Gipsy Moth Circles the World

by Francis Chichester

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  For comparison, the fastest boat in the Fastnet Race for 1967, Pen Duick III, skippered by my old rival and friend, Eric Tabarly, averaged 166 miles per day, but of course she had to sail through variable winds.

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  17. A Pleasant Sail At Last!

  Now in near-calm conditions began the endless wearing ship, resetting sails and retrimming the self-steering gear to coax it to take charge after the yacht had tacked herself time after time with all sails aback. It was tedious work but the weather was lovely. I sat in the cockpit watching the sun go down beyond a gently heaving sea with a glassy surface. Anything more lovely I could not wish for as I sat listening to Ravel and Gershwin played on my recorder.

  On May 7 I was hailed by the Esso Winchester, the first ship I had seen since Cape Horn. To my disgust I found that this first contact with people was making me tremble, but it reminded me that three months’solitude is strong medicine. One may behave as usual, but for a while one’s feelings are changed. The beauty and magic of nature is as if seen under a magnifying glass, and life seems lived to the full. Anyway, to live life to the full is to do something which depends both on physical action and on the senses and also, at the same time, on the man-developed part of the brain.

  I was becalmed or ghosting along at 2 knots or less, but I didn’t much mind. I felt that in some ways I should be sorry when the voyage came to an end. I ghosted on through patches of yellow-brown sargasso weed, which wrapped itself round the self-steering oar and put the boat off course. That weed was a nuisance. I had managed to clear the oar of the big chunk which had fouled it earlier, but more weed came. And as fast as I could clear it from the oar, still more weed collected there. It slowed down the boat, and upset the steering.

  On May 10 I decided to try to fit the new wind vane that I carried as a spare in the forepeak. It seemed that the great amount of play in the holes holding the bolts through the shaft must be causing much of the trouble with the self-steering gear. I worked at this all morning, and it was a tricky job, for those big-vanes were the most awkward things to handle at sea: a puff of wind would whip them out of your hands in a moment. But luck was with me; I had a calm sea, little breeze and no accidents. By noon I had the new vane rigged and fitted, and it seemed to be working well.

  That afternoon I saw another steamer, away astern, headed, I guessed, about east by north, and I logged: “Really, this is getting like Piccadilly for traffic!” In the evening I wrote:

  “Well, I have had peace from the self-steering gear since I fitted the new vane; no trouble at all, though several times quite becalmed. I think the other one was too heavy with the counterpoise and the extra wood used to repair it in Sydney. Also, owing to the holes in the wood being so greatly damaged, and enlarged by the shaft pins, the vane had to move through quite an angle before it acted at all. The bolt through the shaft was chewed to the thickness of a matchstick by the shaft, and actually snapped when I tried to withdraw if from the wooden frame. 2,164 miles to go to Plymouth. It is a pity that I bragged about my big 8-day run—any old sailors would say you can’t do that sort of thing with Neptune and get away with it! Look at the result—only 310½ miles in the past four days, and not even in the right direction; becalmed for a lot of the time and no end to this in sight!”

  May 11 brought no change in the weather. At dawn the sea was like the shiny oiled hide of a great beast, with life and movement rippling and heaving under the skin. Later in the morning I could see breeze on the water, and Gipsy Moth actually touched 5 knots for a bit. But the wind made a BF of me. I tacked to the east, and it chased round after me until I was headed south. I tacked back to the north, and the wind came back and pushed me off to the north-west.

  My arm continued to give me much pain. I don’t like taking drugs of any sort, but that night I gave in and took another codeine. The curious thing was that not only did it ease the pain of the elbow almost right away, but also the elbow seemed better in the morning because of it.

  I made a later start because I had been up almost every hour to trim sails during the night, but then I got down to more major work on the self-steering gear. I fitted a new bush to the bigger of the two bearings of the horizontal fore and aft main shaft. To do this I had to dismantle the gear first, and the biggest job was getting the steering oar detached. My Aussie friends who reconditioned it had made it a very tight fit. The woodwork had swollen since, and I could not get it off until I had chiselled enough wood away. This was a difficult job with the thing outboard of the stern, and my having to work by feel without being able to see what I was doing. However, I got it off in the end, and the rest of the job went smoothly. But, heavens, that thing was heavy! It was a struggle for me to handle it. Luckily it fell calm, which helped. I overhauled the rest of the gear, and felt that it should function better after this.

