VAL HOWELLS
“The only way to escape his demons was to go to sea again”
Left to right: Francis Chichester, Blondie Hasler and David Lewis with Howells; Val aboard Folkboat Eira; working at the yard with son Philip
there and then? It was the first time since the race that the people concerned had actually got together. Of course nothing of the sort occurred – and you know why? There never was a bet.”
A SEAFARING LIFE In his book Sailing into Solitude, Howells recounts the build-up to that first OSTAR, which he dubbed a voyage to a ‘land walled with mirrors’; one where ‘every posture, every façade, stands naked to the truthful eye’. He conveys the haunting suspicion of his own insignificance measured against the immense forces of the elements. Meeting him, though, I was much struck by his other tales: stories of the early days; two further OSTAR races; the depths of depression he sank to after failing to complete the third of these; and his salvation, secured by slipping the mooring lines of family life and sailing round the world alone.
Howells began his seafaring life by boarding a merchantman in Liverpool docks at the age of 17, and continued through the Second World War, where his ship, Ascanius, was blown up during the Normandy landings. Later, he saw service aboard an ammunition ship during the Burma campaign.
On meeting his wife Eira, he settled down to farming
the Welsh hills around Narberth, near Swansea. They took up sailing together out of Saundersfoot, a former coaling harbour on the Pembroke coast, starting with a GP14 built in the barn from a Jack Holt kit. In time, they graduated to an 18ft (5.5m) Osprey trapeze boat, in which their small children played in the forward buoyancy tank while the parents planed up and down the coast.
During the mid-1950s, Howells persuaded his wife that they should sell their 50-acre farm and buy a house in Saundersfoot to turn into a restaurant. The money left over was used to build the 25ft (7.6m) Folkboat Eira, in which he sailed the first OSTAR. “It cost me £900 and all the wood came from local forests,” Howells recalls. He
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adapted the design by including a small self-draining cockpit and extending the coachroof to provide more headroom for his 6ft 4in frame. He also added a bridge-deck to keep the water out of the cabin in the event of a knockdown, and fitted a belt-and-braces rig. Howells sailed Eira single-handed to northern Spain and back, before Blondie Hasler approached him to enter the OSTAR. He finished fourth. Returning for the second OSTAR in 1964, Howells hit on the novel approach of using the race to deliver the 35ft (10.7m) Akka to her owner in America. This time, he finished third in a broader field of 15 starters. But the race marked a high water point. And a few years later, when Francis Chichester asked him to take part in a circumnavigation, he refused.
“There was, as usual, a shortage of cash,” Howells says. “And further on than that, my wife Eira, when she got to know what was going on, came out with the priceless remark: ‘You wouldn’t do that to me Val; would you?’ This related to the death of our third child, which had struck her particularly hard. In the event, I told Francis that, though I would like to take part, my family circumstances made it impossible.” By 1976, however, all that had changed. After a 12-year gap, Howells built two identical 38ft (11.6m) yachts for the fifth OSTAR, one for his son, the other for himself. He was injured in a fall soon after the start and forced to retire. That failure led him to the depths of depression, and a year on, he decided that the only way to escape his demons was to go to sea again. He set out to sail solo around the world with little in the way of money or resources. Eventually arriving back at Milford in 1979, he completed the voyage after an extended stop in Sydney to support his dying daughter Rosemarie. Howells’ frankness and memory of those pioneering days of solo sailing are exhilarating. He is now hard at work writing two further volumes of his memoirs.
Sailing into Solitude (2011 edition), Landsker Publications. Available in hardback, paperback and as an ebook. ISBN 978-0-9542732-2-4
PHOTOGRAPHS BY EILEEN RAMSEY PPL
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