Gipsy Moth Circles the World

by Francis Chichester

  “The third time I came to Sydney was from the east after I had made the first solo flight across the Tasman Sea from New Zealand to Australia. This was in my Gipsy I Moth seaplane and it was another thrilling experience to be alighting and taking off in that little seaplane in the great Sydney Harbour. The fourth visit was to start a flight from Sydney in a Puss Moth monoplane to Peking and then on to London: this was in 1936.

  “And so I like to imagine sailing ships from England passing through Sydney Heads to drop anchor in the peaceful waters of Sydney Harbour after the 14,000 mile passage from Plymouth.”

  I was proud now to meet again that wonderful Sydney welcome, and felt that of all places in Australia this was where I should be.

  Within ten minutes of stepping on shore, I was facing a press conference of, I was told, ninety-four different press outlets, including television and radio, the biggest, it seems, that had ever been held there. This was a change indeed after being alone for over three months, battling day and night without a break of more than a few hours at a time. I saw a film of this conference run through afterwards. I was interested to note how slowly at first an idea put to me in the form of a question penetrated my brain, and obtained a reactionary response. As the minutes passed, however, the film showed my receptiveness speeding up. A lot of the questions were tricky, metaphysical ones, which I thought rather stupid to fire at a man who had been alone for 100 days. After dealing for a long time with the basic facts of life, such as survival, one’s values change completely as to what should, or should not, be taken seriously. To the question, “When were your spirits at their lowest ebb?” the obvious answer seemed to be, “When the gin gave out.”

  The Royal Sydney Yacht Squadron had invited me to tie up at their own dock, and I gratefully accepted. The mainspring of this delightful and excellent Yacht Club was Max Hinchliffe, ex-Captain of the Australian Navy. He had a tremendous boyish enthusiasm. Before I arrived, Sheila, when she first met him, had thought he was unresponsive, until she found that she had been talking to his deaf ear, the reason why he had retired from the Navy. I don’t think it would be possible anywhere to find a people more generously friendly than the Sydneyites, and particularly the Sydney Yacht Squadron. This club has its own boatyard, with shipwrights, joiners and engineers. All their facilities were offered to refit Gipsy Moth for her Cape Horn venture. Max was tireless in helping me. He immediately enlisted the help of Warwick Hood, the naval architect, who had designed the Dame Pattie, the 1967 challenger for the America’s Cup. I already knew, and very much liked, Alan Payne, whom Sheila and I had met in Newport, Rhode Island, after my 1962 solo crossing of the North Atlantic; he was the designer of the Australian 12-metre Gretel, which competed against the Americans for the America’s Cup in 1962. Alan had given up his private practice as a naval architect, and was designing craft for de Havilland’s outside Sydney. He also offered to help and advise me, so straight away I had most wonderful help and advice from two of the naval architects I admire most in the world.

  First, they tried to dissuade me from going on in Gipsy Moth IV, which they considered an unsuitable design for the job. I told Warwick how she had been built specially strong with a view to surviving a capsize and roll over. “Yes,” he said one day, “but she might not come up again with that shape of hull.” I said nothing. Alan expressed much the same views, and also tried to dissuade me from continuing. These men knew what they were talking about; capsizes occur in the wild Tasman Sea. I will not go into details of their views and our conversations1 When they found that I was going ahead with the voyage they brightened up visibly, and set about making Gipsy Moth as seaworthy as they possibly could. I told Warwick how Gipsy Moth broached to as easily as the flick of a cane. He put this down to the shape of the keel, and designed a steel extension to fill the gap between the lowest part of the keel and the heel of the rudder. He would have liked another extension of the keel forward, and I feel quite certain that he was right, but it was not practicable. I wanted the four topmast stays from the stem to the masthead reduced to two, and he agreed to that. I also wanted them footed as far forward as possible. He was somewhat reluctant to do this, but I was positive that the centre of the fore-triangle needed moving forward. This made the boat easier to tack and less difficult to balance. Warwick insisted on a totally different plan of stowage of all my gear and stores. Broadly speaking, the principle was to concentrate the weight amidships, and keep the ends light and buoyant. He would have liked to have a broad stern instead of the narrow pointed one, but I did not think that that change was practicable. Warwick did not just stick to theory, he spent hours up the mast, checking the rigging, and would tackle any troublesome job such as making the anemometer and the wind direction indicator work, which they had refused to do until he took a hand. He completely changed the loads on the mainmast shrouds, with a view to reducing the compression on the middle of the mast in the event of a capsize, when past experience has shown that the compression is apt to break the middle of the mast into several pieces which are shot out. (I may say that, except for two stays, I never adjusted any of Warwick’s rigging afterwards.) Alan was in full agreement, and added one or two items for safety; for instance he made up two strongbacks, as he called them, to reinforce the forehatch which was heavy, weak, and generally of bad design. I remembered that its miserable little hinges had torn out of the woodwork the first day I sailed the boat on trials. The drawback to these strongbacks was that they bolted the hatch down permanently, so that sails could not be dropped down into the forecabin from the deck. Unfortunately, as will be related later, I did not fit these strongbacks soon enough after leaving Sydney.

