Half a day later, there she was:
At 3.50 pm I was met by a fishing-boat. Sheila waved to me, looking very smart in her Mirman hat. Great wavings from friends aboard.
I thought to myself, ‘This is very fine but what about the race? They know, I don’t. How can I find out without appearing too pushing?’ I thought of something, ‘What news of the others?’ I asked. Someone said, ‘You are first’, and those words were honey sweet.
I crossed the finishing line at 5.30 pm, 40 days 12 hours and 30 minutes after the starting gun, having sailed 4,004½ miles to make good 3,000 miles on the Great Circle Course.
It was 21 July. For twenty-six of the forty days he had sailed into the wind, fighting Atlantic gales unceasingly. He had set and taken in the 380-square-foot mainsail 23 times and changed the headsails 40 times, numbers that take no account of the constant trimming, reefing, shaking out reefs, Miranda adjustments – nor the constant battle to reject sleep in order to be on deck fighting for every cable of sea across the great ocean. He would later reflect that he had found himself in the midst of all the struggles: ‘I quite understand why people go in to retreat. During a month alone you become a real person and you are concerned only with the real values of life.’
Sheila meeting Francis after winning first single-handed Trans-Atlantic race
That heroic last leg dash through the invisible dangers of icebergs and fog and the navigational prowess through the shoals had won Francis the race; and in the end he won it comfortably. Blondie had run out of wind at just the wrong moment, as did the good Dr Lewis, the two of them finishing a week apart after Francis. Val’s challenge just disappeared when he called into Bermuda to have his chronometer repaired. The eccentric Frenchman Lecombe eventually made it in his 18-foot bathtub four weeks later.
There followed a week of interviews and celebration, and a further ten days partying with successful Chichester relatives in Cape Cod. Now Francis’s thoughts turned to taking Gipsy Moth III home. Sheila insisted on joining him and on 21 August they left New York, just as Lecombe in Cap Horn was being towed in. The plan was to rely on the Atlantic weather gods and take the sunny, soft, southern route to the Azores, have a break and refill there and then sail home to Plymouth and Buckler’s Hard.
It all started swimmingly, in fact it was so hot on board that Francis fashioned a swimming pool from an old sail and he and Sheila took it in turns to splash around and cool down. In Sheila’s words,
We had glorious sunshine and beautiful blue seas. It was a lovely lazy, happy existence. The nights were really wonderful. I used to go and sit in the cockpit with the moon shining brightly and all the stars out, the sails just billowing out and the ship sighing as she went on her way. I enjoyed watching the dolphins playing around the bow and also saw a shark which was the colour of brandy, accompanied by its pilot fish. We saw a few steamers but on the whole we usually had the whole scent to ourselves. This sort of weather went on for days and Francis became somewhat frustrated.
Francis’s wish for a bit more of a blow was soon answered. As they reached the Azores the gods got bored and sent them a howler. They tried to tack into Horta with just a storm jib and trysail [mini main sail] but then hit a foul current. Most unusually – and certainly only because Sheila was on board – Francis decided to start the motor. But the motor decided it wouldn’t start.
Now I don’t know how my readers are on the seasickness front in rough weather – I’m always all right as long as I’m on deck. Below deck I get a bit queasy; reading below deck, even looking at a chart or pilot book, is enough to make me actively nauseous; to be anywhere near the bilges I’m certain to puke; but worst of all – almost air ambulance time – is to try to be fixing anything in the engine room. And as for alcohol or a hangover and seasickness, nothing worse has ever been invented – apart from being upside down in a bucking and heaving, oily smelling engine room.
So, how about this from Francis?
I decided to start the motor, but I could not get a kick out of it. This made me angry. The motor had been temperamental before I left England, and the boatyard at Buckler’s Hard had put in a lot of time on it; then it jibbed in New York, and the City Island boatyard had worked on it.
