Thirty years of breaking barriers

The first event, organised by the Royal Naval Sailing Association (RNSA), started from the club’s home port of Portsmouth, England in 1973 and attracted 19 disparate entries. Chay Blyth, Eric Tabarly and Les Williams, who all went on to become multi-race veterans, arrived with purpose-built maxis. There were production cruiser-racers like Ramon Carlin’s Swan 65 Sayula II, and Adventure, a Nicholson 55 campaigned by the Royal Navy, a couple of well found Admiral’s Cup entries and veterans like the 1936 Polish-built German entry, Peter van Danzig.

Worst fears realised
When the fleet of 19 set sail on this great adventure on September 8, 1973, big question-marks remained in many minds as to whether these boats, their rigs or crews were man enough to stand up to such prolonged racing pressures. Within a couple of months those worst fears were being realised. Blyth’s Great Britain II had lost her mizzen mast and crewman Eddie Hope had broken an arm. Otago was also partially dismasted and Williams’ Burton Cutter, the British maxi that had led the fleet into Cape Town, had been forced to pull into Port Elizabeth after the heavy pounding she received during the first few days after entering the Southern Ocean had opened up the hull.

Three men lost overboard
Tragically, two crew, Paul Waterhouse aboard Italian entry Tauranga, a Swan 55, and Dominique Guilet, the co-skipper with Jean-Pierre Millet of the French entry 33 Export, were both lost overboard in conditions so cold that life expectancy was measured in minutes rather than hours. On the subsequent leg from Sydney round Cape Horn to Rio de Janeiro, Great Britain II crewman Bernard Hoskin was also lost overboard. The toll might well have been greater had luck not balanced out the effects of a freak wave that overwhelmed Sayula II. Running before a 65 knot gale she was rolled through 170 degrees before coming back upright, dragging many of her crew along on the end of their safety lines.

Remarkable performance
In retrospect, it was remarkable given the low levels of preparation, experience and funding, that 14 of these pioneering teams made it round the world. And did these tales of death, dread, fear or frostbite put people off? Not a bit of it.

Flyer in the Whitbread 77-78

Within weeks of the RNSA announcing a second race, their post bag was filled with entries from around the world. Cornelis van Rietschoten, a 49-year old retired industrialist from Holland, looking, like so many others, for a fresh challenge in life was one, and came to dominate the event for the next eight years. His yachts, both named Flyer, set new standards of professionalism, the principals of which were later embraced by career sailors like Peter Blake, Grant Dalton, and Pierre Fehlmann who all became winners in their own right.

Compared with today’s fit and disciplined teams with their super professional two-boat campaigns, the first race was more a cruise in company out into the unknown. For many in that ’73 race, the first priority was to get enough of the sponsor’s free beer onboard. The crew on Burton Cutter used the cases to form companionway steps down into their unfinished accommodation until something more permanent could be constructed. She was finished in such a rush that her crew did not have time even to test out their sail wardrobe before the start and left Portsmouth cutting lengths of sheet from a reel each time they opened a new bag. They went out of the Solent to the sound of sawing as the crew worked to make up their bunks in readiness for a first night at sea. Worse, it took them six days to find that someone had forgotten to connect up the toilets to the thru-hull seacocks, and by the time the full extent of the problem was realised, the bilge was filthy and much of their food had been ruined.

Drink was certainly a common denominator in those days. Sayula II went around the world to the tune of clinking glass, her crew consuming the equivalent of a bottle of wine each a day and a bottle of spirits between them – and skipper Ramon Carlin, a washing machine magnate from Brazil didn’t drink! But he did (and still does) enjoy the pleasures of life, and ensured that his crew fed royally on a diet of frozen steak, chicken and other delights.

Blyth saved weight by carrying concentrated food that simply had to be mixed with water. It was the right idea – just the wrong mix of powders. He and his team of paratroopers aboard Great Britain II survived the first leg on a diet of curry served up morning, noon and night until rebellion within the ranks led to a wider menu from Cape Town onwards.

We can thank van Rietschoten for introducing the race to the dubious delights of freeze-dried fare. It was a measure of this winner’s meticulous preparation that saw him enlist the services of a professional dietician and fly to the USA for a week of testing and tasting the product of this weight saving, space-age food technology. They came up with a nutritionally balanced daily diet supplemented with frozen meat that would be served up by a professional chef. The problem for crews today is that the constant quest to minimise weight has led to the juicy solids and chefs being left ashore, leaving them with a variety of dishes that so dull the palate, they all begin to taste the same after a week at sea.

The ‘Flying Dutchman’ as he became known, was also first to embark on a detailed shake-down of transatlantic crossings to fully test boat, rig and crew before the big events of 1977 and ’81. His pioneering research programmes also led to the development of discontinuous rod rigging, computer studies of the world’s weather patterns, the three-layer clothing system that wicks body sweat away from the skin and set new standards for warmth and water protection. He also proved the durability of Mylar sails.

Flyer’s back-to-back victory in 1981 also marked the end of an era. When crews returned for the fourth running of the race in 1985, the boats had become stripped out racers without cabins or indeed any personal space save a small bin or pouch big enough to hold only a change of underwear and personal stereo needed to drown out noise. Crews not only had to ‘hot-bunk’, the watch coming below sliding into a sleeping space vacated by a watch member going on deck, but ‘hot-tip’, switching from side to side when off watch, when the boat tacked, to maximise the righting moment. When Van Rietschoten eventually steeled himself to look inside a Volvo 60 yacht developed specially for the race, he was aghast. “You can’t even stand upright,” he complained.

Today’s ocean racing yachts have been designed for a new breed of tough professional sailors who employ round the buoy tactics to racing round the world. Theirs is a world where old comforts are gladly sacrificed in the interest of speed. Designers, like Bruce Farr, have maximised on new construction methods and materials to develop lighter and lighter boats to exploit the fast downwind conditions experienced in the Southern Ocean, and sailmakers have responded with all manner of equally innovative sail combinations.

Crews now have the tools to attack rather than merely survive the Roaring Forty and Screaming Fifty latitudes. The addition of movable water ballast in the 1993-94 race simply added to the power. As a result, records have tumbled dramatically. Flyer’s 81-82 noon to noon record of 328 miles jumped to a 24-hour measured run of 425 miles in the 93-94 race and 484 in 2001-02. The odds are that the new breed of 70-footers now being developed for the 2005-06 Volvo race will breach the 500-mile monohull barrier for the first time.

Other firsts, over the years, include satellite communications and navigation systems that not only track each yacht’s every move, but have transformed a race that used to disappear over the horizon from one month to the next. Now it is one that can be followed in every living room.

But among the many benefits this race has given to the sport, improvements in safety and survival equipment are probably the most significant. The 1985 race saw the development of pocket-sized man-overboard personal transmitters and tracking system. We have also witnessed steady improvements in lifejacket and harness design, clothing to protect against the extremes of weather, and survival suits that are not only practical on deck, but extend life expectancy for those who may go over the side from 20 minutes or so in the first race to a much more realistic 24 hours or more today.

Racing they say, improves the breed – and there is no better example of this than the Volvo Ocean Race.

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