The Guardian summed up in a leading article:
‘Francis Chichester’s passage from Plymouth to New York, alone in his 13-ton cutter Gipsy Moth III, in the record time of thirty-three and a half days, can fairly be acclaimed as one of the great achievements of the sea. As a feat of human endurance (and at the age of sixty-one) it is outstanding: different in degree, for such things are incomparable, but making the same kind of sustained demand on will-power as climbing a high mountain without oxygen. The gear of a 13-ton yacht, normally sailed by a crew of six, would tax the strength of most men to handle alone. Chichester has not only sailed his yacht single-handed across the Atlantic, but driven himself day and night to race her. And his race was, perhaps, the purest form of human competition in that he was racing solely against himself and his own record for the same crossing set up in 1960.
‘He has failed in one sense—his personal ambition was to achieve the crossing in thirty days. But by any other standard his achievement will seem complete; and some measure of it may be gained by considering that his closest rival in the 1960 race, Colonel H. G. Hasler, took forty-eight and a half days to make the passage. Readers of the Guardian have been able to follow Chichester’s voyage day by day by radiotelephone. The radiotelephone is not new, but its use in a small sailing boat to speak across ocean distances is unique. At the outset of Gipsy Moth’s voyage it was held that if messages were received from her halfway across the Atlantic it would be as much as could reasonably be hoped. About 40 degrees west of Greenwich was regarded as the probable limit of radiotelephony from a small battery-operated set. New York is 73 degrees 50 minutes of Greenwich, and Chichester was still talking to the Guardian off Long Island. This is an immense achievement for British radio engineering, and the credit goes fairly to Marconi Marine, the designers of Gipsy’s radio equipment, to the Exide batteries which powered it, and to the marine services of the Post Office, which maintained a constant watch for Gipsy’s calls and made communication with her, often in conditions of great difficulty.
‘Gipsy’s telephone was used to report a yachtman’s voyage, interesting and unusual, but in world terms scarcely of deep significance to humanity. The experience gained, however, is capable of being put to many uses, and the new range of radio-telephony that she has opened may serve to make life happier and safer for people in ways still unguessed. It has been a brave adventure by a brave man.’
10. At the Receiving End
BY DAVID FAIRHALL.
If you ever drive along London’s North Circular Road, heading east past Hendon Stadium, you may just have noticed an anonymous brick building looking like something between a factory and an office block. There is no name outside, no imposing entrance, no distinctive feature but its drabness. Yet it is the centre of a world-wide network of radio communications operated by the GPO.
The concrete halls are packed with wire, plugs and dials. Apart from the control room that is, where the engineers on duty sit quietly talking, almost chatting with their opposite numbers at sea, in Africa or the Far East. This professional nonchalance is characteristic and deceptive. An antidote, perhaps, to the inevitable tedium of shiftwork, although a glance at the equipment that each has to maintain is enough to kill the idea of its being simply routine.
When we arrived to take our first calls from Francis Chichester, the staff’s reception was understandably tentative. Some lunatic trying to drown himself in the Atlantic—expecting to maintain contact over 3,000 miles of ocean with no more than a 60-watt transmitter. There was the usual difficulty in explaining what a 13-ton ocean racing cutter actually amounts to, and the only other yachts on the list of registered call signs seemed to be the kind one associates with Mediterranean millionaires.
The strength of the story which grew from Chichester’s daily call soon began to surprise the GPO staff as much as those who were reporting it. The Chief Engineer, Mr Gray, was enthusiastic from the start and a great deal of the trip’s success as a journalistic exercise was due to the thorough organization provided by him and his assistants. The tape recording of each conversation, for example, proved immensely valuable. When Chichester had been roused by his alarm clock at, say, four a. m. to make his call, possibly after only a couple of hours’exhausted sleep, he was in no state to repeat himself two or three times because reception was poor. We rarely failed to sort out the details, however, after playing the critical phrase back a few times.
The first operators to call for Gipsy Moth III were polite and faintly amused, but they soon became as involved as we were. The technical situation made this inevitable, for even with three great aerials trained on Gipsy Moth’s estimated position from different parts of the country, it was often hard work finding her faint signals. Her transmitter was much less powerful than a normal ship’s radio, even if the batteries had been fully charged. Once Chichester’s voice came through, however faint, it was immediately recognizable through the racketing interference; a distinctive intonation as he called GCN 3, London, GCN 3, London. The booming whine of the searching receivers would quieten as they settled on the frequency and we switched to each in turn to see which had the best circuit.
Before long, engineers began dropping in to see how Gipsy Moth was getting along, or whether reception was really as good as they had heard. In fact, the quality was several times compared favourably with radiotelephone calls from a big passenger liner. The pigeon attracted a good deal of interest once it arrived, and when a technical crisis developed over charging the batteries advice on wiring and voltages was always available. By this time we had switched the calls from early morning to late at night to make them less of a strain for Chichester (reception was not good enough during the day) and each meeting seemed likely to be the last. When Chichester came to rewire his batteries for charging by the main engine, the engineers explained after his call that one wrong connection could flatten them in a few minutes. We waited anxiously until the next night when a calm, clear voice assured us that he was well aware of the danger and we need not have worried.
Over the month’s voyage we built up a curious relationship with Chichester, the more so for my brother, who had previously met him for only a few minutes. One of us would sit in the dingy box of a studio, talking at a microphone and straining to catch the reply through headphones, while the other plotted positions on the chart or assembled a message. During the early part of the trip the calls were a downright nuisance for a man who had more than enough to keep his boat moving at full speed while eating, sleeping and navigating. But towards the end he confessed that he had come to appreciate his daily contact with normal existence.
