Portsmouth - Cape Town - Sydney - Rio de Janeiro - Portsmouth
Winner: Sayula II
There was a feeling of apprehension and nervous exhilaration as 17 race yachts, carrying 167 crew from seven different nations, hoisted their spinnakers on the way out from Portsmouth into the English Channel on the first leg of a brand new sporting contest, the Whitbread Round the World Yacht Race. The race was conceived and organised by the Royal Naval Sailing Association with sponsorship from the London-based brewery company and was the first ever attempt at a global, crewed yacht race.
The yachts, ranging from the 1936-built Peter Von Danzig of Germany, to the UK’s Burton Cutter, which was still being finished during the race, were no different from many of the 3,000 spectator boats that set out to witness the historic start. Crews were mostly adventure-driven novices, with limited experience of offshore sailing and absolutely no idea what lay ahead over the coming 27,500 nms.
Most of the skippers, by contrast, had thousands of sea miles under their belts. Skippers like Chay Blyth, a pugnacious sergeant of the British Army who had first achieved notoriety in 1966 when he rowed the Atlantic with Captain John Ridgeway in a six metre dory. Two years before the start of the Whitbread, he had also become the first person to sail non-stop westwards around the world aboard the 21 metre ketch British Steel, a feat which had made him a household name. On board Great Britain II, funded by Bahamian philanthropist ‘Union’ Jack Hayward, Blyth had a crew of ‘Red Berets’ from the parachute regiment – all of them supremely fit beefcake types known for withstanding the toughest challenges, but not known for their sailing skills.
Since the idea for the race had grown out of discussions at the RNSA, it was no surprise that the British Armed Forces were well represented with three entries, but there were two others from Britain. Ex-naval yachtsman Les Williams, who with Robin Knox-Johnston had won the 1970 Round Britain Race, headed up one of these crews on Burton Cutter, at 24 metres the biggest yacht in the fleet and Roddy Ainslie, a keen sailor from Macclesfield had put together the Second Life syndicate with his brother-in-law Ian Butterworth and found 12 paying passengers to take their Ocean 71 around the course.
“Everyone paid £3,000 each and the entire project cost £40,000,” recalled Ainslie. “It was not enough for us to think about winning so we were just thinking about getting round the world. That was paramount, which was why we chartered Second Life. It was a proven design and of proven construction. Our crew was not very experienced so we were a bit apprehensive when we set out from Portsmouth.
“There was a mass of spectator craft out in the Solent - that came as a surprise. We were not expecting so many people and it made it difficult to steer especially since there was no marshalling to speak of. We almost ran down a rubber dinghy, but managed somehow to avoid it at the last minute.”
From the French navy there was Eric Tabarly, who was already a national sporting hero. He had bought and restored an old Fife Cutter in the 1960’s, naming her Pen Duick, and was now on his sixth upgrade, a powerful 22 metre ketch, but her controversial depleted uranium ballast keel had been outlawed by the race authorities and his qualification at the start was uncertain. Four other French boats lined up at the start along with three from Italy, two from Poland and one each from Germany and South Africa.
All the crewmembers on Peter Von Danzig were either students or graduates from Akademischer-Segler-Verein - a sailing school - and had to pay £500 to compete, also having put in between 3,000 and 4,000 hours to build the boat.
The eight male crew on Polish entry Otago were workers from a Gdansk shipyard, members of the local sailing club but with no ocean racing experience. Skippered by Zdzislaw Pienkawa, the Otago crew included his daughter, architectural student Iwona, who at 19 was the youngest female in the fleet and one of only three women to complete all four legs of the race.
The French boat 33 Export started without Dominic Rulhe, a Brazilian who was killed in the Varig Boeing aircrash at Orly Airport on his way to join the yacht for the start.
From Mexico came Ramon Carlin, a 50-year-old self-made millionaire who had built up a huge conglomerate manufacturing washing machines and other household goods. His Swan 65 Sayula II was one of the few yachts to have a freezer on board, allowing his crew to dine on steaks, hamburgers and chicken each day, washed down with plentiful supplies of beer and carefully selected wine. He also had an eight track stereo system, 100 tapes and a pair of headphones, which may explain why he was rarely seen on deck.
Victualling the boat reflected the way each skipper viewed that first race. Ainslie was offered 1,500 cans of Guinness from his sponsor, but took only a few, preferring instead to have the rest shipped out to Cape Town. Blyth insisted on freeze-dried food and allowed one spoon per crewmember while French boat Grand Louis, like Sayula II, had a fridge and freezer on board, allowing crew to eat fresh meat all race. The bon viveurs on French ketch Kriter drank wine with every meal. In fact, crew on Kriter did not want for much in the way of food as the provisioning list showed:
120kg bread per leg plus fresh bread at each stop250 kg ham25 kg preserved sausages
On Carlin’s boat, the crew reckoned they got through six bottles of wine each day even though their skipper was virtually teetotal.
