Atlantic Adventure

by Francis Chichester

  The next day, June 4th, was a tremendous contrast to the day before. Then, I was sunbathing on top of the cabin, lying on a sail and telling myself that I could not remember the weather ever having been so good during a race. This morning I was doing my office work at the chart table when I heard a loud bang. I rushed on deck to find that a rope grommet holding the 21-foot spinnaker pole to the clew of the genoa had parted in a gale squall. That meant a lot of trouble: there was a 420-square-foot jib blowing about in a Force 8 wind. I had to work very hard to get it in with the other big genoa too—maybe I shouldn’t have carried them so long, but it was good sport running down from the Fastnet in such a wind. It took me two or three hours to get the sails in and secured; now and again seas came aboard which made things difficult with the yacht dancing about. I worked away steadily and got the storm jib up, and then the spitfire (another small, tough jib) on the foretopmast stay. Just with these I did a merry 6 knots. But all this was rather too much for Miranda, whose vane works through a band brake, which began slipping.

  That didn’t make things any easier. Just before noon I tried to take a sextant shot, but was interrupted by a steamer, which came and circled round me, asking if I wanted any help. I had to wait until he had gone before I could get down to things again, but I did get a noon position, and it put me 51° 34' N., 11° 00' W. This gave me 119 miles made good in twenty-four hours, and 290 miles altogether.

  It was a rolling, twisting ride in the Atlantic, but after I had finished setting my storm jibs I would have enjoyed it if I had not been feeling rather sick. I had some trouble getting through on the radiotelephone—London could not hear me, although I could hear them. Afterwards I found a sail tie touching the lead in through the deck, which may have been the reason. In the evening I decided to set the trysail, but after I had set and trimmed it, I found that it interfered with the staysail, so I downed that. The sea was growing, and Gipsy Moth was flung from side to side, but moving fast under trysail and working jib. I had a successful radiotelephone call to the Guardian late that night, and immediately afterwards felt tired and turned in. I went to sleep, but was soon woken up by the sails roaring, Gipsy’s rough ride across the seas, and the wind. When I saw the tell-tale compass in the cabin that she was 60° off course, I got up, dressed in oilies, and went back to work.

  In the small hours I had much trouble with the steering, for Miranda was slipping badly. I calmed things down, and then took a piece of wire and slipped it into the brake band to tighten it. It seemed to work. The pigeon squatted on the cockpit seat in a corner, and took no notice when I stepped right alongside him. Poor devil, he must have been feeling awful. I, too, felt sick, and had some hot water and sugar. I tried to turn in again, but it was difficult to sleep for noise and movement, so I went out again to re-secure the main boom, and to let water out of the cockpit.

  With morning, the wind went down a bit, though it was still strong, and I still felt sick. There was a squall just before noon, gusting up to 60 m.p.h., which meant more work with the sails, and much trimming of Miranda. I felt the need of a smaller Miranda for gales. The wind was blowing around Force 6 to 7 from the south, and I had several waves over me; water ran up my trouser legs, into the top of the long boots inside them. I decided to double reef Miranda, which was a difficult, dirty, and tricky job in that sea, standing on the afterdeck. But it was well worth it, for instead of banging, flapping, jerking and not working, Miranda’s sail fell happily asleep.

  Then I took on another longish job of setting the spitfire on the foretopmast stay, but that also was well worth it, for the ship began going really well in the right direction, and quietly. Of course seas still picked her up and threw her on to her side, or slewed her round, sometimes her counter, sometimes her head. I had no luck with the radio, but just got through enough to say to Land’s End that my aerial was awash with heavy seas, and to give my position.

  Around six o’clock an RAF Shackleton came over, making passes. It was overcast and misty, with poor visibility of only a mile or so. The wind was Force 6, gusting to 8. The Shackleton did well to find me in that muck. I went up to see them; I must have looked pretty wet without oilies. They must have thought me unresponsive.