At our end we tried, though pretty hopelessly, to visualize what was happening out there. Using a long distance telephone is always a feat of imagination; the fact of intervening space is as difficult to grasp as the speed of an aircraft from the passenger’s seat. When the man on the other end is bracing himself against an Atlantic swell, with nothing but ocean for hundreds of miles around, it becomes an impossibility. The fascination comes in trying. Occasionally Chichester would try to convey things direct—‘Can you hear those waves crashing on the deck?’ Normally his habitual understatement prevailed—’ You know it’s quite rough out here’—but either way we knew that we could never really know.
Appendix: About Gipsy Moth III
Gipsy Moth III was designed by Robert Clark in 1957, and built by John Tyrrell at Aiklow in Ireland. She was launched in 1959. She is 39 feet 7 inches long overall, with a waterline of 28 feet, a maximum beam of 10 feet 13⁄4 inches, and draws 6 feet 5 inches. She has an iron keel of 4½ tons. Her Thames Measurement is 13 tons, her gross tonnage 103⁄4 tons, and her net registered tonnage 9½ tons. She is built of mahogany planking on oak frames, with deck beams of spruce. Her deck is of half-inch plywood, with a rubber surface.
Francis Chichester sailed her single-handed from Plymouth to New York in 1960, to win the world’s first single-handed transatlantic race, and to establish the first acknowledged record
for a single-handed crossing from Plymouth to New York of forty and a half days. For that voyage she was rigged as a sloop, with a wooden mast of hollow spruce. For the 1962 crossing, she was re-rigged as a cutter, to designs by John Illingworth, with a new mast of metal alloy by Sparlight.
The plan above (not drawn to scale) gives a simple explanation of her masthead cutter rig. The difference between a sloop and a cutter is that a sloop has only two sails, a mainsail and one head-sail or jib, whereas a cutter has stays for setting two headsails before the mast, commonly called a jib and staysail, although a very large jib is also often called a ‘genoa’—a term which Francis uses in his narrative to describe his big jibs.
Both as a sloop and as a cutter, Gipsy Moth III has what is called ‘Bermudan rig’. This means that her mainsail is triangular, without an upper spar or gaff, and that instead of being hauled up the mast on rings, it goes up a groove in the mast on a track or slides. The Bermudan rig is aerodynamically more efficient than the older gaff rig for small sailing boats, because the mainsail is tight against the mast, and there is no gap through which wind power can be lost. A disadvantage of the rig is that to get the necessary sail area from a triangular sail the mast has to be a good deal taller than the mast of a gaff rigged vessel of similar size: Gipsy’s mast is 50 feet high. Modern methods of staying masts and of mast construction, enabling them to be made much lighter than they used to be, have largely overcome the disadvantage of tall masts.
The areas of Gipsy Moth’s suit of sails are: mainsail, 276 square feet; genoa, 420 square feet; No. 2 jib, 250 square feet; No. 3 jib, 134 square feet; spitfire or storm jib, 65 square feet. Her trysail, another storm sail which can be set in place of the main-sail, has an area of 144 square feet. Her sails are all of Terylene.
The movement of a sailing boat through the water is complex, because at any given moment it is subject to a number of air and water forces, some of which may be in opposition to one another. There are three main points of sailing: running with the wind aft—that is, coming from the stern; reaching, with the wind coming from the side or quarter; and beating, with the wind coming from ahead. In running, the boat is simply blown forward, the only resistance being the friction of the hull in moving through the water. In reaching, the boat is blown both sideways and forwards; the keel resists sideways movement, and the rudder maintains forward motion in the desired direction. Some wind force is naturally lost because of that element in the wind which is trying to blow the boat sideways. In beating, the boat is sailing against the wind; the sails are sheeted in hard, and the wind, in flowing over them, leaves a momentary vacuum at the leading edge of the sails into which the boat is sucked. This explains the ability of a sailing vessel to move forwards against the wind. At the same time, of course, the wind is trying to drive her backwards, and as the boat heads nearer into the wind a point is reached at which the power of the wind flowing over the sails is not sufficient to overcome the direct force of the wind blowing against her. No sailing boat can sail dead into the wind. The angle of nearness to the wind at which she can still make forward progress is determined by her rig, and sailing qualities, and by the skill of her helmsman. The angle that a boat sailing against the wind makes with the direction of the wind is called her degree of ‘pointing’. Where, in his narrative, Francis Chichester records that Gipsy Moth was ‘pointing rather too high’, it means that the boat was beginning to sail rather too close to the wind for maximum efficiency.
Wind forces are commonly measured on the Beaufort Scale, called after Admiral Beaufort who devised it. The forces in the Beaufort Scale, with the wind speed in knots, are:
Wind speed
Force
in knots
0
Under 1
1
1 – 3
2
4 – 6
3
7 – 10
4
11 – 16
5
17 – 21
6
22 – 27
7
28 – 33
8
34 – 40
9
41 – 47
10
48 – 56
11
57 – 65
12
Above 65
At Force 8 the wind officially becomes a ‘gale’. Anything over Force 8 is a violent wind, and Force 12 is the official beginning of a hurricane. In great storms wind speeds may be well over 100 knots.
A knot is a speed, not a distance. One knot is one nautical mile per hour. A nautical mile is rather longer than a land or statute mile, being 6,080 feet, or 1·1515 land miles. Six knots is roughly 7 m.p.h.
Copyright
First published in 1962 by Allen & Unwin
This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world
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ISBN 978-1-4472-3411-1 EPUB
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Copyright © Francis Chichester, 1962
The right of Francis Chichester to be identified as the
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