  Meanwhile the craftsmen in the Sydney Yacht Squadron yard were hard at work on Gipsy Moth. I had never seen faster and more efficient work done on a boat. The long Christmas holidays delayed the job, but Bob Williamson the engineer, for one, worked during his holidays to get forward with Gipsy Moth’s schedule. Jim Perry, the yard manager, who was an excellent shipwright and joiner, made great efforts to staunch the deck leaks. He fitted a quarter beading all round the doghouse, where it joined the deck, and stopped every leak there, except one. He made a big effort to staunch the leaks all along the edge of the deck by using a caulking of expanding rubber, which cut down the number of leaks considerably, but they were due to basic faults in the design or construction and it was an impossible task. He tackled the hatch over the companionway from the cockpit, which used to sluice me frequently if I was working at the galley when seas were sweeping the deck. He improved it greatly, but I still got a douche of sea-water down my neck when a sea landed on top of the hatch.

  The Lewmar winches had given me a lot of trouble and landed me in difficulties several times. I usually tack Gipsy Moth without needing a winch for the jib sheet. I start taking in the sheet as the boat comes head to wind, and have enough taken in with the sheet cleated up by the time the tack is completed. I do rely, however, on the winch spinning freely with the couple of turns of rope which I have passed round it. On several occasions the winch would not budge; it was seized up. By the time I got the sheet off the winch it was too late to cleat it up, and the tack was completely spoiled and useless. I would have either to head off the wind and wait until I had freed the winches, or wear the ship round back on to the other tack, and then proceed to free the winches. My cursing was unprintable, especially when this happened in the dark. I wrongly assumed that the jamming of the winches was due to salt water. On reaching Sydney we looked into this matter thoroughly and found that it was not the salt water at all, but the fact that three different metals had been used in the production of the winch and that the jamming was due to electrolytic action. I thought it incredible that a firm could offer such winches for off-shore sailing. An Australian firm making Barlow winches sportingly presented me with a set of these in Sydney. On the homeward passage, I never had to clean them, or even give them a spot of oil and they looked brand new at the end of it. What was so annoying was that I had s
pecially asked the designer of Gipsy Moth IV to specify a different make of winch, and I even chose the model with him at the Boat Show. I wondered how this different make which had given me such tremendous trouble had been fitted.

  As for the self-steering gear, Jim Mason took this in hand. He was the skipper and owner of Cadence, the yacht which had just won the Sydney to Hobart Race, one of the three most coveted prizes of off-shore racing, the other two being the Bermuda and Fastnet Races. Of these the Fastnet is likely to be the most difficult, the Sydney-Hobart the toughest, and Newport to Bermuda has had to limit the entry to 150 yachts. Jim Mason made two stainless steel plates for the steering oar to replace those which had snapped in half, and strengthened them. Unfortunately, they made the self-steering gear heavier still. Jim Perry repaired the wind vane itself, and as a result this also was heavier. To try to overcome the disadvantage which must result from the increased weight, namely that it would require more wind than before to move it, we fitted a heavier lead counterpoise. This, in turn, put more strain on the vane gear, and later in the voyage I removed it and replaced it with the old, lighter lead weight.