This time, I said, I would damn well find out for myself what was the matter with it. It was no picnic, with Gipsy Moth bucking about in the short steep sea kicked up by the gale, and presently I was lying at full length under the cockpit to get at the bottom of the petrol tank. Every few minutes I had to pop up and tack the ship.
But I found the trouble: the petrol tank was made of iron, and there was ¾ inch of rust sludge at the bottom, which kept on choking the carburettor.
After I cleaned the pipes I could get it to run only for a few minutes before the sludge choked it again. Finally I said to Sheila, ‘Do you mind if we heave to and wait outside the channel till dawn?’ She was relieved.
I backed the storm jib, and we jibbed about in the lee of Fayal while I fished out a bottle of Californian wine and we had a good dinner. Next morning we beat up the channel against a Force 8 wind.
They spent two weeks in Horta, mostly spent waiting for a new copper fuel tank to be built. Horta was not in good shape. An earthquake had broken the island’s plumbing, so no chance of the dreamt-for hot baths and it hadn’t done the restaurants much good either. They could not leave until 3 October, at which point local wisdom, and not a few locals, told them it was too late. Sheila was inclined to believe them and thought about taking a steamer back to Lisbon and making her own way back from there.
These were in the days before accurate forecasts. No doubt Francis looked at the clear sky and flat sea, licked his finger and held it up to the wind, and decided now was a good a time as any. Within an hour they were in a Force 9, with steeps seas breaking over Gipsy Moth’s decks.
Francis was in his element, a man at peace with himself while all nature raged outside:
We were fifteen days on passage from the Azores to Plymouth, and on nine of them we were under storm sails. There were impressive seas, magnificent and monumental, but not malicious. It was exhilarating to watch those mountains of water creeping up and passing. The whole passage was a grand sail. As soon as it blew up to Force 7, I could set the storm rig and retire below to prepare a good feast with a bottle of excellent American wine.
Sheila was now quite happy with big seas in a gale…
This doesn’t quite tie in with Sheila’s version:
Within 51/2 hours we were hove-to under bare poles, with huge seas. I must say I was scared, and I don’t think Francis liked it either. However, he cooked a hearty lunch of eggs and fried potatoes while I took the helm, feeling I was going to be pulled into the sea at any moment, we were rolling so heavily. There were huge seas running, like black mountain ranges. Waves were crashing on the boat: they were about 20 feet high, I’d say, with foaming tops. This rough weather continued day after day.
Stormvogel in action
The intention at the end of 1960 had been to race Gipsy Moth III in the RORC races the next season. However, a bad back and then hepatitis that put him flat on his back early in 1961 put paid to that. Francis had already agreed to be the guest navigator for Cowes Week and the Fastnet Race on Stormvogel, a 75-foot racer of great renown at the time, and didn’t feel he could or should drop out of that. Sailing on Stormvogel with her seventeen-strong crew, including a cook, was rather the opposite of sailing solo on Gipsy Moth III, and during the long hours when other people were doing all the work, Francis set to thinking about his 1960 Atlantic race.
Before the start he hoped, no matter how unrealistically, to equal the time Gipsy Moth III would take had she been fully crewed by six people working watches. He calculated a typical RORC race average distance and speed and added them up to equal an Atlantic crossing. Then he subtracted the foul Gulf Stream current and reckoned a RORC race-crewed Gipsy Moth III could cross the Atlantic in thirty days. He was disappointed in his forty and a half days, irrespec
tive of the fact that most people thought it was mighty heroic.
And that was another thing, these ‘most people’. The ones that mattered to him, his yachting peer group, his fellow RORC members, were divided as to who had really triumphed: Francis coming first or Blondie coming second. That rankled him. Perhaps Chris Brasher in the Observer best summed up the yachting fleet’s sentiment:
The winner had paid the penalty of near exhaustion by driving his boat down rhumb [direct] line for 40 days with numerous sail changes and reefs, all of which require long hours soaked on a sloping and slippery deck. There was no doubt in the minds of those who saw the competitors arrive that Blondie had won in terms of effort expended and technical development, the prime aims of the race.