  Pidgy seemed to have disappeared. Earlier on, a sea had washed him off the counter, and he had to take to the air. I thought he’d gone then, but after circling several times, he came back again. I don’t know where he hid after that, but he turned up again in the night. He looked all in, but he showed a wonderful sense of balance, swaying to the roll without looking; and he had no hand to hold on by. He just stood on a slat of the cockpit seat.

  Note: This was the worst day for communication in the whole of Chichester’s passage. He was then at one of the most difficult stages of his trip, from the radio point of view—almost too far away for medium frequency communication with the coastal station at Land’s End, and not far enough for good long range communication by HF. But by some really brilliant work, Land’s End Radio did manage to pick him up, and pass on to the Guardian the essential information giving his position, and a few words about the rough time he was having.—J.R.L. A.

  3. Trouble

  The weather was still foul, but I had a good sleep from ten p.m. until around one-thirty a.m., when I was woken up by a class I shemozzle. I found the sails aback, and the yacht heading east—back the way we had come. The cord fastening a side block for Miranda’s tiller line had parted, and unfortunately I had some elastic shock cord helping the tiller to windward, and the shock cord took charge. We took no harm, and thank heaven it was no worse. I dealt with the situation, and I had just dried off and got rid of my oilies, when there was more trouble, which I found was due to the block on the other tiller line breaking away. So I put on oilies again and went through everything else again. I went on to the foredeck to look at the sail trim, and conditions certainly were rugged. It was hard to keep a hold, even using both hands, and there were deluges of sea. Pidgy, in the locker under the cockpit seat, was very bedraggled and sick-looking. I feared for his life, but there seemed nothing much that I could do for him.

  I decided that I might as well try to get some more sleep, and I did manage to doze from sometime after three a. m. until about eight a.m. I awoke to a drizzle of rain, with mist keeping visibility to little more than 300 yards or so, but the wind had moderated to around Force 5, and the sea was moderating too. But big seas occasionally threw the yacht over.

  I worked hard that morning (June 6th). First, I cleared the bilges, and pumped them out with thirty-seven pulls at the pump. Then I exchanged a few sentences on the radiotelephone with London. I tried leading the aerial directly to the set from the companion, but they said it was better the other way, through the insulator, although it was dripping water through the cabin top on to the chart table. We arranged to have another try later. I had breakfast of Kenco coffee (darned good) and muesli (ditto). Then I made Pidgy a hut in the port side forward locker under the forward seat by putting a Cellophane roof over the top. I put a dish of Macvita and bread inside, plus a bowl of fresh water, both of which he went for. He seemed better than he had been during the night. Perhaps, like me, he felt less seasick.

  Then I got to work trying to charge the batteries, but the generator ran for only five minutes. Every time the yacht heeled to starboard it robbed the carburettor of petrol. I felt that I must provide some solution to this, as we should probably be mostly on that tack. After struggling with the generator I got down the spitfire and set the working jib in its place. I got some sousers over me while I was working forward, but my new nylon-pvc suit was damned good.

  I spent a lot of time trimming sails, but I could not get them satisfying; they just would not give enough speed. I decided that Gipsy could stand a mainsail, so I downed the trysail. But the main halliard had wound itself round a crosstree, so I hoisted the main on the trysail halliard. The result seemed satisfactory. Then I got the big genoa in its bag out of the cabin, though with much difficulty in lifting i
t through the hatch because of its weight and bulk, and the yacht’s heel.

  I had an idea about the generator, and got to work to try it out. The trouble seemed to be that the carburettor was starved of petrol when Gipsy heeled, so I thought that if I could raise the level of petrol in the tank it might make things better. I got the end off the ensign staff, bored a hole through the middle, and fitted it into the petrol filler opening of the charging motor. This raised the level of petrol. I got a mouthful of petrol in the process—Shell probably tastes better than any other, but still! After all this work I found that it was still no go: The motor died with each big heel, when the petrol (I suppose) swished up to the other end of the reservoir.