  The sails went off to be repaired and various anti-chafe patches were sewn on. When we came to a trial sail, I was worried about the much heavier self-steering gear and asked for a special self-steering sail with a boom to be made. This sail was completed and delivered within twenty-four hours of ordering it from the sail makers.

  All this time Sheila, Giles and I were leading a strenuous life. To start with we had a tremendous Sydney welcome to survive. There was an incessant pressure and temptation to enjoy ourselves. I wanted to reach the Horn before the end of February, which meant leaving Sydney by the middle of January, at latest. My Sydney friends felt that I had finished a voyage on reaching Sydney, and it was difficult for them to feel the urgency for me to get away, though they understood the reasoning which required it. I should not have got away for months if it had not been for Sheila and Giles. Sheila has an extraordinary flair for dealing with the public relations side of a project, and after I first arrived she took a lot of the pressure off me from press, radio and television demands. Giles, with some of his girl friends, unloaded Gipsy Moth so that work could be started on her, and acted on my behalf to start a dozen different operations in conjunction with Max. After settling the first flurry of paper work and discussions, Sheila started organising the revictualling and replenishing of stores. This was midsummer, and all the time the hot Sydney sun shone with a scorching heat for anyone fresh from England. The amount of work to be got through was tremendous. I had hoped my elder son George who had been living in Australia for twenty years and his wife Gay could help me. But they had been married only a year.

  We had to press on with the work so I saw little of George and his wife after our first meeting. I was decidedly below par physically, and seemed unable to get enough rest to pick up condition. My leg was still bad enough to prevent my walking properly. I think that if I could have had the exercise that I am used to, I would quickly have got fitter. I started doing exercises every morning after I got up, but that was not enough. Swimming might have been a good thing if I could have found a secluded patch of smooth water, but since I had trouble with my lung I hate putting my head under water, and I could not face the wonderful surfing for which Sydney is famous. Colin Anderson, whose son Robert is the godson of Tony Dulverton’s mother, is a dentist who served with the Australian Air Force during the War; he fixed up my broken tooth for me, but got very agitated about my lameness and persuaded me to go to a doctor (Warwick Stening) who astonished me by saying that from Colin’s description he had thought at first that I had a tumour on my spine! I mention these things because they were all part of a steady pressure on me from many different quarters to discontinue my voyage.

  Two photographs taken on my arrival caused me an immense amount of trouble. The first was of Giles giving me a hug when he leapt on board. He is much taller than I am, and pretty husky, and the photograph makes me look like an old man of a hundred weeping on his shoulder. (Perhaps if I had been a vegetarian from birth, like Giles, who has never eaten fish or meat in his life, I might have been as tall and husky as he is, and the trouble which arose from this photograph would not have happened.) The second photograph was taken, as I stepped ashore, looking down on me from above, which nearly always produces a disagreeable picture of someone; a police officer was holding one of my arms, and Giles, or someone, was supporting me by the other; and altogether I looked like the oldest inhabitant of Little Teapot by the Sea being helped out towards his one hundred and tenth birthday cake. These ghastly photographs were circulated in Britain, together with some of my outspoken criticisms of Gipsy Moth IV. As a result I had a telegram from Tony, the principal owner of the boat, saying that on no account must I continue the voyage. I replied telegraphing him to disregard newspaper reports, thanked him for giving me a chance to pull out if I wanted to without losing face, and ended the telegram: “Anyway I am sailing.” In fact, the boat was on charter to me for a peppercorn rent for two years, and the charter expressly stated that it was intended that I should attempt this round-the-world voyage. I was told afterwards that another organisation which had contributed some money towards the cost of Gipsy Moth in return for the advertising value, had wanted to publish a statement disclaiming any responsibility if I came to grief on the second half of the voyage. Undoubtedly I was in very poor condition when I landed at Sydney. I had had little sleep for the previous two nights beating up against wind and current, criss-crossing the busy steamer lane. My left leg was still lame, and I could not balance on it, which is why I let someone help me ashore, and I was certainly undernourished, if not partially starved. I reckoned that I had lost 40 lb in weight, but my family declared this exaggerated nonsense. I regret I did not weigh myself until I had been ashore among the fleshpots of Sydney for ten days, but I was still 24 1b under my normal weight then. Captain Alan Vilhers, who probably knows more about Cape Horn sailing conditions than anyone else, as far as square riggers are concerned, burst into print with the following letter in The Guardian of January 11:

  “I see that the redoubtable Francis Chichester plans to sail homewards by way of the Horn, as one would expect. But I hope that this time he will not drive himself singlehanded against some record of ‘average’made by some clipper ships. I would strongly suggest that he either ship some of those young fellows who abound in Sydney, used to the Tasman Sea (a nasty place) in rugged yachts, or heave-to by night or whenever he requires to rest, on the passage.

  “In my opinion, no self-steering device can be really satisfactory over the 6,000 mile run from Sydney towards the Horn. Sailors learned long ago that the price of survival there is constant vigilance and expert helmsmanship, with equally constant attention to the set of the sails. The strong winds can and often do change suddenly and most violently through six or eight compass points, bringing up a vicious cross-sea in which the running ship staggers and lurches and rolls. She can be flung off course in a moment, and she is fortunate if she can get back again.

  “The sea has an unbroken fetch right round the world down there: a ship runs within the ice line: she has to get down to south of 57° South.

  “The master has to be looking, or adequate and experienced assistants must watch with clear eyes. It is a simple thing for the yacht to find herself lifted on some great sea boiling underneath her in its headlong rush towards the Horn, quite out of control in the cross-sea brought up by the shifting wind. And so she broaches-to, falls into the trough broadside-to, with the tremendous tumult of the ghastly breakers murderous and merciless around her. Such a vessel as the Gipsy Moth IV can then be rolled right over.

  “The answer is to heave-to in time, yielding to the sea and not trying to run in it, with a rag of canvas in the after rigging to keep her head up, a drip of oil through the for’ard lavatory pipes to drift to wind’ard and make a slick there, in which the yielding vessel may live. Meantime, the west winds will c
ontinue to drive her towards the Horn; she will make it, probably.

  “In the full-rigged ship Joseph Conrad, I had to heave-to five times between the Islands and the Horn, though she was a strong ship and I had three splendid watch-keeping officers. In the four-masted barque Parma we broached to one night. She pooped a big sea. It washed the steering compasses away, and there she was flung athwart the maddened sea in a moment, rolling violently, swept fore-and-aft, the main deck a boiling of violent and turbulent waters like the bottom of Niagara Falls. We lived, by the grace of God and the strength of that well-built Scots ship. But a good many ships failed to survive such tests.

  “I do not want to see Francis Chichester land back in England a wraith again, as he came to Sydney. I do want to see him land. We cannot spare him.”

  Captain Villiers expanded these warnings in an interview with John Seddon in the Sun of January 12, which I reproduce here:

  “‘I beg Chichester not to attempt it. The outward trip he has made is simple compared with this one. That yacht may suddenly be lifted on boiling seas and rushed headlong towards the Horn.

  “‘The winds shift as if they are being controlled by some demon.

  “‘When I took the barque Parma round, she tossed in the maddened seas, rolled violently, swept fore and aft by the breakers and the main deck swamped with boiling turbulent waters which were like the bottom of Niagara.

  “‘That voyage presents the lousiest, most incredible seas I ever came across in all my years at sea. The worst any man will ever meet.

  “‘I don’t know what drives this man to go on tempting the might of the seas.

  “‘Chichester is magnificent, laudable. He is a wonderful fellow. Quiet, determined and capable.

  “‘God has been very good to him, and very patient. But to handicap yourself with such a monstrously small yacht in those seas at the age of sixty-five and after a serious operation seems to me to be asking a little too much of God.’