On the cruising yachts, crews slept on mattresses. Some took pyjamas, pullovers, socks and underpants plus books, shaving paraphernalia and anything else that would keep them clean and entertained during their adventure. Others were allowed only the bare essentials.
“There were no containers to meet us in the stopover ports so we had to take all our jackets, ties and shoes with us and hang everything up in the lockers. We each had two books each and we had a cassette player playing rock and roll tapes. You were not welcome on our boat unless you were into rock and roll,” said Chay Blyth.
The reality of sailing in dangerous waters was brought home to roost early on when Great Britain II was hit at night by a ferocious squall just a few days out from Portsmouth. Bernie Hosking was thrown overboard, but eventually, after a frenzied search, his head was spotted bobbing around in the water, picked out in the searchlight’s beam. The seas were cold and rough, but he was pulled back on deck by the other crewmembers and given a hot, rather than a ‘stiff’ drink. There was no brandy to administer since Blyth was operating a ‘dry’ boat, but that was to change in subsequent legs.
“I decided it would be good for the crew if we had drinks on the boat so from the second leg, I started a ‘happy hour’ every night where every crewmember was given the choice of either two beers or two shots of spirits. We used it as an opportunity to catch up on the day’s event – sometimes it would be in the cockpit, sometimes down below, depending on the weather, but it was good for team morale. Once a week we also had a party with a theme so we would have to make hats or whatever and that was fun too.”
There were problems elsewhere. In the rush to get Burton Cutter ready for the race, the outlet pipes for the toilets had not been connected and the stench became unbearable when all the human sewage was dumped directly into the bilge.
The first ever boat to suffer a dismasting in the Whitbread Race was on Eric Tabarly’s Pen Duick VI. There was no possibility of repairs so a jury rig was built and the crew headed to Rio de Janeiro, some 1,200 nms to the south east. By the time, they arrived, a new spar had been flown in from France and after it was fitted, Pen Duick VI set off across the Atlantic once more, arriving two days before the re-start.
Race Control volunteers, about 20 of them, checked race positions when they had them and dealt with any messages that came through. Once a week, they plotted all the positions on the chart and passed the information to a computer made available for one hour each week by HMS Collingwood, the Royal Navy’s electrical establishment at Portsmouth.
At the back of the fleet, the Swedish yacht Keewaydin, which had started the race two weeks late, got as far as the Canary Islands before pulling out but Burton Cutter was a class apart and William’s crew was the first to cross the finish line in Cape Town, though it was the Royal Navy’s Adventure, skippered by Patrick Bryans, who won overall on handicap after arriving just three hours ahead of Blyth’s GBII.
If the first leg was seen as a bit of a blast, the second quickly turned into a reality check of the most brutal form as the fleet were subject to a full scale battering as soon as they hit the Southern Ocean.
Burton Cutter started to break up when it was discovered her forward locker, up to the watertight bulkhead, was completely full of water with bags of sails floating on top. Sections of her hull were panting in and out like bellows. She was in no fit state to continue and was forced into Port Elizabeth, just up the coast from Cape Town, for repairs. Re-welding had to be done three times before she could go back in the water and so she had to withdraw from leg 2.
On board the Italian boat Tauranga, Paola Chamaz was at the wheel with Paul Waterhouse, a British Army corporal who had sailed the first leg on British Soldier.
Waterhouse went below for a minute to light a cigarette and as he came back up, Tauranga broached violently. The spinnaker boom broke at the mast end causing it to thrash around on the clew of the sail. He rushed forward to get the sails under control and retrieve what was left of the boom, but as he went forward the boat changed direction once more and the sail suddenly took off. The sheets went taut under Waterhouse and threw him high in the air, dumping him back on deck then overboard in a second surge of power.
They searched for almost four hours without success, though they knew that in such freezing waters, his chances of survival beyond 20 minutes were zero. It is likely he was badly hurt by the fall onto the deck and since he made no effort to grab a lifeline when he came down, it is also likely he was unconscious when he went overboard and would have drowned immediately.
The word went out in the daily skippers radio chat and although there was deep shock, there was also the realisation that accidents were inevitable.
“We were prepared for loss of life,” said Ainslie. “We all set off knowing that when you are sailing around the world, there would be situations that would be life-threatening or where lives would be lost. But it changed the way we did things on Second Life. The crew became more aware of the dangers and started wearing life lines.”
