Gipsy Moth Circles the World

by Francis Chichester

  The squally weather was beginning to form a pattern. Phrases such as this kept on recurring in the log:

  “A 45 knotter threatened to flatten Gipsy Moth. I did not know if it was the start of another gale or what.”

  “There is a big sea running, and a big one coming under the boat slews her stern round now and then.”

  “It was so still below after dropping the genoa that I went up into the cockpit to see if we had stopped. It was still blowing 30 knots of wind, and we were sliding along at about 6½ knots.”

  “Rolling and strong sideways accelerations.”

  “Pretty rough going with strong winds.”

  “The moon shines bright between clouds as if to stress how ordinary all this is for her.”

  “Banging and slamming and throwing about all over the place—probably due to two or three different seas overriding each other.”

  The incessant squalls had one unexpected quality—often the sun would continue to shine brightly while the wind whipped the sea to fury. Somehow this didn’t seem right. An Atlantic squall usually comes from a grey sky over a grey sea. The bright sunshine was good, but it seemed odd, and out of place. Why should the sun be out there enjoying himself, when conditions were so rugged for the rest of us?

  The near-calms were the most exhausting ordeals for me. Time after time the ship would go about, with all the sails aback. I would have to wear round, and retrim the mainsail and mizzen. These near calms seemed to last seven or eight hours, and usually occurred at night. I would be up and down to the cockpit time after time for retrimming, and I would be lucky to get more than a couple of hours’sleep during the night. Each swell passing under the boat brought its own little wind during a near calm. First, the swell pushed the ship so that the sails were all aback as the crest passed under, then it made a wind from the opposite direction after the crest or summit had passed.

  Aback, aback, aback—this is the constantly recurring entry in the log. Each time involved wearing the ship round and retrimming at least the mainsail and the mizzen, then half an hour to an hour coaxing the self-steering gear to take charge again. I attributed this trouble to the unbalance of the sails or hull, or both. A slight change of wind force would completely alter the balance, the boat would head off in a new direction, and the rudder was so hard to move that the self-steering gear could not cope with it. On October 29 the log reads:

  “It is heartbreaking to have a lovely sailing breeze and fine sunny weather, to be sailing well off the wind and able only to do under 5 knots. The sea surface is pretty smooth really, yet Gipsy Moth splashes down, sending out great sheets of spray at the bows, and slows down for 3 rocks on 3 little waves. It is like a charging elephant being stopped by a fly whisk.”

  The seabirds continued to fascinate me. The albatrosses’ legs and feet shook and shuddered each time they flew into the turbulent wind shadow downwind of the sails. In a storm, the birds seemed to climb very slowly up the face of a wave, as if walking up it. I wondered if they could get up only by using their feet or if they had to use their wings as well. Whenever I could, I tried to feed the albatrosses. I liked watching them alight. They would put down their feet to act first as an air-brake, and then to stop them on the water.

  Twice I entered the Forties, and was driven out by a gale. A 50-knot squall going through was like the infernal regions, with great white monsters bearing down out of a black void, picking up the boat and dashing it about. I hated the feeling of being out of control. Once a wave broke in the cockpit, not seriously, but the immense power it showed was frightening. I wrote: “It requires a Dr Johnson to describe this life. I should add that the cabin floor is all running wet, and my clothes are beginning to get pretty wet too. Vive le yachting!”

  On November 2 I could not understand why Gipsy Moth nearly gybed time after time. Several times I reached the companion just in time to push the tiller over (leaning out from the cabin) at the gybing point. If she had gybed in that wind with the boom right out, there would have been chaos and damage. Then the boat would come up to wind until the wind was abeam. I began to fear that something had broken in the self-steering gear, so put on a coat and went to investigate. I found that the self-steering gear was not connected to the rudder at all; the link arm between the wind vane and the steering oar had pulled out of its socket after shaking out the safety pin somehow. I was thankful it was no worse. That day my speedometer packed up. At first I was surprised how much I missed it, but as things turned out it did not matter much, for I found that my dead reckoning was as accurate as it had been when the speedometer was working. As a matter of fact, it was more accurate, because the speedometer had been underregistering at low speeds. Perhaps this was because the little propeller of the speedometer’s underwater unit was getting foul with marine growth. After I had got over the feeling of loss when the speedometer failed, it was quite a relief not to have it. There was certainly more peace in not eyeing the speed all the time, wondering if it could be improved.

