HOMEWATERS GIPSY MOTH IV: SAILING A LEGEND
A face popped up alongside the boat. ‘Is this the real Gipsy Moth IV?’ Looking over the gunwale were two kayakers alongside the boat. Having assured them that it was, they asked if they might touch her, ‘as it might give us a bit more strength.’
It doesn’t take long sailing on Gipsy Moth IV to realise that the boat in which Sir Francis Chichester made his famous circumnavigation in 1966-67 still has enormous significance for sailors and the public at large, both in Britain and internationally.
Time and again, people wanted to know if this was the boat, and to recount stories of when they’d seen the boat at the Greenwich Maritime Museum, sailed in her since her relaunch, or had been there when Chichester first returned home. Even the vast Swiss superyacht against which we moored Gipsy Moth IV took our lines happily: ‘It’s an honour to have such a boat alongside us,’ they said.
I was on board , having been invited to sail in her in the 2019 Fastnet Race, a chance at which I jumped. So it was with some excitement that I joined the iconic boat — no hyperbole given that she appears inside the back cover of all new British passports — on her home berth at Buckler’s Hard on the Beaulieu River. I would be sailing with skipper and mate Ricky and Kirstie Chalmers, and crew Steve and Paddy. With bags stowed, we headed downriver and out into a sun-baked Solent to practise a few manoeuvres ahead of the
