BRITISH STEEL


British steel - MADE ON THE DART


n the late 1960s there was a feeling that sailing round the world had been ‘done’. All the major ‘records’ - first solo circumnavigation, first solo non stop navigation and others - had been achieved and there was little hope of engaging the public in a new attempt to sail round the world. So Chay Blyth, a former Marine Com- mando and adventurer, was told. He was looking to take on an adventure in 1969 that would garner interest with the public and entice sponsorship from big business. Blyth had received an Empire


I


medal for being part of a duo that rowed the Atlantic. He had previ- ously been beaten in his first attempt to sail round the world, with the Sunday Times Golden Globe race in 1967, when he capsized near the Cape of Good Hope. In 1969, after a stint as a travelling salesman, he was itching for some- thing to really get his teeth into. He met a PR man by the name of Terry Bond who knew that British Steel (then a publicly owned company) wanted a large-scale project to sponsor so they could raise their profile with the british public. chay and Terry started negotiating with them about adventure projects the company could sponsor – they pitched the idea of climbing the Andes then canoeing the length of the amazon, or sailing round the world. The preferred choice of the company was the amazon trip because ‘everything in sailing has been done’. Then Blyth’s wife made a throwaway


comment about sailing round the world with an ‘original’ twist: “Well, why not sail around the world the other way?” The world’s currents and prevailing winds make sailing East to West much more favourable than West to East, and a circumnavigation ‘the wrong way’ was actually considered impossible by many experienced sailors. Armed with a revo- lutionary design by Robert Clarke for a


Chay Blyth


50s – producing hundreds of vessels and employing up to 500 men at a time. The company had built its reputation on high-quality workmanship and creat- ing sleek, well-proportioned steel boats. It was this reputation that brought


the British Steel contract to the small boatyard. But the company had been in dire


“Boat of Steel - Man of Iron The most outstanding passage ever made by one man alone”


59-foot, steel-hulled ketch and £20,000 of British Steel sponsorship, Bond and Blyth looked for a suitable boat builder to put the yacht together in double- quick time. They plumped, somewhat surprisingly,


for Philip and Sons, based on the River Dart. Philip and Sons had been a power- house of production in the 1940s and


straights for much of the 1960s and had been bought out in the last months of 1969 by businessman Philip Pensabene, who had a business plan to change the yard into a fibreglass specialist. But Blyth wanted steel and there was still much expertise to utilise at the yard. Bob Weedon, who went from the shop floor to directorship at Philip and Son during his career, was chosen as part of the small team who would have to put the design together. From design to its completion took just four months – a remark- able achievement for a team creating something that was ‘the absolute pinnacle of modern yacht design’ at the time. Stuffed with modern aids to


sailing, the boat was launched on August 19th


1970.


Chay Blyth got ready to take on this ‘impossible’ challenge. It must have been hard to focus when every interview, all the public speculation, was that it simply would not be possible and the chances were he would have turn back, or worse. He was described as a: ‘publicity yachtist’ by ‘real’ sailors who felt he


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