  In spite of these troubles I felt better, thank heaven, than I had felt for some time. My morning sail trim held good and we galloped through the disturbed sea. The pigeon seemed particularly stupid: he stood on the edge of his plate, and emptied all the food into the cockpit water on the floor. I get pretty stupid when I am seasick, so I sympathized with him really.

  In the evening I had a good talk on the radiotelephone to David Fairhall in London, and afterwards I was sitting down below feeling pretty tired when I suddenly noticed from the ‘tell-tale’compass that everything was going haywire; we had gone right off course. I pulled my sea-boots towards me, pretty well full of water, but I had to wear them, and I had started putting them on before I tumbled to the cause of the trouble. I had been given a tin of shortbread by a Scots chap in the office, and I suddenly thought of this tin and moved it away. Sure enough, it had somehow become very highly magnetized, and had driven the tell-tale compass round, making me think that we were right off course.

  I slept until about two-thirty a.m., and then got up and trimmed Miranda. The wind had dropped. I started the charging motor, but it stopped after fifteen minutes and spluttered all the time. I thought that I had better examine the plug, but I knew that the trouble was definitely connected with rolling. I wondered if the exhaust exit was going under water? I thought that I would set more sail, but a puff of strong wind advised caution. I felt tired and capable of making silly mistakes, so I determined to wait until morning, and we went on with a humble 4 knots.

  After the morning’s work I got the charging motor going again by pouring an extra quart of petrol through the wooden block. Then it stopped, with a great squealing and squeaking. I tried the flywheel, but it would not budge, so I could only infer that it had seized up.

  Note: David Fairhall telephoned me at home that night to say that he had bad news: Francis had just come through on the radio-telephone with a call that might very well be the last; he had reported that the charging motor had seized, and that it was completely out of commission. This was grim, for unless the batteries could be charged, our hopes of keeping radio contact with Francis would end. But there was one faint chance: Gipsy Moth III still had her ordinary auxiliary engine, a Coventry Victor, and this incorporated a small generator, like that in a motor car, for charging the self-starter and lighting batteries. I thought of this, but Francis had already thought of it, for David reported that he was going to see if he could use it for charging the radio batteries. It seemed a pretty desperate hope, for the Coventry Victor only had a twelve-volt dynamo, whereas the radio batteries required twenty-four volts. Still, it might be possible to split and parallel the Exide radio batteries and charge them in two banks. But all this would be a most intricate job, and we were none of us at all sure whether it could be done. In the early hours next morning I got hold of Mr Maconachie of Marconi Marine at Chelmsford, explained the position to him, and asked him to put the problem to Marconi’s technical men. I then telephoned Mr C. P. Melly, General Sales Manager of the Coventry Victor Company, and again explained the problem. He and his people at Coventry were all sympathetic, and keen to help. During that morning we assembled all the technical advice we could to pass on to Francis by radiotelephone. He needed power from his batteries mainly for transmitting, and he could use his radio receiver to listen to us with the expenditure of very little current. So we were able to pass on long and detailed messages to him without imperilling the precious charge remaining in his batteries. The Coventry Victor is a marine propulsion engine which, of course, Francis was not using because Gipsy was making the crossing wholly under sail. And he could not use it as it was designed to be used without disqualifying himself from the whole adventure. The problem, therefore, was to find some way of persuading the Victor to run for long periods in neutral, doing nothing but provide charge. Both engine and dynamo were quite unsuitable for this: the engine, like all working engines, worked best under load, and the dynamo was a non-ventilated Lucas generator of the type used in motor cars—excellent for its own job of keeping up the starting battery and providing power for lights, but not at all intended to provide a charge for the big Exides needed for the radiotelephone. To get any charge at all from the Coventry Victor, Francis had first to change the connections of the radio batteries to make them into two parallel banks of twelve-volt units, and this alone was a tricky business in a small sailing boat in an Atlantic seaway—particularly when the man doing it was alone on board, and had to do everything else as well. The Coventry Victor engine in Gipsy is below the cabin sole, well and conveniently placed as an auxiliary engine for being out of the way, but in an extremely awkward position for long and intricate work at sea. Everything was difficult, and gave a great deal of trouble. Francis got his connections made and then ran into the problem of overheating when he tried to run the engine for long periods in a way it was never designed for. He stuck at all this with the calm, determined toughness that is characteristic of him, and somehow or other he made things work. To the end of the voyage the Marconi ‘Kestrel’ set went on transmitting, and we never missed a day’s reception. Quite why things worked remains more in the category of miracle than of mechanical or electrical engineering, but they did work. This success seems to me an immense tribute, not only to Francis, but to all the British products concerned—the radio set itself, the Coventry Victor engine, and the Exide batteries. They could not have been asked to work in worse conditions; they were abused, and made to do things that their designers would have shuddered at; but they worked, and went on working.—J. R.L.A.

