Top: Knox-Johnston lived on Suhaili for some two years prior to sailing her round the world so having returned safely to Falmouth it would be ungrateful to rush ashore for the first drink… Above: no freeze dried meant the battle to keep down the weight of provisions never even began; respect for his boat as the winner takes a first fag on deck; and with fellow circumnavigator Sir Francis Chichester
with boats built in China, and stopovers to organise, skippers to train and all the administration of a complex operation, the Clipper Race is now his main source of income. When we talked in Southampton, aside from organising the next edition, he was wrestling with the fall-out from the loss of two crewmembers in the last race, unhappy – to put it mildly – with sugges- tions that safety measures were not stringent enough; ironic as they were measures pioneered and put in place by Clipper Ventures themselves. ‘In my next boat I’ll have a dartboard with a civil servant on it’ was his most printable response. Yes, there is no getting away from it:
Sir Robin Knox-Johnston bears grudges. Once those gimlet eyes have fastened on their object of contempt, incompetent elec- tronics engineers, the Powers That Be, even some elite organisations of which he has been a past president, business partners who have crossed him, those still
owing money and, last but not least, The Press, stand back. The critics, the naysayers, those whose
response to a challenge is ‘it can’t be done’, those who believe he should hang up his sea boots, all come in for withering fire and, one imagines, worse, for there is still the schoolboy pugilist in him that spoils for a fight. ‘The world is full of people telling you what you can’t do,’ he says. (Needless to say, a planning issue with Portsmouth City Council over a veranda on his lovely waterfront apartment did not prove unduly onerous.) It is a theme that runs through all his
writing, a consistent refusal to take ‘You can’t’ as an answer, and a philosophy that has, often pig-headedly, seen him through storms and personal setbacks both afloat and ashore, the hardest of which was the loss of his wife Sue in 2003, three years before his Saga voyage, an episode in his life about which he writes movingly in
Force of Nature. Yet he is clearly loyal to those he
admires, trusts and who share his passions. Loïck Peyron is ‘a super guy’. Of Chay Blyth, with whom The Press
enjoyed suggesting he has a less than cordial relationship: ‘we are not at daggers drawn; I’ll call him from time to time.’ The late Bernard Moitessier, with
whom he fought a hare and tortoise race in the Golden Globe: ‘we used to write to each other’. Ben Ainslie: ‘I have high hopes. Our best ever chance to win the America’s Cup’. As for the French in general and the
sailors in particular, he has nothing but admiration for their dominance in shorthanded racing. The Figaro training circuit comes in for special praise for its astonishing record in producing the next generation of shorthanded super-sailors. The Suhaili skipper stays in touch. Part II – Snow and ice
q SEAHORSE 45
KNOX-JOHNSTON ARCHIVE/PPL
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