After 312 days at sea averaging just over 4kt Knox-Johnston and Suhaili approach Falmouth and the real prize of being the first person to sail solo non-stop around the globe without assistance. Suhaili will be the only finisher in the Sunday Times Golden Globe, although Nigel Tetley was only 1,100nm from the finish when his plywood trimaran started breaking up as he pushed too hard in a futile effort to overhaul Donald Crowhurst – who by now had stepped off his own boat into the Atlantic after faking the log of his race. Nevertheless, Tetley’s accomplishment still marks one of the most important – and most overlooked – ocean voyages by a multihull
When Suhaili sprang a garboard leak in
the Atlantic, he dived with a copper tingle and tacks, having first made holes in the strip of copper so that putting the tacks in underwater was easier. The repair lasted until the finish. The self-steering gear was built to his design, modified and ultimately ditched when bent beyond repair in the Southern Ocean. There is an episode during the Velux,
again deep in the Southern Ocean, when, running fast in a Force 7, Saga snags a length of heavy fishing rope. He swings the keel over to have a look, drops the sails and lashes a knife to a sail batten. No joy. He tries to catch the rope with a lasso and winch it to the surface; no luck. Worried his now jammed keel mechanism might eventu- ally part company with his hull, as Alex Thomson’s had threatened, he takes stock – which invariably meant a dram ‘to focus my thoughts’ – and curls up in his sleeping bag ‘too apprehensive to sleep’. At first light, with the wind having at last died away, he climbs into his thermals and Henri Lloyd drysuit and ‘gingerly went over the stern.’ Diving down he manages to get hold of
the tail of the rope ‘…and on surfacing was able to look at my poor boat rolling heavily about 100ft away. She appeared very small in the immensity of the ocean.’ At which point a trio of albatrosses circle overhead. ‘I didn’t want these three
44 SEAHORSE
to see me as a lunch option. Their beaks looked vicious…’ The episode had taken 20 hours and lost him an estimated 230 miles. God alive… though the man himself admitted after losing his wife Sue to cancer in 2003 – they were married in 1962, divorced and remarried – to having fallen out with any deity, of the sea or otherwise. RK-J is typical of an intensely British
generation that values the old-fashioned virtues, such as self-sufficiency and reliance. He expects equipment to work and expects his crew to share his work ethos, while accepting that few can match it. He can be scathing about those who talk as opposed to those who do, the press in particular. This pillar of the establishment can
appear remarkably anti-establishment. When a friend was refused entry to a smart club he immediately resigned. Before the Golden Globe one old buffer implied he had no chance and received short shrift. Aside from Yachting World’s editor
Bernard Hayman – ‘He said I was the one to watch, as he was ex-Merchant Navy himself and knew I had all the qualities to succeed’ – no one gave the 29-year-old a hope in hell against the likes of Chay Blyth, John Ridgway and Bernard Moitessier – a late entry who fired up RK-J’s well-developed sense of Britishness to white heat. To let a Frenchman claim
the title of first to circumnavigate solo and non-stop was too much to consider. Much has been made of the psychia-
trist’s famous assessment of his mental state before the voyage and after. ‘Distress- ingly normal’ perhaps, but more appropri- ate would be to label him abnormally normal. His writings suggest a man who is happiest at sea, certainly; and most con- tented alone, preferably in his own boat – ‘I do enjoy not being bothered,’ he writes. While other soloists are on the phone
constantly he enjoys being ‘almost out of touch’. He wonders why they choose to sail singlehanded. On Saga he used the satellite phone sparingly, not least through thrift for his exploits have seldom been particularly well funded. This is a working knight, for both worthy
causes and public bodies, approached whenever a seaman’s opinion is needed, by the BBC when Cheeki Rafiki lost her keel, even Woman’s Hour on occasion – trustee of the National Maritime Museum from 1993 to 2003; president of the Sail Training Association from 1992 to 2001, president of the Little Ship Club, Sports Lottery panellist – and, since he was virtually wiped out in the Lloyds crash, a businessman. Clipper Ventures, the company he set up
with William Ward in 1996, is hugely time consuming. Run every two years – the only way it makes commercial sense, he says –
KEYSTONE/ALAMY
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