Atlantic Adventure

by Francis Chichester

  Victualling and stores for the voyage were looked after by Sheila Chichester, and the job was described by David Fairhall in an article we published shortly before the start of the trip. He wrote: ‘Scurvy may be something of a medical curiosity these days, but providing a constant supply of fresh food is still the basic problem when victualling a yacht for an ocean voyage. This, at any rate, is Mrs Francis Chichester’s main preoccupation as she prepares for her husband’s transatlantic crossing in June. With a large crew water supplies would also be difficult, but Mr Chichester will be alone when he sets out from Plymouth to beat his own record of forty days for the westward crossing.

  ‘Right at the top of the stores list, therefore, come two dozen lemons, supported by oranges and apples, sixteen tins of fruit, and three dozen bottles of juices and cordial. There will also be a good deal of dried fruit on board, including dried bananas, which proved successful on previous trips.

  ‘The Chichesters are basically vegetarian, so that having satisfied the need for Vitamin C the rest of the food stores are centred on cheeses, eggs, and nuts. The cheeses can presumably look after themselves for a few weeks, but even new laid eggs would not survive the crossing under normal conditions. About half of the nine dozen will therefore be coated with “Oateg” preservative by Mrs Martin, who is supplying most of the general stores down at Buckler’s Hard. The potatoes will be packed in small plastic bags, containing perhaps a day’s supply and provided with air holes to prevent them sweating.

  ‘These methods were tried out successfully during the single-handed transatlantic race in 1960 and Mrs Chichester seems to have made few changes in her victualling plans this time. Perhaps her fundamental principle is to keep every aspect of the affair, from buying to the final stowage, under her own supervision. Least of all would she leave it to her husband, who is likely to be far too preoccupied with handling Gipsy Moth III to remember what he needs to be on board—or where he has stowed it.

  ‘On a trip like this, where every fraction of a knot counts every hour of the day, food and sleep are necessary evils rather than luxuries to be enjoyed. The aim is therefore to keep stores as near as possible to where they are required, in the most convenient form. There will be no anonymous tins swilling around in the bilges, which turn out to contain apricots instead of tomato soup when you open them. One of the few things down there will be methylated spirit, arranged in bottles just by the Primus stove. Unless you have been to sea in a small boat like this one, it is difficult to conceive how much you can appreciate something being at your feet instead of on the other side of the cabin.

  ‘A more serious matter is the design of the petrol cans, which are painted a different colour from those containing paraffin. Petrol spilt into the bilges could be disastrous, so small cans fitted with suitable spouts and handles have been provided to be filled from larger ones. Obvious labour savers like “Thermos” flasks and tea bags will naturally be used and all the nuts will be shelled beforehand.

  ‘In the detailed planning of her husband’s diet, Mrs Chichester has tried to combine simplicity with variety.

  ‘Many of his meals will be based on fried potatoes and onions, but Chinook salmon, soft roes, anchovies, smoked salmon and similar delicacies should counteract any tendency to culinary boredom. A typical menu might be:

  Breakfast: Grapefruit segments or Muesli (made with Frutifort, grated apple, honey, and lemon juice). Brown toast, butter, and marmalade. Nescafe.

  Eleven o’clock: Mackeson stout.

  Lunch: Fried mashed potatoes and onions topped with eggs. Fruit (dates or raisins), or cheese and cream crackers.

  Cocktail time: Gin or ale.

  Dinner: Boiled vegetables—potatoes and onions (enough to fry for lunch the following day). Tinned fish, perhaps Chinook salmon. Bartlett pears.

  During the night: Numerous cups of coffee or tea made with a tea bag. Biscuits—ginger nuts a special favourite.