Three days later, as the fleet battled against gale force winds and heavy seas, some 350 miles west of the Kerguelen Islands, 33 Export skippers Dominique Guillet and Jean Pierre Millet decided to replace the foresail with a smaller one. During the manoeuvre, they were hit by a huge breaking wave which slammed the boat over to starboard. When she righted herself, it became clear that Guillet was missing.
They switched the engine on and spent 30 minutes looking for him, but deteriorating conditions forced Millet to abandon the search to preserve the safety of both boat and remaining crew. They withdrew from the race and headed for Fremantle, the crew profoundly traumatised by Guillet’s death.
It was from these tragedies that crews and race organisers learned most about the perilous dangers of ocean racing and which led to the development of the exhaustive range of safety measures that are in place today.
Sayula II was also knocked down by a mammoth freak wave which left most of the crew in the water and caused carnage around the boat, with knives embedded into the deckhead and tins, bedding and floorboards crashing to one side of the saloon.
“I did not feel upside down. It was rather like an hallucination,” reported Butch Dalrymple-Smith. “It is impossible to believe that your whole world has suddenly been turned upside down. But looking at all these things falling across the boat, you know that something obviously is amiss.
The boat was completely flooded but every member of the crew was either recovered or hauled themselves back on board. Their safety harnesses, all attached when the boat pitch-poled, were bent by the force of the wave and the fear of God was well and truly upon them.
“Three or four of the crew, dazed and shocked, were meandering around vaguely, not knowing what to do. They thought the boat was sinking since bilge-water was pouring from between the two starboard fuel tanks, indicating a leak, but after pumping out the bilges, this threat subsided. The ship was safe and suddenly we began to feel cold. Then followed the coldest night in the world. The only four dry bunks were occupied by the wounded. All the mattresses in the main saloon were soaking. The six of us left to keep watch slept or tried to sleep in full oilskins on the bare floorboards. It was as cold and wet below as it was on deck. For days after the crash, if the boat lurched on any sort of wave, the crew went quiet and hung on tight for a moment then slowly resumed conversation with sheepish glances all round,” reported Dalrymple-Smith.
The passage south, deep into the Southern Ocean, inevitably took its toll on the boats. Adventure suffered problems with her rudder, depriving her crew of a second leg victory and GBII lost her mizzen mast, which left crewman Eddie Hope with a broken arm. Otago, the 17 meter Polish ketch, also lost the top section of her mizzen mast.
Despite these dramas, Sayula II, remarkably, won the leg on handicap though it was Tabarly who took line honours on Pen Duick VI, setting a new 24 hour record of 305 nms and beating GBII into Sydney by nine hours.
It had been a gruesome leg and at the halfway stage in Sydney, crews were left to reflect on what they had taken on. Two men were dead and the fleet had been given a rude awakening, which changed the mood among the crews from one of cavalier excitement to a grim determination to complete their ordeal.
The drama continued into the third leg. Within a few miles of leaving Sydney, Pen Duick VI was dismasted for the second time, following their misfortune in the first leg which left them languishing in Rio for five days making repairs. This time, however, they headed quickly back to Sydney where riggers worked round the clock to replace the mast before Tabarly restarted the race, though the delay meant his chances of making the restart in Rio for Leg 4 were slim.
Also, for the second time, Bernie Hocking disappeared overboard GBII. This time, with winds blowing Force 5-6, the crew were not able to recover him despite a search that lasted more than two hours, during which time, they neither saw him nor the dan buoy that was thrown to him after he lost his footing while tidying up in the pulpit. He was gone forever.
In his log, Blyth wrote, “Other yachts would have taken this harder or more emotionally. The reason its not affecting us so much is that once again the training of the Paras comes out. You’re steeled towards death. All of us in the yacht have seen active service so have seen death before. This is more personal, but we keep our thoughts to ourselves. He will rarely be mentioned now, more out of respect than anything else. Bernie was one of us. He wouldn’t want it any other way.”
Blyth and his crew expressed their loss by sailing the boat hard and fast to Rio, taking line honours for the first time in the race.
The passage through the Southern Ocean provided the crews with their most memorable moments of the race though some claimed it was monotonous and boring.
“One comes in from the cockpit, little is said, one eats, one sleeps, one goes one degree only further than animal existence,” wrote one crewmember in the Sayula II log.
This monotony led to problems. There were rumours of major conflicts between the crewmembers though after six weeks at sea, on top of the two previous legs, a bond of secrecy had developed between the crews which prevented rows from becoming public.
According to Dr Robin Leach, doctor on Second Life, “One of three or four members of the crew would quite unannounced become the person to moan at for a few days. The issues were often trifling and that crew member had to take the abuse that was given to him until the needle was pointed to another. Trifling things became blown up at sea. Somebody had a perpetual sniff. One seat was always occupied by the same person. Somebody started reading a book before someone else finished it. Someone was late on watch again. The heads were blocked and no one admitted to being the last to use them.”
