Never Fear

by Ian Strathcarron

  Anyway, back to the race. At the midway point Chris Brasher’s headline in the Observer was:

  ATLANTIC RACE IS NECK-AND-NECK

  One Lone Yachtsman Still to be Sighted

  He then reported that Gipsy Moth III and Jester had both sailed 1,500 miles, with Jester 300 miles to the north of Gipsy Moth III. Val Howells’ gamble to take Eira south had failed and he was in light winds and 400 miles behind. Dr Lewis had suffered a broken mast soon after the start and had to return to Plymouth for repairs, re-joining the race three days later. He was the ‘One Lone Yachtsman Still to be Sighted’. Lastly, we read that our French friend Lecombe had started five days after the others and had taken the sensible option of heading for the Azores and crossing in the sunshine; as a result, Cap Horn was 300 miles behind Eira.

  Apart from reading the Observer accounts, I am lucky to be shown Gipsy Moth III’s log in pride of place in the Holborn headquarters of GAPAN, the Guild of Air Pilots and Navigators, of which Francis was a prominent – and its most famous – member, and to whom he donated his logbook. Nowadays the need for navigators is negligible, so GAPAN has become The Honourable Company of Air Pilots and is the largest livery company in the City. I’m very grateful to the Company’s historian, the retired British Airways pilot Peter Bugge, for spending so much time researching Francis’s and GAPAN’s times together.

  So, I learn that Francis always kept very detailed logs. It seems that no event was too small to record in his own shorthand, which, translated could be:

  1149 made tea; still 4 knots – 287°

  1205 napped

  1243 awoke sails flap, adjust main sheet, now 4.5 knots – 294°

  1318 adjusted course 301° – 3.5 knots,

  1328 napped

  1348 tired, back on deck…

  The log had two roles, navigational and narrational. As we will see, in the pre-satellite days navigation was done by dead reckoning, with confirmation by sextant as and when the clouds cleared for a sun, moon or star sight. As the world’s greatest navigator, this was second nature to Francis. Then the log was never meant to be seen by anyone but him and it doubled up as an aide-mémoire for the fuller account that would follow in a book or lecture. Consequently the excitement of finding Francis’s Rosetta Stone is tempered by the prospect of unscrambling his hieroglyphs.

  In these satellite days of us each knowing within a few metres where we all are all the time and telling each other about it too, it is hard to appreciate the excitement in Chris Brasher’s next headline:

  ATLANTIC RACE; THE FIRST RADIO MESSAGE

  Yachtsman Sails 2,100 Miles From Plymouth in 27 Days

  Then the copy:

  Francis Chichester in Gipsy Moth III contacted Cape Race radio station and reported he was 50 miles south-south-west of the Cape. Cape Race is the extreme south-east tip of Newfoundland and about 60 miles south of St. Johns.

  All previous reports received had been from vessels which had sighted the yachts, and it had been feared that the yachts’ radio sets had been out of action by the very heavy weather of June 12 and 13.

  Chichester is making extremely good progress. He has covered approximately 2,100 miles in 27 days since leaving Plymouth on 11 June. He has 800 miles still to go to New York, and if he keeps up his present average of 78 miles a day he should compete the voyage on 19 July. This would be considerably faster than anyone else who has sailed single-handed from Europe to America.

  However, he is still in the ice area off the Newfoundland coast and the United States Navy says that several ships have been diverted from the area because of icebergs.

  Francis found it all rather exciting too:

  On 8 July, excitement; after twenty-seven days of calling in vain on my R/T, I had an answer! It is true that I closed the land to within 40 miles of Cape Race, Newfoundland, but I got through a message to Chris Brasher in London.

  It was a Saturday morning and I felt that he would urgently need some news for the next day’s Observer. I had an odd feeling of excitement in speaking to someone after four weeks’ silence.