To the second man in any race goes little glory. But to Blondie Hasler to become the second man to finish in the single-handed transatlantic race he devised will go immense satisfaction. If this race had been run on handicap lines he would undoubtedly have won it.
But others were impressed, particularly the Royal Yacht Squadron, then as now the most select yacht club in Europe and, with the New York Yacht Club, the most exclusive in the world. They made Francis an honorary member in May 1961 and from then on he always sailed with their White Ensign.
The lesson of his achievements being decried in comparison with Blondie’s had sunk home with Francis, who by now was determined to race across the Atlantic again the following summer. This time he would have only one competitor, time, thirty days’ worth of time. Once more he had the bit between his teeth: ‘I believe that this is the greatest urge to adventure for a man – to have an idea, an ideal or an ambition, and then to prove, at any cost, that the idea is right, or that the ambition can be fulfilled’.
As good luck would have it, also on board Stormvogel was the famous yacht designer John Illingworth; in fact, Illingworth had designed Stormvogel’s rig. During the Fastnet Race he and Francis shared ideas on how to make Gipsy Moth III less of a handful – and so also faster. John suggested a shorter metal mast and recut mainsail and a much shorter boom. This decrease in the mainsail area was to be offset by larger headsails, but ones that would be easier to handle, on dedicated stays. Francis also wanted to get rid of ‘the lethal runners, which had seemed animated by a mad lust to brain me’. Miranda, too, had a major makeover and so would become Miranda 2. By the end of the Fastnet they had a plan, no doubt much helped by looking all around John’s rig on Stormvogel as she romped home first and just missed breaking the race record by 100 minutes.
Francis now had to raise some sponsorship. The first port of call was the Observer but the nature of a 30-day dash didn’t suit a Sunday-only newspaper. Francis knew the yachting writer John Anderson, then the Guardian’s yachting correspondent. One can’t imagine the Guardian today sponsoring anything as competitive and elitist as a yacht race, even one against time, but like the Observer it was once a proud and stalwart rag that jumped at the chance.
With the Guardian on board came a technical challenge which today we take in our stride but which caused much boffin head-scratching in 1962: how to transmit Francis’s progress daily from the mid-Atlantic back to the Guardian’s readers. In those days all radio transmissions were controlled by the government via the General Post Office; surprisingly, the Post Office was keen to become involved with this long-range experiment. Marconi, who made the actual radio equipment, were more obviously enthusiastic. Such ground-breaking radio hardware did not come small or light. Francis’s account reminds me of the first mobile telephones, including my Nokia ‘brick’:
At the beginning of March, work started with a meeting of technicians on Gipsy Moth at Buckler’s Hard. Place had to be found for four heavy banks of accumulators in acid-proof boxes, with Atlantic-proof tops; also for a special charging motor, which might seem light to them, but was heavy to me; and for a radio-telephone of half a man’s weight, which had to be high above the water line.
All this weight would put the stern down, increase the rolling movement and decrease the sailing power, but the brilliant technical bandits were merciless to Gipsy Moth. My chart table and navigating department had to be partially wrecked to make room for the telephone.
There followed trouble with the transmitting aerials, trouble with the receiving aerials, trouble with the earthing arrangements, trouble with electrolytic action, trouble with noxious fumes from the batteries being charged.
Fortunately Marconi’s were really keen that the R/T should transmit, and the GPO men were determined that it should be received.
Delays, delays, delays. After the first transatlantic Francis vowed never to race without proper sea trials again – and here he was, wading into the same trap. The Agamemnon yard was due to launch Gipsy Moth III at Buckler’s Hard at the end of March but she did not get into the water until the end of April. The deal with the Guardian was for the attempt to take the whole of the month of June, so starting on the 1st with the climax on the 30th. Francis only had May to try out the new rigging, try to understand the vagaries of short-wave radio transmission, victual Gipsy Moth III (now forsaking whisky for new sponsor Whitbread’s Pale Ale), get himself physically prepared, deal with the Guardian and other media, sail her to Plymouth by 27 May and start the race Bristol fashion.
