Eighteenth day’s run to noon fix Saturday 30 January 1971.
Position: 12˚54’N 69˚04’W.
Distance fix-to-fix: 215.5 miles.
Calculated distance to finish: 868.5 miles.
Days remaining: 2.
By mid-afternoon Gipsy Moth was going well with a fresh breeze, but I was concerned to get still more speed out of her. I dropped the mizen stays’l experimentally. Gipsy Moth then seemed to sail less heeled and to be more efficient as well as making much less effort. She also tended to gripe up to windward less and I eased off the No. 1 jib as well. This gave fractionally better speed and more comfortable, less anxious sailing. I wondered if the 600 running sail with its lower cut and 90sq.ft more area would be better as a running genoa than the No. 1 jib, and I determined to try it when the wind eased at night as seemed usual in those parts.
Since noon Gipsy Moth had been sailing at a high speed, averaging between 8.7 and 9 knots during eight periods logged. (Later, I concluded that the speedometer was under-registering by about half a knot and that Gipsy Moth was belting out the fastest speed of the passage.)
At dusk I shot Capella, Procyon and Sirius for a three-star fix to improve my drill, and at 0635 the next morning I got a planet fix from Jupiter and Venus.
At 0955 on Sunday 31 January: ‘I have been looking hard into the tactics and think it would be best to hold this gybe until after the R/T session which I arranged to make at 2.0 p.m. I reckon that to gybe now would entail taking 200 miles to pass across the main shipping lanes to Panama and that of this 200 miles 100 would be in the dark; whereas if I leave the gybe till 3.0 p.m. I shall then be about 75 miles past this morning’s planet fix and will cut across the first three main lanes in daylight. These first three lanes are from the Mediterranean, the English Channel, and New York via Puerto Rico. That will leave me with only two more lanes to cross, New York via Windward Passage (Cuba-Haiti) 325 miles farther on and the last big lane from Mexico, Florida and the east coast of the U.S.A. to be crossed 215 miles from San Juan del Norte. Another reason for holding on as at present is that the longer Gipsy Moth stays on this gybe, the faster the speed she will make on the port gybe when she changes over.
‘Now I must bake. I had no bread yesterday and this morning I missed it when I had only one potato ready for my breakfast fry-up.’
Nineteenth day’s run to noon fix Sunday 31 January 1971.
Position: 14˚15’N 72˚49’W.
Distance fix-to-fix: 231.5 miles.
Calculated distance to finish: 665.5 miles.
Days remaining: 1.
The nineteenth day’s run of 231.5 miles between fixes was Gipsy Moth’s best day’s run to date. At last I had got the sort of daily run which I had hoped for every day of the passage. The total of the fix-to-fix runs for the last three days was 637 miles.
At 1515 I wrote: ‘The confounded R/T upsets everything. I held off gybing or starting any deckwork which I might not have had time to finish before the R/T session booked for 1405; but the operator, after I had spent an exasperating half-hour trying to contact him, said that he could not handle me at the time and that it would throw Portishead out of gear if he took the call then. He asked me to call again at 5 p.m. which is in one and a half hours time2 I ought to eat something, having had nothing but breakfast; so the R/T will chop right into the gybe or else I’ll have to do that in the dark.’
Later, probably after nightfall, but no time is given in the log, I wrote: ‘I started the gybe act an hour before the second R/T meeting arranged. (It’s no go; I keep on falling asleep. I have put on a large saucepan full of spuds and onions. God knows why because all I can do now is to sleep for a while.) More anon.’ And an hour after midnight on 1 February: ‘I was quite upset—no, that’s not quite the right word, perhaps “thrown” is better—by the R/ T affair yesterday. I think it upset my “cool” and made me insufficiently aware of what was going on around me such as the wind and the weather. I just dug in to the job of the moment and paid no attention to the scene. I record this because it illustrates what a great drag and handicap is a daily R/T session, especially for long distance transmitting. If one considers the added fatigue and nervous strain caused by it, I reckon it can cost a racer anything up to 10 miles a day. However, this also shows how silly one can be to let trivial things disturb one.’
