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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.