I don’t intend to report in detail on Francis’s second and record-breaking transatlantic solo voyage of 1962, partly because his source material isn’t particularly inspiring and the risk of repetition is as obvious in the telling as in the deed. Although he crossed solo westabout faster than anyone previously, he just failed to meet his own thirty-day target. If he felt that the extra three and a half days were a disappointment, the rest of the world realised that to sail across the Atlantic alone in thirty-three days was a stupendous achievement, and a full week faster than his winning time of two years previously.
On arrival he was met by the BBC’s top man in America, Alistair Cooke, who gave Francis this telegram:
I would like to extend my hearty congratulations to you on your successful new record-breaking crossing of the Atlantic Stop Your skill and gallantry as a sailor are already well known but this new achievement will certainly cap your career Stop And we are particularly pleased that you have arrived in the United States on 4 July the great historic day in United States history when we celebrate our independence = President John F. Kennedy.
Then the following day came another telegram, this from HRH Prince Philip:
Delighted to see that you have achieved your ambition to beat your own record Stop All members of the Guild and millions of other admirers send their heartiest congratulations on a magnificent achievement = Philip.
But for Francis the greatest complement came not from the powerful and illustrious but from that old warhorse and pleasure palace, the Cunard liner Queen Elizabeth:
Later in the morning I was proceeding up the East River under motor with Sheila on board. The Statue of Liberty was abeam, and at that critical moment the Queen Elizabeth passed close on her way out of New York Harbour. She saluted Gipsy Moth with three blasts, we dipped ensigns to each other and that was one of the great moments of a lifetime.
The other interesting part of the voyage is that for the first time I have the impression that Francis actually enjoyed sailing. It sounds strange I know; most of us who sail do so because we love it – well mostly – enough of the time to make us come back for more.
But reading Francis’s exploits of his time on board, one is reminded that he only chose sailing as a means to practise his first love, navigation. Seven years after the war, when he suddenly had the urge to navigate again, he was undecided between gliding and sailing, knowing aeroplane flying was unaffordable. It was Sheila who insisted on sailing, so that she could take part too. No, I can’t imagine Sheila in a glider either. When Sheila decided on sailing, Francis first sought out a navigator’s role with the RORC and it was only when none was forthcoming that he bought the yacht that became Gipsy Moth II. From that point the only time wh
en he waxes lyrical about sailing is when navigating a much bigger boat for someone else in one of the famous races. Not until we read this, as he approaches New York for the second time, do we sense that he enjoyed sailing as much as most sailors do:
This is the sailing that sailors’ dreams are made of, across the misty mysterious Grand Banks smooth as the Solent with water gliding along the hull gurgling and rumbling. The magic of the voyage was in my blood. It was sheer joy to set or trim a sail to keep Gipsy Moth sailing at her best; it was sport getting over difficulties. I laughed at incidents like coming across a steamer on the Grand Banks. It began to seem as if life was a joke, and should be treated as one. I was bursting with fitness and joie de vivre that seemed to build up after a few weeks alone. Perhaps it had taken three weeks to shed the materialism of ordinary living. I had become twice as efficient as when with people; my sensations were all greater; excitement, fear, pleasure, achievement, all seemed sharper. My senses were much more acute, and everything was much more vivid – the shape and colour of sky and sea; feeling spray and wind, heat and cold; tasting food and drink; hearing the slightest change in the weather, the sea or the ship’s gear. I have never enjoyed anything more than that marvellous last 1,000 miles sailing along the eastern seaboard of North America.
Francis, Giles and Sheila celebrating another Atlantic crossing
Never Fear Page 25