  Now on the home run, Francis became more philosophical, aware from the coastal radio station that in spite of all the dangers and efforts, the soakings and exhaustion, at the end of this third week he had not sailed as far in a straight line from Plymouth as Blondie had. Although his northerly course meant that Blondie was still 85 miles further from New York than Francis, it must have been discouraging. Furthermore, the late-starting Dr Lewis in his 25-foot Vertue was catching him up and was now only 350 miles astern. Still,

  Everything seemed to go wrong in that week. I ended it up on the night of 2 July by freeing Miranda and leaving the yacht to sail herself through the night. I refused to struggle any longer with one sail change after another.

  During the next week’s sailing I came to terms with life. I found that my sense of humour had returned; things which would have irritated me or maddened and infuriated me ashore made me laugh out loud, and I dealt with them steadily and efficiently. Rain, fog, gale, squalls and turbulent forceful seas under grey skies became merely obstacles. I seemed to have found the true values of life. The meals I cooked myself were feasts, and my noggins of whisky were nectar.

  I was enjoying life, and treating it as it should be treated – lightly.

  Tackling tough jobs gave me a wonderful sense of achievement and pleasure. For example, on 5 July I was fast asleep, snug among my blankets at 9.30 at night. I woke with a feeling of urgency and apprehension.

  A gale squall had hit the yacht, and I had to get out quickly on deck to drop sails. This is one of the toughest things about sailing alone – switching from fast sleep in snug warm blankets, to being dunked on the foredeck in the dirty black night a minute later.

  Then I was standing in the water in the cockpit, and from there pressing against the gale. I made my way to the mast, and wrestled with the mainsail halyard with one hand, slacking it away as I grabbed handfuls of mainsail with the other hand and hauled the sail down. The sail bound tight against the mast crosstree and shroud under the pressure of the wind, and the slides jammed in their tracks.

  The stem of the yacht was leaping 10 feet into the air and smacking down to dash solid crests over my back. The thick fog was luminous when the lightning flashed, but I heard no sound at all of thunder; it was drowned by the thunderclaps from the flogging sails. I scarcely noticed the deluge of rain among the solid masses of sea water hitting me.

  When I got below, my oilskins off, sitting on the settee in glorious comfort sipping a bowl of tomato soup, I had a wonderful sense of achievement.

  It was a positive, but perhaps a simple thing, dealing with a difficult and tricky job in a thrilling, romantic setting.

  If the first three quarters of Francis’s race had been alternatingly arduous and dangerous, the last quarter must have been exhilarating and terrifying. He was now sailing fast in seas of ice and fog. Reading his account I was reminded of the time we were following Dame Ellen MacArthur’s round-the-world record attempt in the winter of 2004/5. She too was in iceberg oceans and just carried on regardless at 25 knots, right through the nights. She couldn’t see the icebergs on the radar and she couldn’t see them with her eyes. She just knew they were out there and that if her trimaran hit one the boat would break up and she’d have to take to the icy waters in her lifeboat. But racers are racers, normal calculations of risk/reward don’t apply and like Ellen Francis ignored the risk, gloried only for the reward and cracked on into the invisible:

  By this time I was over the Grand Banks, and in fog nearly always, thin fog, thick fog or dense fog, always some kind of fog.

  Before I started I had intended to heave to and keep watch in fog, but in the event I never slowed down; I was racing, and what difference would it make if I was stopped anyway?

  I had expected 300 miles of fog, but actually I sailed through no less than 1,430 miles.

  My reason told me the chance of being run down in the broad Atlantic was infinitesim
ally small; but my instinct said you must be a fool to believe that.

  Then there was ice. I dreaded icebergs, though there were many times more trawlers to hit on the banks than icebergs.

  Once a cold clammy air entered the cabin, and I thought there must be a big berg nearby. I climbed into the cockpit to keep watch, but found dense fog on a pitch black night. I could not see 25 yards ahead with a light. Gipsy Moth was sailing fast into the darkness.

  I decided that keeping watch was a waste of time, went below and mixed myself my antiscorbutic. The lemon juice of this wonderful drink not only keeps physical scurvy away, but if enough of the right kind of whisky is added to it, mental scurvy as well.

