Customer Reviews

Gipsy Moth Circles the World

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My father read this book aloud to me when I was a child... It was spellbinding... i wish it was available for Kindle, so i could carry it with me always.... Read it for yourself, or to your child.

Alone Across the Atlantic, by Francis Charles Chichester, is the story of sailing across the Atlantic Ocean in his boat Gypsy Moth III in 1960, and winning the first single-handed transatlantic race (for a grand prize of a half-crown, reported in the American press as 5 shillings). The book actually says by Sir Francis Chichester, but he was only knighted years later, on July 7, 1967 - after sailing solo around the world in Gypsy Moth IV. My book is a 1979 trade paperback, the original hardback was published in 1961.

From this perspective in time, the gear, the preparations, and the boats itself seem simple, almost primitive. It is a heavy full keel wooden sloop, with only an elementary first generation self-steering setup - a wind vane, with lines to the tiller that interferes with the main boom on many tacks. There is no roller jib or main - he spends a lot of time on the foredeck, handling lines and sheets in gale conditions. C has the boat for only a few weeks before setting out, not really enough time to become familiar with her. Navigation will be dead reckoning and, occasionally, celestial. There is no radar, and the radio works only intermittently.

But simple can be good as well. The race card reads "Leave the Melampus buoy to starboard, and thence by any route to the Ambrose lightvessel, New York." There is no handicapping - whoever arrives first, wins. The boats aren't huge identical high tech carbon fiber 'sleds', but rather each participants' quirky individual choice. There is no satellite forecast, no 'support teams' on call via video-conferencing, and the sailors are not professionals but enthusiastic amateurs.

It's a good read. It's an early writing effort, and not as polished as, say, his later Gypsy Moth Circle the World, but C comes through. He is a an excellent navigator, as befits someone who was an aircraft pilot in the years before World War II. His dead reckoning skills are good - though he almost gets into trouble with Sable Island, "Graveyard of the Atlantic". He actually, before the race, calculates by hand a mathematical analysis of the 'best route' across the ocean, breaking the sea into square regions, calculating the boats performance for the predicted wind and tides for each, and adding them up to get a best time & route across. Which turns out to be the Great Circle route, with a possibility of 1600 miles of fog.

He's a loner, not suffering unduly from the solitude (though it is clear he loves his wife Sheila dearly), and drives himself hard. Changing sails is exhausting work, yet he does it multiple times a day. He wants to win, and has set up in his mind one of his opponents as the man to beat - that 'black bearded pirate' Howell, who is taking the low powered steamer route. Again and again he muses how the 'pirate' is probably having better winds and tides than himself - thus encouraging himself to further effort (I should emphasize, this is a psychological gambit - in actuality Chichester likes and admires his fellow racers).

Chichester's minimalist emoting - he is definitely a britisher of his time and class - will probably put some people off. But if you can get past that you'll find a wonderful saga of man versus ocean.

Francis Chichester's masterwork of travelogue and adventure ranks with such marintime classics as Joshua Slocum's SAILING ALONE AROUND THE WORLD [(C) 1899, 1900]. Chichester, like Slocum who was the first documented singlehanded circumnavigation, recounts a story of undaunted courage and daring that demonstrates how men and women that are determined to meet and surpass a goal can do so and become a source of inspiriation for their fellows. This is a must read for sailors and "lubbers" alike as it recounts a true tale of the tenacity of the human spirit.