  ‘All the main stores must be on board at Buckler’s Hard by May 25th or 26th, before Gipsy Moth makes her coastal hop to Plymouth, the final departure point. There, at the last minute, fresh wholemeal bread and fruit will be stowed and Mrs Chichester hopes to make her husband a few salads to see him on his way round the Lizard. On her trip home with him after the 1960 race she made a salad every day of grated carrots, apples, onions, raisins, nuts and lemon juices—“but of course men won’t bother to do that”.’

  The main stores were loaded and stowed by May 26th, and on May 27th Francis left the Beaulieu River for Plymouth, sailing with Sheila Chichester and David Fairhall on board. They reached Plymouth over the weekend, and moored at Cremyll, off the Mashford Brothers’yard. While all the work of fitting-out Gipsy, and preparing for the voyage, was going on, at least an equal amount of work went into the organization of her radio communications. In theory, Francis could have picked up his radiotelephone anywhere at sea, and spoken directly to any telephone in England. On trial trips he had made one or two calls to the Guardian office in Manchester, and in the first few days of his voyage he spoke to Sheila at their home in London. The idea of receiving messages from Gipsy daily in the Guardian office was attractive, but there were a number of hazards.

  First, if communication was weak, transferring the call to the public telephone system might have lost still more of it. Secondly, handling a radiotelephone call in bad conditions really requires an operator specially trained in marine telephony, so with the help of the Post Office we played safe and arranged to talk to Gipsy every day from the GPO’s Marine Radio Terminal at Brent. I think that this decision had a lot to do with the final success of the whole operation. Mr S. Gray, the Engineer in Charge at Brent, and the whole staff there, put their hearts into the job of keeping track of Gipsy, and at times when conditions were very bad they did whatever may be the radio engineers’equivalent of moving heaven and earth to maintain contact with her. The whole of the vast GPO organization was eager to help this little ship at sea. In the first few days Gipsy’s calls went out on medium frequency to Land’s End Radio, and from there were transferred by landline to Brent. Later they went out on HF transmissions, and were received at post office stations at Baldock, Herts, Bearly, Warwickshire, and Cooling, Kent. Whichever made the best reception sent the call on to Brent. Communications to Gipsy went by landline to Rugby, and went out by radio from there.

  Mr Wilson and his staff worked out a kind of immense radio time-map, giving the times in each twenty-four hours that were likely to be most suitable for radio. These were mostly very inconvenient for people, who occasionally like to sleep, for they fell for the most part in the dim hours of the night; but they worked. The Guardian side of the telephone at Brent was manned by the brothers David and John Fairhall of the Guardian staff, who took their watches much as if they were at sea. The work of the engineers at Brent was not only valuable in obtaining Francis Chichester’s narrative from day to day: it was also of material importance to the success of the voyage. From Brent we were able to give Francis Greenwich Mean Time to check his chronometer, and we were also able to send him daily weather reports from the Meteorological Office, and to give him the reported positions of icebergs near his course. The Met. Office, with the particular help of Sir Graham Sutton, the Director General, and Mr B. C. V. Oddie, Deputy Director, did a splendid job in preparing special forecasts for the area of the North Atlantic approximately 100 miles ahead of Francis’s last-known position as we gave it them each day. They also collected every scrap of information they could about icebergs, which are a major anxiety to navigators as they approach the Newfoundland coast.

  In a big ship equipped with radar, icebergs are a hazard which can be guarded against in the ordinary course of keeping watch, but for a single-handed navigator, who was to sleep, they are the gravest menace on a North Atlantic crossing. The vile early summer helped Francis a bit here, for it had been so cold in the Arctic as well as in England that icebergs broke off late, and did not come so far south as they do in some years. But there w
ere still a few dangerous monsters drifting near his course, and we were able to give him news of most of them—in the event, of all that mattered.

