The Romantic Challenge

by Francis Chichester

  On her heading at midnight, Gipsy Moth would pass west of Great Inagua by 3½ miles. In any case the strong current of about a knot would have been setting her W by N since Cape Maysí. That meant a 6-mile set to the west so far, and as it would take another six hours before the island was abeam, I reckoned that Gipsy Moth would be giving it a handsome miss. Therefore I could turn in and have a sleep without any worry except for going over the Clarion Bank off the SW point of Great Inagua, where the depth shallows from 1,700 fathoms to 230. I imagined it would be very rough water there but on consideration I thought it would be negligible compared with the seas off Cape Maysí. I would look up the Clarion Bank in the Admiralty Pilot: ‘Lord, how I would love to be deep asleep instead of just dropping off all the time as I write. Later, I read up the Clarion Bank; no one seems to worry about it so why should I? Goodnight.’

  At 0600 on 1 March I got a fix from Jupiter and Arcturus. This put Gipsy Moth 20 miles west of Great Inagua and also 20 miles W by N of the DR position, so that for twelve hours the leeway had been at 1.6 knots.

  I had to review my escape tactics. The Mayaguana Passage was bearing 27˚, distant 101 miles; 27˚ had been Gipsy Moth’s heading (more or less) since Cape Maysí but she had only made good a track of due north. Therefore she would have to beat up to Mayaguana and spend another night on the way. There were no lights on French Cays or on the south-west corner of Mayaguana. There was a light on the Hogsty Reef which had to be avoided on the way, but the east coast of Acklins Island was unlighted for 45 miles. I decided that I would like to avoid both the Mayaguana and the Acklins Island Passages. That left Mira-por-Vos Passage followed by the Crooked Island Passage north of it. The Mirapor-Vos was bearing 347˚, distant 68 miles. It was lighted and appeared to be a shipping lane for traffic to the U.S.A. If I went for that I should reach it at about dusk but would then have another hop of some 50 miles to the Crooked Island Passage without a chance of any sleep. I decided to think about it while setting more sail. That was at 0700 and at 0745 I altered course for the Mira-por-Vos. Gipsy Moth would not be hard on the wind as until now, and so although the passage would be longer, it would be much faster.

  At noon Gipsy Moth was 32 miles off Castle Island, the eastern portal of the Mira-por-Vos Passage. At her speed of over 8 knots she should arrive there at 1540. This was exciting navigation. Castle Island and Acklins Island behind it were low-lying, while there were low rocks on the other side of the Mica-por-Vos Passage, eight miles to the west of Castle Island. Eight miles sounds like a wide target but always there were those unpredictable currents and eddies. However, it was a lovely, fine, sunny day and the sailing fast and joyous.

  It could have been a dangerous approach, but for the sun; I was able to use the same trick which had put Gipsy Moth on the right heading for the Haiti-Navassa Island Passage. I waited patiently until the sun was on the right bearing, which was at 1421, and then took a sight which showed that Gipsy Moth was off course 5˚ to the westward. I altered course accordingly and at 1535 I sighted the lighthouse ahead. There was no land visible anywhere, nor any buildings, just a mottled brown pin sticking up out of the sea four miles off. Without the position line from the sun I think it could have been very difficult to find it in day-time without radar.

  At night Gipsy Moth sailed into smooth water in the lee of the cays, rocks and sandbanks stretching for 27 miles from Castle Rock at the south-west end of Acklins Island to the south end of Long Island. Here there was another light, visible 8 miles. It was very weak and erratic but I picked it up at 1909 and from there it was an easy sail seventeen miles northwards to the Bird Rock light at the north-west end of Crooked Island, a good strong light, flashing every five seconds, with a range of 16 miles. This light was abeam at 2136.

  With a great surge of relief and a wonderful feeling of achievement such as only comes rarely to one during a lifetime, when some difficult project ends positively and successfully and can be seen to have done just that, I dropped the mizen and trimmed the remaining sails to come hard on the wind, heading NE. Gipsy Moth was through the Crooked Island Passage and had escaped from the Caribbean into the broad Atlantic at last. Within five minutes of setting on the new course I was in my bunk, asleep. It was the end of a four-day marathon; I had been unable to relax for a hundred hours.