  On November 3 I had been three days without a sun sight, three days of “blind going” as the clipper navigators called it. This was just what I hoped would not occur when I was approaching Bass Strait, with no position fix since Madeira. With strong currents during the gales, no wonder so many clippers were wrecked there. In the afternoon of the 3rd I got a sun sight for longitude. This gave a day’s run of 227 miles, but again this depended on the dead reckoning being correct for the two previous days when the runs had been 155 and 138.

  I wondered how much more speed I should have made if I had not got the high-powered radio telephone on board, and did not have to use it. My log is full of entries such as this: “Long R/T contact with Cape Town. I feel absolutely flattened out.” Apart from the effort of transmitting and writing out reports, there was the matter of the great weight which had to be carried to operate the telephone. There was the weight of the radio telephone itself, which was four feet or so above the waterline, and therefore badly placed for the stability of the boat. Then there were the heavy batteries, the alternator for charging the batteries at high amperage, fuel for the charging motor, earthing plates down to the keel of the boat, two backstays rigged with big insulators top and bottom for transmitting aerials. On top of all this was the negative effect of transmitting; time after time I would delay sail setting because a radio telephone schedule was coming up during the next hour. Altogether the effect on the performance of the boat was considerable.

  November 3 brought the first real fog of the passage, with visibility down to about 100 yards. I had both flames of my Aladdin stove lit and full on, trying to dry out the inside of the boat which was oozing water everywhere. My rain-collecting system went on sending down water collected from the fog—no smoke particles there! It rained a good deal when it wasn’t foggy, and by November 4 I had collected 27 gallons of fresh water in my tank. That made me secure as far as water for drinking and cooking was concerned, but did not give me enough for washing clothes. I could sit for hours watching the rainwater trickling through the transparent pipe leading to the tank. It gave me great pleasure and satisfaction. I can’t explain why; I think some primeval instinct must have been involved.

  I was fagged out, and I grew worried by fits of intense depression. Often I could not stand up without hanging on to some support, and I wondered if I had something wrong with my balancing nerves. I felt weak, thin and somehow wasted, and I had a sense of immense space empty of any spiritual—what? I didn’t know. I knew only that it made for intense loneliness, and a feeling of hopelessness, as if faced with imminent doom. On November 5 I held a serious conference with myself about my weakness. When I got up that morning I found that I could not stand on my legs without support, just as if I had emerged from hospital after three months in bed. I was exhausted after a long struggle with the radio on the previous evening, and a long-drawn battle with the mainsail during the night finished me off. Then I thought, “Husky young men on fully-crewed yachts during an ocean race of a few day
s have been known to collapse from sheer exhaustion. I have been doing this singlehanded for more than two months. Is it any wonder that I feel exhausted?” That cheered me up a bit, and I made two resolutions: firstly, to try to relax and take some time off during each day; secondly, to eat more nourishing food. Because I was so tired I was not eating enough. I logged: “I must go more for things like honey, nuts, dried fruits. I ought to bake some more wholemeal bread.”

  My oven was a camping one which fitted over the Primus, and it baked very well. But I had rather got out of the habit of baking, which was a mistake, because I enjoyed my bread, and always felt that it did me good. But conditions were usually so rough and I felt such lassitude that often I did not have the energy to prepare the dough and bake. After my resolution I did bake more regularly.