That morning, at 0616, I got another star and planet fix, using Vega, Jupiter and Venus. This gave a speed for the past 18¼ hours of 201.5 miles per day. When it came to the noon position of this, the last of the twenty days in which I had hoped to sail my point-to-point distance of 4,000 miles:
Twentieth day’s run to noon fix Monday 1 February 1971.
Position: 13˚11’N 76˚06’W.
Distance fix-to-fix: 203.5 miles.
Calculated distance to finish: 464.5 miles.
Days remaining: None.
So there it was. The flag had come down when Gipsy Moth and I still had 464.5 miles to go to the finishing point, a percentage of 11.6.
I had not hit the target; but I do not recall any feelings of great disappointment as I completed my calculations on that twentieth day, probably because I had in my heart accepted on the tenth day that the daily average required from the remaining ten days—227.25 miles—was hopelessly beyond Gipsy Moth’s capabilities. I was more excited than depressed. The total of the past four noon-to-noon runs was 840.5 miles, an average of 210 per day, and I had high hopes of ‘breaking the barrier’of 1,000 miles in five days.
In the afternoon the wind at last worked round to NE by E; but this time I wished it could have stayed where it was; ‘I must gybe again, dammit’, and just after six o’clock that evening, ‘it has taken me all this time (1 hour 14 minutes) just to get the poled-out sail down, get the pole down, unrig it and nobble it on deck, plus coiling the ropes afterwards and unfouling the various of them twisted round each other. That heavy repaired pole is an awkward customer in this fresh breeze. Now to continue.’ Fatigue was all through me and slowing up my reactions. I did not realize it, but it had been building up slowly over twenty days and nights of continuous racing. An hour later I was ‘Trying to make up my mind what rig to wear. It is a pretty fresh breeze up forward.’ The wind on board was 24 knots which made the true wind 29 knots from NE by N. ‘The mizen and tops’l are doing all the driving at the moment. The only other sail up is the main stays’l. A pole-out is not wanted, thank heaven. Shall I hoist the No. 1 jib? I will a brandy sip which will the think-box clear (maybe). Later: I’ll have a wee snooze meanwhile.’
I had a good sleep until I was awakened by a loud cannon bang at 2015. That noise always sends a shock-wave through me, and my instinctive reaction is one of dread that something has crashed or smashed. But a rapid casing of the joint this time showed that it was only the tops’l gybing. It could not stand doing that many times, so I changed the big windvane for a smaller, less sensitive one—a tricky job, especially at night. The big vane, meant for light airs, had behaved wonderfully after I had strengthened it; it had taken endless punishment without failing, but in the lively wind it was now banging the helm constantly and rapidly from side to side, which in turn put the tops’l at risk. While on deck I did some other jobs, outhauling the tops’l sheet to the mizen boom end, trimming the main stays’l, bagging up Big Brother and so on. It was quite a list. As so often happens, however, the sea had the last word. A souser wave swept aboard and some of the water shot through the cabin sky-light, which I had raised a few inches. One of its victims was a jar of peanut butter which I had left open in the galley when I dashed on deck and this was now filled with sea water. I had not had time for a meal since breakfast, but could not be miserable about that with Gipsy Moth ‘going like a witch with this cut-down rig of only 850sq.ft—the mizen, tops’l and main stays’l; but the tops’l is a powerful puller if its wind is not interfered with by the other sails, and now I have the wind I had hoped for right across the Atlantic—30 knots from the NE.’
Shortly after
four o’clock the next morning ‘I woke with a feeling that Gipsy Moth was being dragged back by something though the wind was registering up to 25 knots and she ought to have been going merrily. I hoisted the mizen stays’l but still felt that something was not quite right. I’ll try hoisting No. 1 jib after an infusion (into me) of tea. Perhaps the wind is losing its drive though still clocking up to 25 knots.’ This entry in the log shows clearly that I was losing efficiency through fatigue: I ought to have boomed out a running sail there and then. As it was I hoisted the No. 1 jib then, but did not tackle the boom and the 300 until a quarter-past ten, when it took me nearly two-and-a-half hours to get it set out to starboard. ‘Pole wouldn’t stand big runner again I fear. Now must change vanes again. This one cannot control downwind in light wind.’ Of course routine jobs, such as observing the sun and navigating, interfered with the act, but I would have taken much less time if I had not been fagged out.