  6. Ambling Eastwards

  Tuesday 2 March, 0852: ‘I’m lying in my berth, relaxed. It seems an age since I could rest or let go the tension, or allow myself to have a deep sleep. I am sipping nectar. Maybe it appears to be the same old brew of tea, except for having a slice of Nicaraguan lime in it instead of lemon, and sugar chipped off a round brick with an ice pick; but to me this morning it is nectar. And the biscuit I am eating reminds me of when dear wonderful old Jane Beer used to bring me in a cup of tea and two wine biscuits to wake me up when, as a boy, in 1909, I was staying with my great-aunt in Devon. Where does all this tension come from, you may well wonder. Why couldn’t I just drop the sails and sleep as long as I wanted to while working the Passages out of the Caribbean? I think the currents are the chief bandits.…In the open ocean they may be inconvenient but they are seldom dangerous… but among these islands and sandbanks they are strong and unpredictable. Maybe at X the current will be west-going and 1.5 knots or sometimes 2.5 knots, but also maybe it will be east-going at 3 knots in certain conditions, which can be expected or is sometimes quite unpredictable. For safe navigation in these waters a sailing vessel needs a constant lookout and plenty of time so that dangerous approaches can be made in daylight.’

  It seemed to me that the currents of the Caribbean are in league with the winds. If an onshore current was tolerable because there was a wind which would enable me to sail away from the breakers—then the wind fell dead calm. If I left the ship sailing safely along the coast while I had some sleep—and even two hours of sleep can seem a heavenly gift at times—as soon as I was oblivious, then the wind swung right round the compass until it was blowing from the opposite direction to try to put Gipsy Moth among the breakers before I awoke.

  Now all that was past; I was at large at the edge of the ocean, in calm seas under the sunshine, and with a light, pleasant breeze. I stood looking at the clumps of Sargasso weed, pale yellowy brown, the size of a lilypond, drifting past and opening briefly a straight path for Gipsy Moth to pass through.

  There followed a delightful sail such as yachtsmen all hope for but in most cases only experience in their dreams. Smooth seas, moderate winds, sunshine and mostly fine weather. It is true that Gipsy Moth was on the wind neatly, the whole time, sailing as close as she could towards her target, Point X, 20 ˚N 40 ˚W, 2,000 miles due east in the middle of the Atlantic, but I started off determined to enjoy myself. I was not in a hurry because for one thing I wanted time to carry out various repairs and experiments before making a speed dash down to the Equator. To start with I had to set up all the rigging afresh. I started a log so that I could keep a record of changes I made. This soon filled up with entries such as ‘Took up backstay a further two turns [of the bottles crew] trying to cure forward bend or curve in top half of main mast, also curve forward of mizen mast’; and ‘I regret to say I shirked tautening up the topmast stays at the stem head because it is so damn wet there when close-hauled. The lifelines are festooned with Sargasso weed brought aboard in the green water.’ (Actually the sea was a lovely blue, a tint of ultramarine, and ‘green water’, the water coming aboard solid and sweeping the deck, gives the wrong impression.)

  Periodically—far too often—I am amazed at my stupidity. In Gipsy Moth’s cabin was a swinging table which used to make me swear. When she was heeled to starboard the table hit my knees and upset any glasses of water and such like that were on it. When she was heeled to port the table was at the level of my mouth and I could not see what I was cutting on my plate without standing up. The other side of the table cannot be used at all because it is too far from the settee. The stupidity in this case is that it had never occurred to me until three and a half month
s after leaving Plymouth that I had only to sit on two or three cushions when Gipsy Moth was heeled to port to bring me up high enough to eat comfortably.

  On 5 March, after dark, Gipsy Moth was buzzed by a low-flying aircraft. This was a very unusual thing to happen out there, three hundred miles from land and in the dark and I thought the pilot might be having engine trouble or had lost his way, so I put on my spreader lights in case the poor fellow had to ditch. The aircraft turned, buzzing down again to a height of about 200ft above Gipsy Moth, then flew off to the north. I wondered what I would have done if he had ditched. I could stop Gipsy Moth IV in a few lengths but Gipsy Moth V will go on sailing if put aback because of her boomed sails. I thought I would make a first pass and drop a lighted buoy, then drop some sails and come back slowly to the buoy. Or, if I could see whoever it was I was aiming to pick up, I would approach him as if he were a buoy.