  I have made up my mind that it is reasonable to press on. I shall put my trust in the Almighty, who, I am convinced, has it all arranged.

  The Grand Banks seem wrapped in romance after the turbulent Atlantic.

  Next day ended the fourth week of the race. Gipsy Moth had sailed as she should, like a horse picking up its heels and going full stretch’.

  It was during this last stretch that by a combination of the bravery we have seen, hurtling unseen and unseeing into the ice and fog, and outstanding – almost otherworldly – navigation that Francis won the race. During the fourth week he made 700 miles directly towards New York, leaving just 850 miles still to run. His spirits were high, literally on one occasion:

  During this passage I had a narrow escape. I was sitting in the cabin with the last bottle of whisky aboard on the swinging table. Gipsy Moth suddenly performed one of her famous ski jumps.

  She would sidle up the side of a wave and roll sharply at the top before taking off the other side, and landing with a terrific crash in the trough. This was more than the swinging table could cope with, the bottle of whisky shot up into the air, turned a somersault, and was headed for the cabin floor neck first. I was faced with tragedy – my last bottle of whisky. My hand shot out and I fielded it by the neck on the way down. I could not have been more pleased if I had brought off a brilliant catch in a Test Match.

  And now we come to the navigation. Of all the aspects of sailing that have changed since Francis’s adventures, navigation must be the foremost. In fact we don’t really navigate at all now. I’m of the generation that spans the old, if not the very old, and the new. When I learned to sail, the very old, the sextant, had just been replaced by the old, radio beacons. This made life a lot easier, albeit by today’s standards still hopelessly difficult. I remember going to a boat show and with great excitement buying something called a Lokata. There we were having a demonstration on the flat sea that is the Earls Court Exhibition Hall floor and it worked perfectly, with pinpoint accuracy. Weeks later, on a bucking, cold and wet English Channel, it was so hard to get a steady reading from the coastal stations that we nearly missed the Cherbourg Peninsula altogether.

  And the new? A few nights ago we made a full moon overnight passage on Vasco da Gama from Corinth to Galaxhidi. Next to me as I write is a 15-inch navigation screen. All I have to do is put the cursor over where I want to go, press enter, and it tells me how to get there. If I want to, I can even tell the autopilot to take me directly there, although for that part I still like to make my own decisions. On passage other symbols tell me who else is out there and if we need to take avoiding action. When we arrive it tells me where the channel is and I just press buttons on the autopilot to keep the yacht within the screen image. Navigating has in effect become a video game.

  (The best example I had of this was as a pilot’s observer on a bulk carrier in the Mississippi River. I was writing the last part of my Mark Twain travel trilogy; he was a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi before he became Mark Twain. The New Orleans and Baton Rouge Pilots Association was kind enough to show me what piloting the Mississippi is like now. We boarded a bulk carrier just south of New Orleans and took her up towards Vicksburg to load her with soya beans destined for China. On the bridge the Bangladeshi officers had an array of all the latest satellite navigation and radar screens you can imagine, but my pilot whisked out his iPhone with its Navionics app and took her the 30 miles up river on that.)

  Of course the advantage of never losing oneself also means there is no longer any satisfaction in finding oneself. You always know within a few metres exactly where you are; and at the press of another button, so can the rescue services. When one was not nearly missing the Cherbourg Peninsula one would occasionally make a perfect landfall at dawn, purely by old-fashioned dead reckoning, taking into account tidal streams, leeway and all the rest of it. Those days and this satisfaction – and danger – are gone forever.

  I once wrote a book about the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama and his place in the Age of Discovery from Dias to Magellan. The Portuguese had the world’s first waterborne empire, one born out of their extraordinary navigational skills. As they were working their way down the west coast of Africa, looking for the sea route to India. For example, each navigator would erect a large cross on high ground to inform the next navigator where he had been. After two months at sea, including navigating by unfamiliar southern stars, Vasco missed the one he was aiming for, in what is now Namibia, by just 50 kilometres. He then went on to ‘discover’ India; in fact he did discover it, as a sea route from Europe, and went on to become Emperor of India – twice.