Twenty-first day’s run to noon fix Tuesday 2 February 1971.
Position: 12˚16’N 79˚20’W
Distance fix-to-fix: 199 miles.
Calculated distance to finish: 268 miles.
This made a total for the last five daily runs fix-to-fix of 1,039.5 miles. It really looked as if I would have my 1,000 miles in five days this time. I calculated the Great Circle distance between the noon fixes at the start and finish of the five days. The distance was 982.25 miles. I was taken aback; it was like a blow in the face and at first I couldn’t believe it. When I studied the chart I could see that the track over the past five days had two dog-legs in it; first, on the port gybe Gipsy Moth had borne down on the islands off Venezuela, then she had to gybe away to avoid the Curacao and Aruba Islands and the peninsula projecting into the Caribbean from Colombia. Finally I had gybed again and headed S of W for San Juan del Norte. The six noon positions were not in a straight line and the fix-to-fix straight line over the five days was 57¼ miles less than the total of the five daily point-to-point straight lines. The Spanish Main had done me down; I had lost distance by gybing away from it.
I was not moping. I had all the time a feeling of excitement, as though I were treading lighter. This 200 miles a day for a single-hander instead of the traditional 100 miles a day average was something new and exciting in small boat sailing. Since I entered the Caribbean I had had a filling of excitement, of being hard-pressed because of the speed. There always seemed to be a rush to complete the sun or planet sights and to navigate accurately. Islands and land seemed to rush up, and it was difficult to get through all the routine work and yet sail the ship at its fastest and navigate accurately, even with time spent on eating and sleeping cut to a minimum.
At 1935 I made the distance to my finishing point 207 miles; course 251˚. Gipsy Moth was sailing fast, having averaged 8.4 knots for the 7½ hours since noon. (The ½ knot underreading would have made the average 8.9 knots.) At dusk I tried for a star fix as more practice for the next night when I would be racing up to a lee shore, but cloud came up and hid all until it was too dark to see the horizon sharply enough for an altitude. Even if the sky had been clear, I would probably have failed to get the fix because I had not prepared thoroughly for it. For the star fix to be a success the stars must be picked up in daylight and the sights completed before the horizon becomes obscured by darkness.
My do-it-yourself pole was not going to last much longer; the concertina-ing compression effect on the lashings had moved one pole against the other a little and so shortened the total length by a few inches. I thought it amazing how it had survived being up continuously—except for the last night—from when I first hoisted it. But it was hell to shift it from one side of the boat to the other and then lift the heel ten feet up the mast to the lug. On that morning, while I was shifting the pole across, Gipsy Moth took charge and came up to the wind at about 10 knots with a big heel and the sea invading the lee deck. I feared I might lose the pole overboard but managed to hand on until I had it in a safe position and could leave it to set Gipsy Moth back on course again.
At 0634 on the morning of Wednesday 3 February a four-star fix, using stars Rigel and Vega and planets Venus and Jupiter, put Gipsy Moth 117.5 miles off the finishing line after a speed made good since the previous noon of 202mpd. At 1054 I took the first sun sight in preparation for working out the position for the final noon of the passage.
Shortly after eleven o’clock I got a clear R/T link with a man whom I understood to be speaking from Managua, the capital of Nicaragua. Managua is about 200 males inland. When he said that he could not contact Christopher Doll, who was supposed to be waiting for me at San Juan, because there was no communication with that town, I was somewhat taken aback. My contact, whom I at first took to be ‘Captain of the Port’, said that the 50ft ship junior was coming out to meet me from San Juan del Norte. That was kind, but with the craft manned by sailors perhaps unused to yachts, would not this be fraught with bash-up possibilities? Towards the end of our talk I discovered that I was actually speaking to a Captain Bartlett of a firm called Caribbean Marine, and that he was not at Managua, but at El Bluff, a port farther up the coast from San Juan. He asked me to give him my noon position and I arranged to call him back. All these arrangements struck home to me that I must set hard to work and clean up below—especially the galley and primus cooker—before I arrived.