  By 7 March Gipsy Moth had sailed 830 miles from Crooked Island. Every spare hour I had been absorbed in analysing the results of the 4,000-mile run and planning my ‘Equator Dart’. Several points stood out which surprised and disappointed me. First, Gipsy Moth was not the flier I had hoped for. She was little or no faster than most other ocean racers of the same size. Vanished were my dreams of averaging 10 knots. I had never touched 10 knots in Gipsy Moth for any one-hour run since she was launched. Occasionally she had surfed up to speeds as high as 17 knots, but only while surfing on the crest of a wave, for a period of seconds.

  It was clear that I should always have quite a task to squeeze 1,000 miles out of five days, however carefully I chose my racecourse’; during the 4,000 miles Gipsy Moth only sailed at 9 knots or more on twenty-two occasions worth recording, over distances which ranged from 2.87 miles to a longest of 41.48 miles. In face of that it seemed to me remarkable that she had made good 2,000 of the 4,000 in ten days—1,017.75 in the last five days and 995.5 in the five-day period during the first half of the passage: 2,013.25 in ten days is an average of 201.325 per day, or 8.388 knots.

  On 9 March: ‘10.45 a. m. At a meeting of the Ship’s Company this a.m., the M.O. and Chaplain in attendance, Captain presiding, it was unanimously agreed on the tactics for the first part of the coming speed trial, namely, to sail down the 40th Meridian from 20˚N to the Equator. The Medical Officer said he was very relieved that the Captain had come out of his mental purdah and finished his cerebral ordeal with some result, whatever it might be, and apparently without losing his sanity. He said the whole crew had been worried about their master being immersed in calculations and rows of figures for day after day, to the—he wouldn’t say neglect—to the delay in dealing with other matters which naturally seemed to them much more important. Some of the less understanding of the crew, such as himself, had wondered if the master was doing his nut or, in scientific medical language, going crackers. The Captain ordered an extra round of brandy for all hands and grunted his way below to the security of his cabin.’

  I handled some of the ‘other matters’ the next day, when I adjusted the backstay and two forestays, the latter an awkward, niggly job at sea in a boat with a narrow, pointed stemhead. I also finished adjusting the starboard fore and aft lower shrouds, after which the main mast did not look too bad. It still had some curve forward at the top, but I dared not harden up the backstay any more. It was as tight as I cared to see it with the new insulator fitted by Bart at Bluff of uncertain compression resistance.

  I also made myself a chart. The Admiralty chart I had for the area took in the whole Atlantic and was much too small in scale. Making a plotting chart is not difficult. The scale must be chosen carefully so that it is large enough to make plotting of DR and astro position lines easy to see and accurate, while being small enough for one sheet to cover a reasonable number of days’sailing. I use a sheet of graph paper, choose some meridians of longitude and label them at the bottom or top of the sheet, and then mark off the degrees of latitude at the side, according to their value in meridional parts given in navigation tables. The meridional parts of a parallel of latitude are its distance from the Equator in terms of the distance between meridians chosen for that sheet. For example, the meridional parts of 40˚N are 2607.6 and 41˚N, 2686.2. The length of that degree of latitude is 2686.2 minus 2607.6 = 78.6 minutes of longitude at the scale chosen at the bottom of the chart. I divide each degree of latitude into six parts equalling 10’ or miles each, and divide one or two of those into five equal parts of 2-miles each. For 1 mile it is easiest to judge half of a 2-mile division. These charts I made were much the most convenient I had for plotting and gave the most accurate results.

  Thursday 11 March, 0200: ‘I do not know if all kinds of solitary living have the same effect. The solitary sea-life…makes me think and feel more than is comfortable for my peace of mind. I have dreadful attacks of remorse. My chief remorse is for unkind acts to friends in the past. Maybe something deeply wounding that I have said or done. Then I find myself stuck with such things for ever; they cannot be undone and the awful thing is that often they did not mean much to me, nor were even seriously believed, but were used as a cruel weapon to hurt. Thank heaven I have a lot of jobs and work waiting to be done; otherwise, if able to lay about with nothing to do but think and feel, I would soon get into a maudlin state and eventually I can imagine the possibility of finding life too hard and cruel to bear. This life makes one so sympathetic with others in trouble with their conscience or unable to cope with the overwhelming difficulties of their life. I often think of Donald Crowhurst with great sympathy. For me, to be nine months alone without aim, project, objective, challenge, would mean exposing my soul far too much. I can understand it being damaged or destroyed by continuous considering of it, relentless probing of it. I can only stand a very little peep of it now and then. Thank God for activity of body and mind to keep me away from my soul.’