  But that’s another story. What remains of this story is that some people, like Vasco and Francis, have an extraordinary ability to know where they are right now and where they should be heading next. But the abilities of these two men seem to me to be differently derived, as their aids to navigation were so completely different. Commenting on his navigational skills through the Nantucket Shoals, which would put the seal on his winning the OSTAR a few days later, Francis said: ‘If one could rely on accurate information, navigation would be a simple science, whereas the art and great fascination of it lies in deducing it correctly from uncertain clues’. In other words, for Francis navigation was a process of investigation and deduction, a process of inexorable logic with a final twist of hunch. Vasco’s navigation, however, was otherworldly, sixth-sensual, inexplicable to logic, like an Arctic tern or a monarch butterfly – or as he too was seaborne, a whale, salmon or turtle.

  A few months later, back in London, Francis would be invited to give a lecture to the Institute of Navigation. During the race Blondie’s chronometer had broken, leaving Francis to reflect on what he would have done in those circumstances. He called the talk ‘An elegant variant of the lunar distance method of determining longitude at sea without reference to Greenwich Mean Time’. Introducing him to the audience, the Institute’s Executive Secretary, Michael Richey – himself later to sail Jester with great distinction – explained what made Francis a great navigator. He spoke of the qualities of preparation, of dedication, of precision, of discipline and of persistence – and of when all of these had been exhausted and the point reached where logic can go no further in deciding the course to steer, a little something inexplicable, this final shrug of a hunch, that will invariably make the right decision.

  But back to Francis’s navigational coup de grâce, threading his way through the Nantucket Shoals:

  I was approaching the Nantucket Shoals, about which the Admiralty pilots say, ‘These shoals extend 40 miles south-east of Sankaty Head Lighthouse, and render this one of the most dangerous parts of the Unites States coast.’

  At first I hoped to sail round them to the south, without having to tack, but the wind veered, and headed me straight for the middle of the shoals. I was racing, and did not want to tack. I studied all the charts I had to see if I could thread a safe passage through them, bearing in mind that I had seen no landmark or seamark of any description since the Eddystone Rock 3,700 miles behind me.

  The night was pitch black, and there were no lights to aid me. I could not get soundings, and radio-beacon bearings are unreliable at night.

  None of the radio fixes I got agreed with one another, and the dead reckoning differed from th
em all. I passed over one shoal, but I knew that there was enough depth and sailed on into a squall.

  My track should have taken me, by my reckoning, within 2 miles of a Texas radar tower built on legs on the shoals, but I never saw it, for as soon as I was near the middle of the shoals a thick fog rolled up.

  I was not happy; I could not get a radio-beacon fix because the three usable beacons [Nantucket Light Vessel, Cape Cod and Pollock’s Rip] were all in a line with Gipsy Moth. However, I kept on taking bearings from them and formed an impression of where I was.

  Three-quarters of an hour later we were still moving, but still had 20 miles of the shoals to cross. I could not think of anything else I could do, so I went below and turned in for a siesta.

  When I woke it was 9.10 and I found the ship going well at 5 knots. I felt that I had been lucky.

  He had no idea where he was in the race. He still feared the Celtic Viking in his beefed-up Folkboat and Blondie’s northern route gamble. One thing he did know was that there would soon be company and Sheila wouldn’t stand for him arriving scruffy, forty sometimes desperate days and nights at sea alone or not.

  Next morning I sighted my first mark – Block Island at the north entrance to Long Island Sound. I embarked on an orgy of cleanliness. Sheila had made a strong statement that it was quite unnecessary for a single-handed sailor to turn up looking like a tramp with a dirty boat, so, after I had washed the cabin floor, the stove and everything washable including my shirts, I set to work on myself and threw in a haircut.