  4. Ups and Downs

  Twice in the night I woke up to find that we were pointing the wrong way. We had swung round in a calm, and since I didn’t want to go east I had to get up and trim the boat. I finally got up to have breakfast at six a. m., and just as I was sitting down to eat something, I saw that we were heading north-east again. I thought it was Miranda’s fault, but it wasn’t her at all: in a few minutes the wind had swung from south-west to north. I straightened things out, and went over on the starboard tack, the first change of tack for five or six days. There was very little wind, perhaps Force I, but we ghosted along fairly well. I took the opportunity of the calm to tackle several days of washing up, and to deal with arrears of shaving and personal ablution. I got a sun shot at noon (June 8th) and found that we had made good a total of 762 miles towards New York. The log seemed to be persistently under-reading. Partly this was because of the periods of Gipsy’s ghosting, when we moved through the water too slowly to move the log, but there was more to be accounted for than that. I looked into things thoroughly, and discovered the trouble: the bearings were sticking. Moreover, the strain had made the line kink a good deal between the lead and the spinner. It is quite hard to train a log properly. The instructions say, ‘Don’t oil’, but I gave it a good oiling, and after that it seemed to be running well. Next, I fitted Miranda with a cordage so that it could be put into action by pulling the cord from the cockpit. I tried fixing a bamboo to the lever with another cord on the other side to disengage the clutch, but the bamboo broke and I didn’t have anything suitable to use instead.

  When I am alone at sea I don’t have much time to get lonely: one is fully occupied in doing one’s job. I felt very fit, but I was feeling a bit tired. I hadn’t had all the slee
p I needed: in bad weather, when I was being thrown about, I couldn’t sleep properly, and tended to wake up feeling more tired than when I went to sleep. But fatigue is accepted as the great enemy to ocean racing.

  In the evening I had a talk with Cliff Michelmore, and Sheila, for the BBC‘s ‘Tonight’television programme, and then a long talk with Mr Gray (the Engineer in Charge at Brent) about my batteries, and the main motor. I had to think things out hard. One thing I had to do to save electricity was to get out my oil lamps and candles. It was quite like old times.

  Pidgy looked very old and dark, and sick, and his behaviour was terrible: I had to mop up after him before I could step in the cockpit, or on the counter. He never seemed to learn about eating, and always stepped on the side of his dish, and upset it.

  Late that night I managed to connect the main engine to the Marconi batteries, and ran the motor for sixteen and a half minutes. But the generator got hot, and so did the gear-case. I decided to leave things for the moment, and think about it all tomorrow.

  With morning, June 9th, we were still becalmed: I freed Miranda and lashed the helm. What wind there was switched 180 degrees to the south, and kept me mucking about on deck. I tacked and set Miranda when a puff came, but it was only a zephyr. The cockpit, with all Miranda’s gear, looked like a tangle of cobwebs: I don’t know what Sheila would have said about it! I decided to turn in again for a bit in the hope that the wind would have decided what to do when I woke up.