  There was certainly plenty to keep my mind occupied. I wanted to have my big 41-gallon tank of drinking water empty for racing as it was for the 4,000 miles. There was a misunderstanding somewhere at El Bluff and my tanks, including the big one, were filled while I was away in Managua. There was no real problem, but in order to empty the 41-gallon tank by the time I started the speed run, I used fresh water as freely as if I had been in a house. I noticed the carpet in the galley/navigation cabin was wet and thought that was due to an overspill from the galley where the pump for the No. 1 tank squirts water into the galley sink unless I cork up the pump pipe when the yacht is heeled over. I had seen water jetting into the sink from this pump pipe, and also noticed that the pump itself was leaking. However, one fine day I took the carpet up to dry it on deck, and found water running from a loose pipe connection to a gauge which had been fitted at Buckler’s Hard. Suddenly the big tank pumped dry, but I did not mind that, since I wanted it to be empty before I started my run. The trouble was that I had also been drawing freely from the No. 2 tank, which I had intended to top up from the big tank before I started. I sounded the No. 2 tank and found there were only nine gallons left, plus the full jerricans and Portuguese water bottles in the forepeak, to last me for about 9,000 miles of sailing back to Plymouth. I immediately rationed the water severely and limited it to drinking, baking, watering the mustard and two glassfuls every other day for shaving and washing. But I wanted more water than that otherwise I should have no pasta or rice, because I have found I cannot cook these in sea water as I do the potatoes (I steam the onions on top of the potatoes in a basket gadget which Sheila found for me). And although it is amazing how much washing of oneself one can do with two glassfuls if one tries—besides shaving they provide for an all-over wash with a flannel and a clean of the razor and basin—I like to have fresh water for frequent swab downs in the Tropics to get rid of the sea salt on my body, which can cause rashes and boils. I also like to wash my clothes in fresh water: I don’t use clothes much in the Tropics but I was already running short of shirts, shorts and such like. So all my brain cells had to be put to work to devise how to provide fresh water.


  Friday 12 March, noon: ‘600 miles to go to Point X. It looks as if a calm day is needed to finish off the chores which remain to be done before the speed trial: Inspecting the batteries for water, adjustments to the life-raft, sewing the mizen stays’l batten pocket, finishing the rigging adjustments and taking up the cap shrouds.’ The next morning Gipsy Moth was still making heavy weather of it, hard on the wind with some hefty seas coming aboard forward. The jumper strut bottlescrew which Bart repaired for me came adrift and the wire began to flail about at the end of a jumper strut like a whip, with the bottlescrew attached. The bottles crew weighs about half a pound and I feared it would damage the tops’l track and other gear attached to the mast, or jam up the halyards. When the bottlescrew first parted during the 4,000-mile run, only the broken screw-eye was attached to the jumper stay end. That was bad enough, but now the barrel of the bottlescrew, a solid lump of bronze, was thrashing about. I wished I had my bo’sun’s chair tackle rigged up—I used it always in Gipsy Moth III and Gipsy Moth IV—but even that is no joke if the mast is pitching quickly. However I had not got it, so I would have to climb up the mast to the crosstrees or above to secure the bottlescrew, but I did not want to go up in this rough weather if I could help it. As the crosstrees on Gipsy Moth are reached, there is one place where it is decidedly tricky to hold on in a seaway. There is one narrow foothold just wide enough to take my toes, and a single handhold vertically above it. Rolling is not so bad, but at every pitch my whole body is wrenched forwards or aft from these holds.

  That night the second jumper stay broke adrift and joined in the fun of flogging the mast, but conditions were too bad to attempt to climb up to them. I just had to bear the agony as best I could.

  I was also worrying about Sargasso weed damaging the self-steering skeg and rudder. Although with Gipsy Moth clearing a path it was difficult to see how the skeg could get entangled in a clump, the fact remained that it was continually picking up small clumps of weed which straddled it and would not come off. Presumably more and more piled on until the heap overbalanced to one side or the other and pulled away. This strained the self-steering gear and of course interfered with the steering control.