  June 1st was a Friday, and by the Monday of that week, May 28th, Francis and Gipsy Moth III were at Plymouth, and pretty well ready to start. The last three clear days were spent in getting a few final adjustments made by the Mashford Brothers, and in taking on fresh vegetables and final stores. The night before Gipsy sailed, the Lord Mayor of Plymouth, the Rev P. B. (‘Tubby’) Clayton, Vice-Admiral Sir Conolly Abel Smith and a number of other guests attended a farewell dinner, given in Francis’s honour by Colonel Whitbread, who had been a staunch supporter of the venture from the start. Colonel Whitbread is a keen yachtsman, and as an amateur pilot he did a lot of flying in the early days, when Francis was setting up records in the air. A particularly pleasing incident was the presentation to Francis of a flag specially designed by the Institute of Navigation.

  The day of departure brought one of the first really fine days of the summer, and Francis crossed the starting line at 1100 hours (BST) in brilliant sunshine, escorted across Plymouth Sound by a noble fleet of little vessels including, I am glad to say, a smart, red Silhouette, Waskasoo, sailed by eighty-four-year-old Mr William Spurrell, who is the senior skipper of the Silhouette Register.

  As Gipsy Moth III passed the breakwater, and stood out to sea, the escorting fleet gradually fell away, leaving him to his long struggle with the Atlantic Ocean alone. To those of us who were there, it was a moving moment. Through the centuries many small ships on great errands have made their departure from Plymouth. Gipsy Moth III is among the smallest, but her errand was not the least great.

  Of the voyage that followed, Francis’s narrative speaks for itself. It will surely rank as one of the great single-handed voyages of all time. He failed to achieve his private ambition of a crossing in thirty days, but he knocked almost a full week—six days and twenty-one hours—off his record time in 1960, and his time of thirty-three days and fifteen hours will stand as a remarkable achievement. Moreover, he devoted much time in the first few weeks to keeping alive a sick homing pigeon, which landed on Gipsy, lost and bedraggled, on the second day out from Plymouth. The pigeon was lost overboard on June 21st, and Francis’s heroic efforts at rescue, putting about a 13-tonner time and time again single-handed, and keeping track of a tiny pigeon for forty minutes in the vastness of an Atlantic swell, will rank as one of the greatest feats of seamanship of our generation.

  The radio achievement of the voyage was also substantial. The failure of the charging engine, installed to provide power for the batteries, the troubles that ensued, and how they were dealt with, are all described in the narrative: the outcome was a great achievement by Francis himself, and by British radio engineering.

  A word about my editing: Really, I come into this at all only because Francis was at sea, taking Gipsy Moth III back to England, when this book had to be produced. The voyage and the narrative are his. My part has been simply to take his daily pieces, sent by radiotelephone to the Guardian, to relate them to his working logs, which he sent me from New York, and to assemble the material into a whole. Anyone who has ever sailed in a small boat—and imagination should be enough for those who have not—will understand that his daily messages to the Guardian, and his working logs, had to be prepared in conditions often of great difficulty and discomfort. Therefore, there has been need for some re-arranging to make a connected narrative. But I have added nothing in any material sense, and where some piece of explanation has been needed to explain events, this is made clear in the text. Where I have occasionally re-arranged something, I have been at pains to preserve the integrity of Francis’s own writing.

  We are indebted to the Editor of the Guardian for permission to include much that originally appeared in the Guardian’s pages, and I personally owe a great debt to David and John Fairhall for all their work during the actual crossing, and to George Hurley, of Plymouth, for much practical kindness to us all. I must also thank, on Francis’s behalf as well as my own, Miss Monica Cooper in London, who typed his handwritten working logs in the shortest

  possible time, and Miss Mary Walthall in Manchester, who typed

  the whole manuscript of this book.

  The Voyage

  by Francis Chichester

  1. The Start

  The drawbacks of racing alone across the Atlantic may be obvious, but what are the advantages, which must be great to make one wish to do it again? Loneliness, which you would think a disadvantage, only lasts for a short period of time, while breaking contact with the land, and for a few hours after that. From then on it seems to me one is only in a long race. I mean, that if you were in a cross-country race you wouldn’t worry about being alone, and a trip across the Atlantic is only a longer race. There is the obvious thrill of surging through the Atlantic swell and seas with all sail set, and lovely bow waves combing each side. There is the adventure of 3,000 miles of the Atlantic ahead of you. A voyage is like a classical drama: it starts slowly and works up with many adventurous incidents to the finish.