  That night I logged:

  “The fickle moon is on his back again under Venus, which does not seem quite right1 A lovely night. The Pole Star climbs up the heavens from night to night. With music and the remains of a bottle of Baccardi, it builds up to the most pleasant part of the whole voyage.”

  My arm seemed to get worse, and by May 14 the lump at the point of my elbow had become red and shiny like a huge spot or boil. The lump was about three inches long by one and a half inches wide, and nearly as hard as bone. I put on arnica twice, but it seemed to enrage the place. But I managed to last out the night without any more pain killer. I got some relief by hanging the arm down over the side of my bunk. In the afternoon the M/S Missouri, of New York City, NY, turned to have a look at Gipsy Moth, and we exchanged toots. I was waiting to set the big genoa in a lull, and did so after she had gone.

  That night I logged:

  “Last week, my fifteenth week at sea, was the slowest of the whole voyage, only 509 miles. This was due to calms and light airs while crossing the Azores High, the permanent high pressure system of the North Atlantic. I suppose it is only fair, as the previous week, the fourteenth, was the fastest of the whole voyage, 1,244½ miles. It has turned quite cold. The sea water was pretty cool this afternoon and I think I must have switched into a branch of the Gulf Stream coming down from the north-west.”

  But the wind freed at last, and on May 15 Gipsy Moth was running before it with a jib poled out. I tried to remember when last I had a free wind, and believed it was at the Horn! I had certainly been on the wind for a good many thousands of miles, and a free wind made a very pleasant change.

  I fell for some more codeine, not so much to relieve the pain in my arm itself, as to get some sleep, which the pain prevented. How I needed sleep! This extract from my log next morning (May 16) helps to explain why:

  “08.25. Since 07.15 I have done the following deck work. Transferred fore and aft pole-guys from starboard to port pole. Poled out. Topped up pole as soon as winch free. Unhanked 300 ft jib from starboard topmast stay, and transferred it (later) to port side ditto. Outhauled the clew of 300-ft jib to the pole-end, after fitting sheet at right length. Hoisted sail. Trimmed topping lift, outhaul and guys till sail setting to satisfaction. Transferred big genny from port side topmast stay to starboard side ditto (after first dropping the sail!) then rehoisted.”

  Later that day there was a class I, 3-star shemozzle, due to an innocent-looking rain shower. It started with a deluge, and I piped up from the main boom to the big water tank. While I was below for a few moments, dealing with the pipery, the wind came in from the opposite direction, not very strong, thank Heaven, but a fresh breeze. I had 1,550 square feet of sail set (a single tennis court has an area of 2,106 square feet). The wind switch put all the sails aback. The poled-out jib was in the way, preventing me from wearing the ship round, so I had to drop the big genoa, or rather let the halliard go, because the wet sail, pressed hard against the forestays and shrouds, would not come down. I ended up with all three headsails down. After the deluge finished, I hoisted the genoa staysail and got sailing again, but immediately
I went below the wind came in from the south, fresh. The sails were all aback again, and I could not release the mizzen sail because the boom vang was jammed tight in the jam cleat. At last I had the boat hove to in a new rain storm, while I waited for the wind to make up its mind. One good thing was that the rainwater whistled into the tank, and filled it up to its 40 gallons, enough to see me through handsomely to Plymouth (considering that I was down to my last bottle of gin to mix with it!). After the shemozzle, I enjoyed a hot rum and lime, which I reckoned it warranted.

  Although crossing the Azores High made for the slowest week’s sailing of the voyage, it was easily the most delightful part of it. I used to stand myself a pink gin in the cockpit at sundown, with soft music off scene. I collected some weird creatures in the sargasso weed. One horrible thing looked like a miniature dinosaur with six stumpy legs, each of which had a big sucker instead of a foot. It placed these stumps one at a time as it walked over the weed. I put two Portuguese men-of-war in a bucket. Their mauve-and-blue-tinted air bladders nosed their way round the bucket, and I was surprised to see how they shot out their long dangling tendrils like a flash. But I did not see any of these strange creatures, or any of the crabs, eat each other, or even attack each other.