  Breakfast was my best meal, partly, perhaps, because I felt more like eating after getting some sleep, but partly, too, because breakfast always seemed important as a ritual after coming through the night safely—candy for the kid. So deliberately I took more time over my breakfasts. I was often up at dawn, and at it all day until dark without a let-up, followed probably by three or four dressings-up in deck clothes during the night. So I sat for as long as I could over breakfast, and sometimes went back to my bunk for a snooze after it. My bunk was the most comfortable place on the yacht, but I had to give up the quarter berth which I liked best because of leaks. My sleeping bag and everything else got so sopping that I was driven out to another berth in the cabin.

  Those first weeks of November were hard going. There was constant rough work on deck in huge seas, and I was constantly afraid of another accidental gybe, which might have brought grave damage. I was fortunate that my earlier gybe had not done more damage than it did—I felt I had been lucky. Apart from the deck-fittings, which I contrived to repair or replace from my bosun’s stores, the only real damage had been to the mizzen staysail. That, too, was mendable, and although sewing was difficult in the rough conditions, I managed to restore the sail.

  I think that the patent hanks on my headsails caused me more cursing than any other item of equipment on the boat. Almost every time a sail was hoisted, some of them came undone. On November 8 I logged that it was quite a job getting the big genoa down because the wind was piping up, and all the hanks except four were unfastened, so that the sail began flogging as soon as I started to lower it. There was one hank left at the head of the sail, but with the strain on it that tore free of the sail. I would have given a lot to have the good old-fashioned hanks on my sails.

  On the evening of November 9 I was transmitting to Cape Town for The Guardian and got half my message through when the lead came off the aerial. I was still able to hear the operator and he could hear a few words from me, which I think was amazing with no aerial at all, and a 2,500-mile transmission! Part of the message which they got wrong was that I liked having birds around me, but that they made me realise how completely I was alone. The message went through, “because they make me realise how I am completely alone!”

  In 10,000 miles of sailing I had not seen a single fish in the water, only flying fish in the air, and on the deck. A few squid landed on the deck at night. The prions were my favourite birds, the most beautiful dove-grey birds with pointed wings, flying like big crazy swallows. They would play above the top of the mizzen mast, flying up to it and hovering there in the updraught, before turning and streaking downwind. I think it must have been a prion that I saw one midnight, flying silently round the yacht like a white ghost. The Cape Hens were the quickest to settle on the water, to examine the scraps I threw to them.

  Sheila, on her way to meet me in Sydney in the P and O Oriana, sailed from Aden on November 10, and I looked forward to being able to talk to her on the radio telephone. I tried two or three times to call up Oriana but without success. I was bothered about this, because I knew they were expecting me to call them and feared they would worry if they could not pick me up. But making unanswered radio calls was an exhausting strain, and Oriana became a sort of nightmare. I felt that I ought to tune in to try to contact her twice a day, but I also felt that it was nonsense to be trying to reach a ship still some 3,000 miles away. I decided to wait and not to try again until Oriana was nearing Fremantle in Australia. After my last futile call on the night of November 11 I wrote:

  “No luck with Oriana. I don’t think I shall try till they are near Fremantle. It wears one down with uncertainty. I’m sure Sheila would understand that. I think she is the most understanding, sensitive woman I know.”

  On November 11 I got all my dispatch for the Sunday Times through to Philip Stohr in Cape Town, but it took me 1 hour 20 minutes. This made an inroad into my charging fuel, which was already running short.

  Next day I pumped the bilge and found that it took 257 pumps to clear the water. I had last pumped on November 9, when it needed only 57 pumps. I wondered where all the water came from—257 pumps represents a lot of water. It had been heavy weather all the time, and I decided that the total of all deck leaks could probably be enough to account for the water; a lot of water always seemed to get in through the doors of the dinghy well. Still, 257 pumps was a lot of water. I added to my tasks the job of keeping a more frequent eye on the bilge, in case there was a leak below the waterline. In spite of my resolution I had another go at trying to call Oriana but not a squeak could I hear.

