The Francis Chichester 60th Anniversary Challenge.
Sailing single-handed around the world at the age of 77 to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the record-breaking voyage of the great Sir Francis Chichester
Follow the journey ~
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It is not a race, there is no organising committee, no rules – just one old sailor wanting to give a nod to another.
In 1966, nobody had sailed around the world without stopping. It was considered impossible – and doubly impossible singlehanded. Making it round with only one stop like the fully-crewed clipper ships might be doable, just.
Francis Chichester was a London map publisher. Before the war, he had set several records in small aircraft (and nearly died while attempting to become the first person to fly solo around the world.)
After the war, he turned to sailing – and, in 1960, won the first singlehanded transatlantic race in his yacht Gipsy Moth III.
He might have gone on to make a textbook circumnavigation if he had set off in the same boat. But he had a wealthy cousin who promised to build him a yacht to beat the 100-day time of the Cutty Sark. The building of Gipsy Moth IV went over budget by half as much again. She was delivered six months late, was bigger and heavier than originally planned, and heeled to 35° in the slightest puff of wind. She is still sailing today – and recognised as possibly the worst sailing yacht ever launched.
And yet Chichester took her all the way round. When he reached Sydney there was a newspaper campaign begging him not to set off again and face certain death in the waters of Cape Horn. But he did – and sailed home in triumph.
A quarter of a million people turned out on Plymouth Hoe to welcome him home. The Queen knighted him at Greenwich with the sword Elizabeth I had used for Sir Francis Drake. The television audience rivalled the moon landing two years later.
Sir Francis Chichester was the most famous sailor in the world – a national hero. A household name.
Then, the following year, a merchant navy officer named Robin Knox-Johnston went round without stopping, and everybody forgot about Chichester. If you mention his name today, anyone under the age of 45 will say: “Who?”
But John Passmore remembers.
Passmore is the Old Man Sailing – a retired war correspondent who reinvented himself as a blogger and author of sailing travelogues written during a series of ocean crossings and detailing the day-by-day minutiae of life at sea.
He was eleven years old when his parents took him to the yacht club to hear a talk by the then Mr Chichester about his victory in the first Singlehanded Transatlantic Race.
The young Passmore was transfixed. Afterwards he announced that one day he would race across the Atlantic singlehanded.
He remembers his mother saying: “That’s nice, dear.”
But he did – in 1988.
And now he is following his hero in his circumnavigation. He set off from Plymouth on August 27th with a send-off from the Royal Western Yacht Club, just like Chichester. He expects to arrive in Sydney sometime in January. His boat is smaller and slower but, he would argue, one of the best sailing yachts ever designed.
Indeed, in many ways the two voyages could not be more different. Chichester had a Marconi radio the size of a small suitcase and was at the mercy of sunspots and fluctuations in the ionosphere. Passmore has Starlink and faster internet than he would get at home.
Chichester had to wait until the voyage was over before publishing his classic Gipsy Moth Circles the World. Passmore is posting daily chapters from Samsara Circles the World in real time – his readers, waiting on tenterhooks to discover what happened when the storm hit or whether he will fix the torn sail…
And for those who prefer audiobooks, every chapter is available to stream, and naturally, it is read by the author himself.
This is, the old man says, the biggest thing he has ever done.
Follow the journey ~
Click here to track John live on PolarSteps.com
Watch short daily video clips at ~
Instagram — YouTube — TikTok
Or sign up for The Full Ocean Experience (small monthly subscription, exclusive daily content, cancel anytime.)