  On May 17 a school of black fish (pilot whales), surfacing lazily, went past astern. I next saw them a mile to the north. It was hot and I felt languid and tired, and off colour. The radio telephone worried me—I wanted to be free of everything but the job of sailing. My arm, which was still more painful that day, was also having a bad effect. Unfortunately, it had had two nasty jabs the day before while handling the pole in the shemozzle.

  In the small hours of next morning I saw a motor vessel, bearing 255 °, overtaking me. I had had a good sleep, and my arm seemed slightly better, though the pain had extended in a line up to the armpit, which I supposed was the poison reaching the gland there. The motor vessel was the Sea Huntress, which the Sunday Times hired to hunt for me. I wished that I could be left alone to, get on with my job.

  The Sea Huntress came alongside at 08.10 and someone offered me some gin, but I declined it. I wished she would go away so that I could gybe. She had already been a nuisance through the night, because I had had to keep an eye on her during the darkness, in case she was a tunny fisherman, which would have had right of way. While the Sea Huntress was close in daylight, taking photographs, I had to delay my day’s routine, such as getting breakfast, until she had left. I wanted to gybe, which involved dropping the pole boomed out to port and, after the gybe, booming out the other pole on the opposite side, but I did not want to do this while being watched from close to, because I was well aware how clumsy and unseamanlike I would appear to be with my painful elbow.

  After she had gone and I had finished my work on deck, I wrote up my log, recording:

  “Yesterday I crossed the 1960 track of Gipsy Moth III, when Sheila and I sailed back in her from New York after the first Transatlantic Solo Race and we called in at delightful Fayal. I felt quite nostalgic about it. Even the lonely sea and the sky looked the same. I used to have a theory when I was flying alone over a lot of seas that, with experience, one would be able to fix a position roughly just by the look of the sea from the air.”

  Just before dusk I tried to photograph a dolphin scratching its back on the stem. A school of dolphins was playing a favourite game of dashing to and fro past the bow, to see which of them could touch it without being caught by the stem slicing through the water. I stepped quietly across the foredeck, but must have made a noise, because they all vanished, except one, which turned up again, and made agitated passes ahead of the stem, just like a child which has lost the rest of the party.

  Throughout May 19 I did nothing all day, except navigate, feed and put hot packs on my elbow. This had started oozing, and I applied scalding hot packs, bandaging the elbow with some lint. On May 20 I was still 1,120 miles from Plymouth. As I had only once on the voyage made this distance in a week, I guessed that I could not be in in a week’s time.

  But I was picking up speed, with a run of 179 miles that day and 171 miles on May 21. There was quite a big sea running then, and I was kept busy sewing the genoa staysail, a job I disliked very much. It made my back ache, which I supposed must be due to boredom, because I don’t sew with my back! That night it turned rough, with a 35-knot wind with a bite in it. It was difficult to stand in the cabin, and quite dangerous in the cockpit and on the deck. I started on the long and tedious job of setting storm headsails.

  Daybreak at 03.30 brought a wild-looking sea and sky. Gipsy Moth had done 5.85 knots all night under the two small headsails, reaching. I wanted to add a reefed mizzen, but the wire splice of the mizzen halliard drew at the masthead, and the halliard came down inside the mast; the sail came down outside it. I needed that sail badly, but could not climb to the masthead to replace the halliard in the rough sea running. I decided that I could make do with the mizzen staysail halliard, which is on the forward side of the mast, if only I could get it over the crosstree. I tried to pull it over the crosstree with the boathook while standing on the mizzen boom, but the 8-foot long boathook is a piece of heavy, waterlogged mahogany and I could not hold it against the wind. Next I tried shinning up the mast, but got cramp in the instep of the leg I damaged before starting the voyage, and had to give that up.

  Then at last my wits came to the surface. I made up a heaving line of a spare signal halliard, with a weight at the end, to throw over the crosstree, but the wind kept on carrying the heaving line away and twisting cordage round everywhere. At last, after many failures, I got my heaving line over and used it to pull the halliard through after it. The mizzen was then set again, to my delight, though I must admit that I had a very sore arm afterward.

