While the watchmaker’s association with yacht racing is well known, Rolex’s support of pioneering nautical adventurers—like intrepid solo circumnavigator Francis Chichester—is another story altogether
The sponsor of numerous regattas and yacht clubs, Rolex boasts a long association with the world of competitive sailing. The bond stretches back to the 1950s, when—at the same time the company’s newly launched Submariner dive watch was beginning to find favour with serious yachtsmen—Rolex forged its first formal partnership in the nautical realm, allying with the New York Yacht Club.
In the nearly seven decades since, it has built many other such relationships with prestigious clubs, including Britain’s Royal Ocean Racing Club and Royal Yacht Squadron, the Yacht Club de Monaco, the Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda, Société Nautique de Saint-Tropez, Yacht Club Argentino and the Cruising Yacht Club of Australia.
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The brand’s green and gold livery resplendent on banners, scoreboards, sails and prows, Rolex’s sponsorship of yacht racing captures plenty of attention. Perhaps less known is that, as in other areas of exploration—famously, Edmund Hillary’s pioneering climb of Everest—Rolex has long supported adventure on the high seas.
The spirit of adventure
In the most notable case, Rolex provided British yachtsman Francis Chichester with a Rolex Oyster Perpetual to help keep time during his 1966–67 attempt to become the first person to sail solo around the world from west to east along what’s known as the Clipper Route.
This is the sea path between Europe and Asia, Australia and New Zealand that was used by the great clipper-class merchant ships of the 19th century, harnessing the powerful winds of the Roaring Forties.
Though Chichester was the son of a Devon clergyman, his uncle Edward, ninth baronet of Chichester, was a rear admiral in the Royal Navy, naval aide-de-camp to Queen Victoria and King Edward VII, and admiral superintendent of the Naval Establishment, Gibraltar. The sea was in Chichester’s blood. He was also a talented pilot who literally wrote the book on Royal Air Force fighter aircraft navigation during World War II.
Described by The Guardian newspaper in 1966 as “brave, a little eccentric, intensely individual,” Chichester was 65 when he set out on the formidable round-the-world journey of 46,000 kilometres in his custom 16-metre ketch Gipsy Moth IV. The adventurer had named his four vessels for the De Havilland Gipsy Moth aircraft he’d flown as a young aviator. In one such plane, in 1931, he’d become the first person to fly solo across the Tasman Sea from New Zealand to Australia.
One close call after another
No stranger to death-defying challenges, in 1958 Chichester had been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer and given six months to live. He ignored doctors’ advice and had a lung surgically removed. He was nursed back to health by his wife, Sheila, who placed him on a vegetarian diet. Thus macrobiotically fortified, Chichester sailed from Plymouth to New York in 40 days in 1960, winning the world’s first solo transatlantic sailing race in Gipsy Moth III.
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