It is extraordinary how easily one can get rattled when fresh contact with the land is fast approaching after several weeks alone at sea. I hurried through the calculations for the sun fix and was shaken when it put Gipsy Moth 20 miles south of the DR position worked up from the planet fix at dawn. Sure that there was an error somewhere I hurriedly took a third check shot of the sun. As soon as I started working it out I spotted the silly mistake I had made—using the Ephemerides for the sun’s position for 2 February instead of 3 February. Was I relieved to find it!
A fix-to-fix distance of 209 miles for the day made the sum total of the last five fix-to-fix runs 1,058.5 miles, nineteen miles more than the five runs to noon on 2 February; but there would still be the same kink in the track where I was avoiding the Spanish Main and I thought it was scarcely worthwhile calculating the point-to-point distance. When I did, though, I was astonished and delighted to find that the straight line distance between the noon positions on 29 January and 3 February was 1,017.75. Gipsy Moth had done it! She had broken through the 200mpd barrier at last! Her average speed over the five days was 203.5 miles per day. I had given up all hope of her doing it and was taken completely by surprise.
Twenty-second day’s run to noon fix Wednesday 3 February
1971.
Position: 11˚34’N 82˚47½’W.
Distance fix-to-fix: 209 miles.
Total of fix-to-fix runs over past five days: 1,058.5 miles.
Distance made good over past five days: 1,017.75 miles.
Calculated distance to finish: 59.5 miles.
Now I was hard-pressed; I had to clean up the boat, navigate, plan for carrying all sail until the last moment and then dropping it as quickly as possible, feed, sleep, charge batteries, and make another call to Captain Bartlett at 1600.
First, the R/T; this time it was a triangular call, with Christopher Doll taking the third part. When Captain Bartlett asked me about my plans and I told him that I would be unable to enter the estuary or cross the coastline at San Juan del Norte because the entrance was too shallow for Gipsy Moth’s draught, he asked if I would come up to El Bluff where I could enter the port easily. I told him that I should be turning round as soon as possible and making for Panama; he sounded disappointed but said nothing more. He was clear, intelligible, and his voice gave the immediate impression that he was practical and reliable. I was very impressed by him and felt sorry when he seemed disappointed.
At 1600 I had less than 38 miles to go. I could not carry the poled-out runner after the R/T talk. I had kept it up longer I should have done because I knew that Christopher Doll wanted a helicopter shot of Gipsy Moth sailing in, and he might hav
e appeared at any time, but he was with the British Ambassador from Managua, staying the night a considerable distance northwards along the coast from San Juan in a house on a banana plantation belonging to an Englishman who had a radiotelephone. He began to unroll the most unexpected information for me. San Juan, which over the months had become a sort of El Dorado for me, was like an almost deserted mining town with rows of empty wooden houses from which the paint had all peeled off, facing dirt streets ankle-deep in boggy mud. There were no navigation lights anywhere at the harbour entrance or near it. The chart showed a big hospital on the shore to the north of San Juan, so I asked if he could get the hospital authorities to put a bright light in one of their seaward facing rooms. He replied, ‘There’s no hospital now and even if there were, it would be too late for me to get there.’ There was the silence of a hurried consultation. ‘We could arrange a light for you forty miles north of San Juan.’ I did not think that much good.
I should have to do the best I could without any shore lights and I did not like the prospect. I had already run 30 miles since the noon fix, which only left another 30 to go to the finish. With a 22.5 knot NE by E tail wind Gipsy Moth was driving fast on to a lee shore. The coast waters were described as having strong, unpredictable currents. There were no radio beacons or radio aids of any sort, nor any navigational aids of any kind other than my echo-sounder. Even that would be an uncertain protection; the sea bottom was so shallow off the coast that a depth of only 23 fathoms was charted 21 miles offshore and 12 fathoms only 2½ miles off the beach. Besides that, the chart survey had been made in 1836 and with the strong eddying currents for which this coast is notorious, God only knew what the sea bottom would be like now. With this tail wind Gipsy Moth was fairly belting out the miles; I must drop the pole and running sail at once. But there was so much to do and I must not have anything interfering with the star fix, which was now vitally important.
The Romantic Challenge Page 11