  During the following night (May 22-23) I slept soundly for over four hours, after doctoring my arm at 03.30 with scalding hot packs. I used a cloth with a picture of the House of Commons on it, which seemed to keep in the heat better than the others. When I awoke I thought the speedometer must have gone wrong because the needle was up against the stop at 10 knots almost continuously. Reluctantly I got up, and found that, according to the log, Gipsy Moth had sailed 41.9 miles in the past 4 hours 52 minutes, an average speed of 8.6 knots. When I got on deck to reduce sail the lee deck was boiling along under water, with half the main boom in the sea at times. It was highly exhilarating, but I didn’t want trouble at that stage of the voyage. I looked aloft, and all the gear seemed all right, but I hurriedly dropped the mainsail, followed by the mizzen, followed by the working jib, leaving only the storm staysail. With this small sail Gipsy Moth still did 5½ knots. There were some big rough seas running, and the wind was up to 40 knots.

  Throughout that day Gipsy Moth slid along well—I felt that she wanted to be tugging at her mooring in Plymouth Sound! In the past 5 days she had knocked off 810 miles, an average speed of 162 miles per day. That evening I serviced and rigged the “Not-Under-Control” lights, and to my amazement they worked. These two red lights, one above the other in the stem, indicate that Gipsy Moth is not under control, and I light them if I am asleep while sailing in a shipping lane at night. A sailing vessel is supposed to have right of way over everything except fishing boats, and with luck those might move out of the way if they saw red “Not-Under-Control” lights coming. With those two reds, and the navigation lights, and the hurricane lamp, and an inspection lamp in the cockpit, Gipsy Moth must have looked rather like a Christmas tree! Having right of way is not of much value at times with big steamers. They are not expecting a small boat in deep waters, and some appear not to be keeping a watch.

  My fuel oil gauge was down to 2 gallons, so I hooked out a Shell plastic container holding 2 gallons, and emptied that into the tank. I did not want to risk running the tank dry, in case I got an air lock in the fuel system, just when I most needed the motor for charging the batteries. I now had nearly 4 gallons in the tank and 2 gallons in reserve. It was a big relief to have that much, because I shou
ld need a lot of lights in the western approaches to the Channel.

  A big event on May 25, at 02.30 in the morning after I had been up to tack ship and was rooting about in one of the lockers when I got below, was finding a fresh lemon. I had a delicious hot honey and lemon. That must have helped me to get to sleep, for I was asleep at 08.30 when two RAF Shackletons buzzed me. I was deep in dreamland, and cursed them, lying doggo. Then I thought this was mean, considering all the trouble they must have taken to find me, so I turned out. I hoisted the Royal Yacht Squadron burgee and the White Ensign for the first time since leaving Australia.

  With sunshine and a sparkling blue sea, Gipsy Moth was running fast for the Channel, rolling and cavorting as if enjoying herself. What a difference the sun makes! I felt the thrill of fast passage-making in a small boat, with the hope of crossing my starting line in 50 or 60 hours’time. I hoped then to cross it at 11.00 on Sunday morning, May 28, which would make the passage 119 days, or 17 weeks. That was a lot slower than I had hoped for. I had had sailing troubles, but one must expect those. This wonderful sailing in the Atlantic seemed so enjoyable, and somehow not fearsome as in the Southern Ocean. One soon forgets that there is not only the boat to worry about on this sort of long adventure; there are attitudes of mind, which one wishes to suppress by trying not to think of them, an obvious one being fear. At times one is attacked by the futility of making an effort incessantly, day and night for four months. It is difficult to keep up an effort incessantly by day and night.

  Usually after a solo voyage I dread fresh contact with the land, but this time I felt more relaxed, and resigned to whatever might turn up. Perhaps my previous voyages were not long enough. What effect had four months of solitude had on me? What habits had I developed? One unsociable habit, which had become strong by then, was that of dropping asleep at any time of day. I never had enough sleep. I was usually up half a dozen times in the night—last night, which I reckoned trouble free, and when I should have been sleeping deeper than usual because of taking some more pain killer for my arm, I was up four times. I would eat huge breakfasts, and often have to stop in the middle of breakfast and sleep before the end of it. I reflected: “If I am dining out in London in a few days’ time, what will my hostess think if at the end of the soup I say I must sleep for ten minutes before the next course?”