Driven to conquer - Part I

Monday 5 July 2010, 13:30 GMT

Words: Bob Fisher

Driven to conquer the Sea of Certain Death

Round the world racing was a very new, and very brave idea in the early seventies and there were many who had expressed a desire to do something adventurous. It was only after Sir Francis Chichester's solo world-girdling (in 1967-68) proved that Britons could still become heroes that any decided that it might just be possible to race around the planet in fully crewed yachts.

For some it was launching into the unknown; for others it was a race too far; there is always a challenge waiting round the corner.

The first group, in 1973-74, was enormous since no one had ever contemplated such a competition before and they stood on the brink of an adventure. One such was Peter Blake, who, while experienced in offshore racing, was green around the gills when it came to the long distance events, but for whom the passion was such that he competed in five Whitbread races before winning every leg with ‘Big Red', the ketch-rigged Steinlager 2. While he couldn't get enough, Clare Francis, who skippered the Swan 65, ADC Accutrac in the 1977-78 race, admitted, "I think, for me, it was one race too many."

Clare had her reasons for competing in the race. "I was talked into it by the crew," she said, "Who had no experience, but lots of ambition. They put up the idea and I was caught up by the events. In the end, the crew held it together".

Wendy Hines on Second Life, and Zara Pascoli, with her husband on Tauranga, were the first women to take part, but Clare was the first woman skipper and set the style for Tracy Edwards to put together an all-woman crew in 1989-90, and for Dawn Riley, Christine Guillou and Lisa McDonald to follow in her wake.

There are those for whom the challenge was totally financially driven, like Lawrie Smith, who said, "I was in it for the money; it paid me well." Smith's refreshing honesty came from a talented professional sailor who realised the dangers of the race as his first foray was for the single opening leg aboard Simon Le Bon's maxi, Drum that had serious delamination problems in the southeast Trades on her way to Cape Town. "It was touch and go as to whether we would get there," he remembers, knowing that the first race had been a triple killer.

The fear never left him, particularly in subsequent races when he was in the Southern Ocean, a place he referred to as ‘The Sea of Certain Death'. He pointed to an occasion when things might have gone very badly for a competitor. "Martella OF, which was at 65 degrees south, asked us to keep an eye out for them as they were having trouble with the keel - it was in danger of falling off. We were 180 miles north of them and would have not got to them for a day. What chance would they have had to survive?"

Martella did shed her keel later, but after rounding Cape Horn, when she was heading north and 350 miles from Punta del Este in Uruguay. Pierre Fehlmann's Merit and Alain Gabbay's Charles Jourdan were the closest and easily able to rescue the crew of the upturned boat. Smith said, "It would have been very different two weeks earlier".

It was always the fear of the organisers that one day a competing yacht might collide with an iceberg, sink and take all her crew to the bottom of the ocean. Thankfully, it was a fear that was never realised, although the Southern Ocean has claimed four of the competitor's lives, and the Atlantic has claimed one.

Chay Blyth remembered, "Sunday, 6 January, 1974 is a day that will live in my mind for ever. Our world was shattered as John Rist shouted that dreaded phrase: ‘man overboard'. I looked aft to glimpse a blue bundle being left astern in our wake. It was Bernie Hosking."

Despite a search, Hosking was not recovered and the maxi-ketch Great Britain II returned to the race after Blyth had determined that Bernie was dead, that he could not have survived in the near-freezing sea. He logged at the time, "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."

Hosking was the third to lose his life; on the previous leg, both Paul Waterhouse and Dominique Guillet had been lost overboard. Their deaths were a constant reminder of the ever-present danger that stalked the Southern Ocean and that instilled fear in the race for many years.

The adventure was still the gripping factor of the race as Peter Blake was doing his second Whitbread aboard Heath's Condor. Having lost the carbon fibre mast on the first leg, the big, varnished boat was first into Auckland and stirred the sinews of a particular young man. "It was the sense of adventure that started me wanting to race around the world," declared Grant Dalton. "Seeing Heath's Condor coming around North Head in 1977, and the thought that it had sailed from Cape Town and was going on around Cape Horn did it for me. And I knew I wanted to be part of that."

It has always been difficult to make the move into becoming a crewmember and Dalton first tried out for Blake's team for the next race aboard Ceramco New Zealand, but just failed to make selection and was forced to look elsewhere. "I wrote to everybody I could and would have gone on any boat, no matter how small or slow, but ended up on the biggest and fastest, Flyer." And to secure that berth, Dalton knew that he would have to be the most useful person on the boat. "I had gone sailmaking, from accounting, to make myself more useful and I ended up as Flyer's sailmaker."

To be continued...