Initially, skippers had resented the need to let organisers know their positions, but following the deaths on legs two and three, the importance of relaying the information was slowly recognised by the crews and with the help of sextants – there was no GPS on board in those early days – they worked out roughly where they were.
“Most of time, we had no clue where we were,” admits Ainslie on Second Life. “The readings we took using our instruments gave us a rough idea, but it was only when we were 50 nms from a coastline, when we could tune in to the radio direction finder using our receivers that we had any precise information and obviously there weren’t too many times when we were 50 nms from a coastline.”
Positions were supposed to be logged twice weekly. If no report was received from a yacht for seven days, the organisers informed Lloyds who passed the message to merchant shipping and also to BBC World Service, which mentioned that a report was overdue. The Lloyds appeal invariably brought a response within a few days. The BBC announcement generated nothing.
For the leading skippers, this haphazard way of tracking positions was used tactically, in an attempt to ensure they stayed at the top of the leaderboard when the results were released each week by Race HQ. It was a means of maximising publicity for the boats and their sponsors since the media, invariably, were interested only in the leading boat.
The landmarks came in useful, but rounding Cape Horn, the most famous landmark of them all, filled many crews with dread. In 1973 the number of sporting yachts that had survived this rounding numbered less than 10. At 55°56' south and 67°19' west, the extreme tip of the southern American continent, the 1,400 feet of harsh rock marked a point where the topographic formation and intensity of atmospheric phenomena which surround it turn Cape Horn into one of the most feared places on the planet. History was littered with reports of passages that had been ravaged by gale-force winds, freezing rain and icebergs.
Icebergs posed the most dangerous threat of all and while lookouts stationed at the bow could alert helmsmen to the ones that rose above the water, it was the growlers - that lay just below the surface - that potentially were likely to do the most damage. Even with radar, these were impossible to detect until the boats were on top of them.
At Cape Horn, HMS Endurance, the British Antarctic research and guard vessel, was standing by to ensure a safe passage through some of the most treacherous waters on the planet. The more macho crews felt it was wet nursing gone too far. Others claimed this was progress.
Tauranga stopped at Port Stanley to pick up water supplies and while there bought a whole sheep for $3….but they lost 12 hours in the process after having to stand off in bad weather before entering the harbour.
The Cape behind them, the fleet turned north toward the sun and warmth of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. Blyth’s GBII was the first to finish in Rio, followed by Second Life and Sayula II, but most arrived in time for Mardi Gras, which was everything the brochure had promised. For the first time in five months, the crews could forget about racing and get down to some heavy duty partying.
To win the overall race, the British navy entry Adventure had to beat its Mexican rival Sayula II by three and a half days. With 1600 nms to go to Portsmouth, Adventure was becalmed for six hours, but then began to make progress in the right direction.
The start on the last leg had been staggered. Organisers understood the power of publicity and it was felt this would be maximised if all the boats finished at the same time so the larger boats started later than the smaller ones. This led to major grief among skippers in the larger boats and staggered starts were thereafter scrapped.
Sayula II was hampered by rigging problems, but kept it quiet from the rest of the fleet. On the approach home, Adventure made good use of local knowledge – off the Isle of Wight, she was nearly becalmed and in a foul tide, so dropped anchor with only 37 nms to go to the finish. Then she got some wind to go south of Wight in the darkness and crossed the finish line in third place, which gave them the overall runners up prize. Sayula II arrived in fourth place to take the first Whitbread Trophy title.
First over the line, five days earlier, was Blyth’s GBII, completing the course in 144 days which was a record for a round the world passage at that time. His aim had been to win line honours for each leg, realising that the handicap system did not favour GBII for overall victory. On three of the four legs, she was the fastest boat and on corrected time, she finished sixth.
As one of the only boats with a sponsor (Jack Hayward, the multimillionaire businessman), Blyth was keen for a good show in the media, but arriving home on Maundy Thursday scuppered his plans for a big publicity drive since no newspapers were published on Good Friday!
Completing the circumnavigation placed the crews in a small and exclusive elite of sailors. Blyth was already a member, but years later, he said the race had opened his eyes in more ways than one. “When we came back to Portsmouth, we had a debriefing where we all talked about what had gone right and what had gone wrong in the race. I decided to let someone else take it, but was a bit shocked when I heard the crew talk about my leadership. They said that I dished out the praise when it was needed, but that I was too quick to criticise. I wasn’t happy to hear that, but I have never forgotten it so the whole experience was very useful as well as being a lot of fun.”
It was as cold and wet below as it was on deck
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1973-1974 Whitbread