#169 | The Romantic Challenge | Sir Francis Chichester | Part 23

If you are a solo sailor, a racer, a cruiser or even a dinghy sailor...  you  should know who Sir Francis Chichester is.

Basically, he is the guy that proved to the world in the 60's that you could sail solo around the world without stops.

He did stop, just once and only because he wanted to, but very soon afterwards the Sunday Times in the UK created the Golden Globe; the first ever Solo, Non-stop Around the World yacht race in 1968 and the rest is history.

BUT, this was not the first of Francis Chichester's adventures, nor his last and in this book, The Romantic Challenge, we discover Francis just a few years on from his successful circumnavigation, looking for something else in sailing that will whet his whistle in the same way the circumnav did.  

What he choose to do was to challenge the concept of sailing 200Nm per a day, a big feat for even modern computer-designed cruiser. At the time in the early 70's it was a far away goal to most sailors except those who remembered the Clipper ships .

As was his style, he chose to add greatly to the difficulty of the undertaking, by laying forth a goal of completing this high daily mileage on not one or two days, but for five!

He drew a 4000Nm line across the Atlantic and challenged himself to complete 1000Nm in five consecutive days. Meaning every single one of them would be required to be over 200NM. 

It was a quantum leap in the psychology of performance around sailing and we are lucky that Sir Francis's style of writing allows the reader to get under the skin of the endeavour and really see inside the mind of a master mariner at work as he wrestles with the task.

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