  When I am alone on an adventure I become more efficient. I seem to be twice as efficient, and I become vitalized. I don’t know why—perhaps it is because when I am with someone else I am concerned with their comfort or safety rather than getting on with the job. I have always been keen on doing things alone.

  When I was a boy I used to wander all day through the woods in north Devon by myself. I used to go bird-nesting, but only to get a single egg from some particularly difficult buzzard’s nest, or crow’s nest.

  One day, when I was about eleven, I caught a viper. I thought it might be hungry, and I showed it a beetle which I thought would make a good meal. It hissed, and bit me instead. For twenty hours or so, I was told, it was touch and go whether I would survive. Perhaps I made things worse by the fact that I travelled seven miles as fast as I could running, and on a bicycle, hampered for the first part of the journey by the snake that I was still carrying. Perhaps this adventure with the snake ought to have taught me a lesson in sticking to the job: if I’d killed the snake instead of trying to please it, none of this trouble would have arisen. But I did try to please the snake, and got bitten for it. When you are quite alone you don ‘t have to think about pleasing anybody, or anything else. You can give your whole being to the job in hand, and there is immense pleasure in using manual dexterity.

  When on a solo adventure, it seems to me that all one’s sensations are magnified: the sensation of excitement, the feeling of accomplishment, of fear perhaps, or of pleasure. All one’s senses are more acute. One sees and preceives more the beauty and details of the sky and the water, their colour or shape. One’s touch is more sensitive, and the feeling of water and wind and things become more real and more acute. One tastes things more sharply; everything tastes better, or worse, than usual. One’s hearing is more acute. One becomes so tuned up that the slightest change of conditions, of weather, or noise, or movement will be perceived and, in fact, will wake one up after being alone for a while. Another curious thing about prolonged solitude is that time seems to change its rate. Sometimes there seems a long interval between two words you are thinking, as if you dropped them separately into a pool; sometimes when you are in some difficult situation time goes incredibly fast, sometimes incredibly slowly. Time’s values change.

  Apart from boyhood adventures in north Devon, my first big adventures alone were with mechanical power in the air, when I flew Gipsy Moth I solo from England to Australia in 1929, and made the first east-west solo flight from New Zealand to Australia across the Tasman Sea. A voyage in sail has advantages over a flight because you are using natural forces, the wind and water, for your power, instead of mechanical power. Secondly, you are using more physical effort, and this always results in more pleasure than a nervous effort. Thirdly, because a voyage in sail takes longer, the experience is more protracted.

  My solo transatlantic passage in 1962 was very different from the
1960 one. There is no magic like the first-time adventure: the second time you know it can be done, so bang goes a lot of romance. Romance is an exciting adventure into the unknown, as I see it.

  This year it was still a big adventure, but of a different kind. Chiefly, it was a formidable project in this way: I came out into the open and declared I would start on June 1st to cross the Atlantic, that I aimed to beat my 1960 forty-day record, and lastly that I was trying to do it in thirty days.

  In the early days of flying we used to be scared to disclose even a destination, not to speak of an ETA; it invited bad luck, if not disaster. So the great battle for me this year was against time. Every ocean racer is acutely aware of the 100 things that can prevent a yacht from reaching the starting line. Family affairs for the skipper, crew trouble, broken gear, being hit by another vessel, stranding or grounding, for example. I reached the line on time, one deep breath of relief. Now I wanted to cut out 3,000 miles in thirty days. But before I got to the line much had to be done. I started living on board Gipsy in the Beaulieu River in March, and we had our first sail under her new rig one Sunday towards the end of April.