With the Moan of the Wind And a Barrel of Beer

"I'm not very effective when other people are around," Yachtsman Francis Chichester once said about his penchant for solo performances. "Any attempt to diverge from this lot makes me half a person." Whether he was roaming the English countryside as a boy, piloting a seaplane from Australia to Japan as a young man, or crossing the Atlantic in a small sloop in middle age. Chichester always faced danger alone. Though he has never escaped fear ("A spot of panic is good for you, keeps you alive"), Chichester has loved the rewards of mastering it.

Born into a dull, grey Victorian world, Chichester became a loner in a home dominated by a clergyman father who "squashed any enthusiasm," and in private schools where the punishment for a misdemeanor was a whipping. So in later life--after careers as a sheep-shearer, gold prospector and land speculator in New Zealand and a mapmaker in England--Chichester was struck with sea fever. Though he thought "the whole prospect of the Atlantic so appalling that I can't face it," he nonetheless thrilled to "the moan of the wind in the rigging," loved drawing "deep, mad breaths" in midocean.

A veteran of six yacht crossings of the Atlantic--as a novice in 1960 he won the first transatlantic race--Chichester set out last August on an even more perilous journey. Lured by the prospect of traveling the route of the 19th century wool and tea clippers, Chichester embarked on a 14,000-mile trip from England to Australia, around South Africa and the Cape of Good Hope. Then a jaunty 64 years of age, the wiry, bespectacled mariner was, as he has ever been, by himself--this time in a 53-ft. yacht, Gipsy Moth IV.

The Roaring Forties. His most formidable obstacle was a stretch of black, tempestuous ocean just east of the Cape in the latitudes known forbiddingly as the "roaring forties." In Moby Dick, Melville described how the Pequod "sharply bowed to the blast" in these storm-tossed waters, with "showers of silver chips" flying over her bulwarks. In the voyages of the clippers, a crew of more than three dozen seasoned hands was needed to keep a vessel from disaster in the roaring forties.

Nevertheless, Chichester set sail aboard the $84,000 two-masted yacht, which was rigged as a ketch for ease in handling by one man. Named after the De Havilland plane that Chichester had once piloted around the Pacific, the slender-beamed Gipsy Moth was outfitted for comfort. In his quarters were a galley designed by his wife, a red upholstered chair with a safety belt and a radio transmitter by which to report his weekly progress to two London newspapers.

Also aboard were a barrel of beer and plenty of bottles of assorted other spirits. "If I have a craze for anything --sorry if this sounds bad--it's generally drink," confesses Chichester. "I know pretty well at the outset whether it's going to be a rum voyage, a gin voyage or a Mackeson [beer] voyage."

Opening Presents. On the high seas, Chichester baked his own bread, grew his own salads (he is a vegetarian), and ate knobs of garlic and Dutch midget cheese. He even did his own dentistry. On his 65th birthday, he donned a green velvet smoking jacket, opened presents from his wife and had "a sentimental evening drinking toasts to friends." When, in October, the Gipsy Moth at last entered the roaring forties, Chichester was unfazed. "I looked out, and we were surfing on a big comber," he reported one day. "As I watched, the mizzenmast lay flat above the comber's white water. I think that was very close to big trouble."

The sea's fury wrecked the automatic steering device that Chichester had rigged up by linking a wind vane to the rudder with a series of pulleys. Since his aim was to reach Sydney in 100 days--the average sailing time of the old clippers--Chichester had to get by with occasional catnaps, stayed at the helm and soon was almost too weak to hoist the mainsail. "I couldn't stand without holding myself up, as if I had been three months in the hospital."

The Wheel's Kick. Though at one point he yielded to temptation and turned the Gipsy Moth toward the nearer Australian port of Fremantle, he soon put the yacht back on course ("The more I thought about it, the more it stuck in my gullet"). At week's end the exhausted sailor--clean-shaven and wearing his baseball cap--cruised into Sydney Harbor. Before the inevitable armada came out to greet him, the press corps pulled up in a fishing boat, handed Chichester a bag of onions and a bottle of Scotch. When the vessels scraped, Chichester uttered his first words after 105 days at sea: "Bloody Sunday drivers!"

Tugging proudly at his sagging pants, Chichester shouted: "Look how skinny I've become. I've lost forty pounds!" But the weathered mariner gave no sign that he was now ready to forgo the wheel's kick and the wind's song. After a month's rest, he plans a return trip westward around South America's Cape Horn.

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