpd. It was no use getting depressed; it was my own fault for letting myself be trapped by a romantic notion. I must get on with the job. Gipsy Moth was becalmed until two hours after noon, when a gentle north-wester headed her off to the southwest. I had to drop the running sail, unship the pole, and harden up to the wind. I sluiced some bucketfuls of the Atlantic Ocean over myself in the cockpit and felt refreshed and revived, a new man. My head was still aching though, which I think was due to eyestrain from looking for the lights the night before.

  In the evening I had a good R/T connection with the BBC. Gipsy Moth was crossing the main steamer route and while I was below on the R/T I had a bit of a fright when a steamer crossed Gipsy Moth’s bows. The north-west breeze had also been a disagreeable surprise to me in a zone where there ought to be a northeast Trade Wind; but I suddenly realized that it was in fact the start of the north-east Trade. The true wind was N by W and only appeared to be from the north-west due to my sailing into it. By evening it had become a gentle 12-15 knot breeze and Gipsy Moth was settling into her stride. As the breeze swung round from north-west to north I freed the sheets and thoroughly trimmed the sails; I had neglected this until now because I was so fagged out; then, by sailing 10-15˚ downwind of the course, Gipsy Moth’s speed-up began a proper start to her voyage. The whole scene had crept upon me unawares.

  Next morning I was a reluctant starter. But the breeze had freshened at 20 knots, the heel was excessive and the tops’l sheet was pulling the stern round to leeward, causing too much weather helm for the self-steering gear to cope with, so I hauled myself out of my bunk and dropped the tops’l. By six the sky was lightening in the east and Gipsy Moth was well and truly in her stride; she had averaged 9.2 knots for a short period.

  Soon I was again at one with the ocean life. ‘Here I am,’ I logged at 0800, ‘reclining on my bunk like a Grand Pasha. I expect to be back on form today after a quiet night with a lot of sleep, broken only by one sail handling and one other visit above deck to trim the helm. At the moment I am lolling and lazing, drinking my morning tea with honey, which I make without even sitting up, having an Aladdin vacuum flask secured to the mizen mast within arm’s length and the rest of the “doings” beside me. How excellent it is too! I am glad of a chance to re-charge my energy cells. Now I must up and trim Gipsy Moth to sail her proper course though I am loth to do it because I fear it will mean loss of speed.’

  Second day’s run to noon fix Thursday 14 January 1971.

  Position: 12˚ 48½’N 19˚38½’ W.

  Distance fix-to-fix: 166 miles.

  Calculated distance to finish: 3,755 miles.

  Days remaining: 18.

  The second day’s run was disappointing, because Gipsy Moth had averaged more than her 200 miles a day in the twelve hours since midnight. Now she was 155 miles short of the two-day target, and needing to average. 208.6mpd for the remaining eighteen days. Maybe I had made a fool of myself; on the other hand, a lot could happen in eighteen days.

  In the afternoon I sowed the rest of my salad garden, or, put a little less grandly, the four trays which I plant with mustard and cress and keep on the shelf at the back of the settee in the main cabin. Two of these plastic trays are about lift long by 4in wide and the other two about a foot long. I have developed a simple drill for the crop raising and crop rotation which seems to work well. Sheets of paper kitchen towel roll are folded up to make a pad about four inches square and these are fitted on the bottom of the tray. The correct procedure is to sow the cress first, then the mustard four days later on top of it. They should then crop together. Unfortunately I do not seem able to get cress to germinate in the Tropics, so on this voyage I had to rely on mustard only. When it is ready to cut I just lift one square paper pad and snip mustard off on to the Barmene and sliced raw onion sandwich which I make for lunch. Then I fold another sheet of paper and make a fresh sowing. I had sowed one full tray before I left Bissau but had forgotten to water it again
in the flurry of beating out of the estuary and it had died by the time I got to it. Too late I remembered that I must water the seedbeds twice a day in the Tropics.

  At 1800 I set Big Brother, bringing the total sail area up to 2,27osq.ft. Gipsy Moth was now on a broad reach, 100˚ off the relative wind. The excellent little self-steering gear was having trouble in controlling the heading with this amount of sail set. The big runner poled out to windward was pressing the stem away from the wind (the opposite effect from that of the tops’l) and the wind was not strong enough at 12 knots to press the windvane over, in turn to force the self-steering skeg to one side and pull the tiller to leeward, steering the yacht back to windward to its original heading. To ease the load on the self-steering gear, it was necessary to balance the wind thrust on the sails on both the windward and the leeward sides of the yacht. The delicacy of the task was to do this without losing the wind’s driving force.

  While I was at Bissau, Luis had brought me a huge ‘hand’of about two or three hundred green bananas. We had had a long discussion about where we should put it in Gipsy Moth, and finally decided to hang it from the rail in Sheila’s hanging cupboard, outboard of the alleyway going past the heads. This was all right while Gipsy Moth was at anchor, but as soon as she started bouncing about in rough seas, the bananas swung to and fro, smashing into the sides of the cupboard and the edges of the door frame, going rotten where they had been crushed and making a horrible mess of the woodwork. In pursuit of a banana after two days at sea, I discovered a slushy, rotting mess in a dark corner of the cupboard, teeming with wriggling white maggots; presently a minor plague of nasty black flies began to crawl over everything in the boat. They were a new species to me, with bodies and wings a little longer and more slender than ordinary houseflies. I did my best with an Aerosol and hung the bananas that were left in a way that would keep them safe.