  It grew steadily colder. My fingers used to get frozen with any work on deck, and on November 14 a squall brought hail instead of rain. The hailstones rattled on the skylight like piles of white peas. I had a good contact, however, with Perth radio, and got through a 412-word telegram to The Guardian quite easily. I asked them to tell Oriana that I had tried to get her, and to say that I would call again on November 16 and 17 at 14.00 hours.

  Thursday, November 15, brought disaster. I woke to a 40-knot wind—a heavy weight of wind, but no worse than the rough weather over most of the past weeks. The burgee halliard parted, but that was small beer. At 12.15 I went aft to make what I thought would be a minor repair to the self-steering gear, and found that the steel frame holding the top of the steering blade had broken in half. There were two steel plates, one on each side of the top of the blade, to hold the blade and to connect it to the wind vane. Both had fractured. The oar blade was attached to the ship only by a rod used to alter its rake. It was wobbling about in the wake like a dead fish held by a line. I expected it to break away at any moment, and rushed back to the cockpit. I let all the sails drop with a run as fast as I could let the halliards go, so as to stop the ship and take as much strain off the gear as possible. Then I unshipped the blade, and got it aboard as quickly as I could, before the fitting which held the rod broke off and I lost the oar. The sight of the self-steering gear broken beyond repair acted like a catalyst. At first I turned cold inside and my feelings, my spirit, seemed to freeze and sink inside me. I had a strange feeling that my personality was split and that I was watching myself drop the sails efficiently and lift out the broken gear coolly. My project was killed. Not only was my plan to race 100 days to Sydney shattered, but to make a non-stop passage there was impossible, too. Then I found out that I was not really crestfallen; it was a relief. I realised that I had been waiting for this to happen for a long time. I went below and stood myself a brandy, hot. Now my thoughts began whirling round in tight circles, as I thought about what had happened, and searched for the best course of action. I went back to the stern and studied the breakage. Two steel plates, 27 inches long, 6 inches wide and 1/8 inch thick connected the wooden steering oar to the rest of the gear. These had both broken clean across, where a strengthening girder had been welded on to the plates. I considered all the pieces of sheet metal on the boat that I could think of, wondering if I could make a repair. The best bet seemed to be the swinging frame of the Primus stove, but it was not nearly as strong as the original metal that had broken and, besides that, I had no suitable nuts and bolts for bolting it to the broken pieces. The self-steering gear could
not be repaired on board—I was well and truly in trouble. If I had had a normal boat I could have trimmed her up to sail herself, but experience so far had convinced me that Gipsy Moth IV could never be balanced to sail herself for more than a few minutes. The bald fact was that she could only be sailed from now on while I was at the helm, otherwise she must be hove to while I slept, cooked, ate, navigated or did any of the other many jobs about the ship. I should do well if I could average 10 hours a day at the helm; that would give me 60 miles a day at 6 knots. Taking calms and headwinds into consideration, I should do well to make good, on an average, 50 miles per day. I thought I was 2,758 miles from Sydney which was a long way, only 200 miles less, for example, than the Great Circle distance from Plymouth to New York. It would take an age to reach it, 55 days at 50 miles per day, perhaps 3 months. On top of the 80 days I had spent on the passage so far, it seemed out of the question. The only course open to me was to head for the nearest place where I could get a repair. The nearest suitable place was Fremantle. Even that was 1,160 miles away which would mean a very long time at the helm. I worked out a course for Fremantle.

  I started work. I hoisted a small sail and after rigging a line from the tiller to the side of the cockpit I played with the adjustment of this until I got the boat reluctantly to keep roughly to a heading. It was not the best heading, but it could have been worse. I logged: “How I shall get her to steer on any heading that is not nearly abeam I can’t think at present. I’ll have some lunch and try again with more sail etc. Of course this 37-knot wind is pretty strong.” Later I wrote: