Above: Seriously? This is the Peterson-designed Rogers 43 Bubblegum at the start of the 1981 Whitbread Round the World Race… Bubblegum did not make it to the end. Cold times in the Southern Ocean (top right) in the 1981 race onboard overall winner Flyer II whose crew included a young Grant Dalton as sailmaker. Clare Francis (right) skippered ADC Accutrac in the second race in 1977/78
Southern Ocean legs. The great circle course from Cape Town to Auckland runs pretty close to Antarctica and any savvy navigator knows that the great circle route is the shortest distance between two points. It was a very fine line between shaving off distance and getting too deep into iceberg territory. Which do you think is tougher? Con-
stantly gybing along the southern limit line imposed under current race rules, or having to boil a kettle to melt the ice that had formed in the winch handle socket before you could wind the sail in? I am not sure which is worse, but I do distinctly rem - ember an iceberg picked up on the radar directly ahead and the panic that ensued when we realised that the spinnaker sheet and guy were frozen solid to the winch and a quick gybe or spinnaker drop was not an option. I can’t remember how we got out of that one, it was one of many near-misses, but I do remember Skip giving us a bollock- ing for napping on watch and not noticing that we were going into a deep freeze. Clothing was also a challenge. Granted
we were past the days of genuine oilskins where your wool or cotton clothing was waterproofed with oil, but we were not that far ahead. There was not much on the market. The top wet weather gear makers like Henry Lloyd and Musto were just getting a handle on what was needed. Before them there was Line 7, plastic and non-breathable, which left you soaking on the inside from sweat rather than salt water, and I am not sure which was worse. The clothing worn by the current Volvo
sailors is highly engineered, designed to breath, light and durable, but even so there is still the same problem faced by all sailors: how often to change clothing. Gear is heavy and heavy is slow so changes of
clothing are kept to a minimum. Weight was not as critical an issue back in the early days but the dilemma remained. To change clothes you had to get undressed and it didn’t make that much sense to put clean clothes on a dirty body, but the only way to clean that dirty body was chuck a bucket over the side and scrub with icy cold Southern Ocean water. Many crews simply opted to douse themselves with Johnson’s Baby Powder – we had a num- ber of crew on Drum who admitted wear- ing the same underpants when they arrived in Auckland as when they left Cape Town. I think that one of the things that makes
the Volvo Race a lot easier is the amount of very accurate weather information the teams receive. It allows them to position themselves ahead of a front to take full advantage of what the system has to offer. We received faxes that, depending on where they came from, were either quite detailed or looked like they’d been drawn by a toddler riding in the back of a pick-up truck. I remember as we approached the
equator on Fazisi that though we had a fax the faxes we were getting had very little information. On the well-funded boats they had computers that could pull in satellite imagery and the skippers and nav- igators hunkered below doing their best to decipher what they were looking at. With- out anything of any value on Fazisi we did what most sailors would do: we looked out of the window and played the puffs. In doing so we went from 15th, where we had languished since the start, to fifth. The Volvo Ocean Race will continue to
evolve, designers will innovate, sponsors will demand more, the sailors will deliver more and the gap between the early races and those still to come will continue to widen. There are two major differences
between now and then and for us old- timers one is a plus and the other a minus. We were racing incognito; family and
friends barely had any clue where we were and that was how we liked it. The amount of (necessary) communication that these sailors are putting out is unreal. There is no escape. The phone can ring at any time and the demand for high-quality material is only going to increase. But for them the route is well worn.
They know what to expect, they know what to wear, they know what to eat and they know what’s expected of them. The first Whitbread was held in
1973/74. It really was a pioneering event. Navigation was by sextant, weather infor- mation non-existent. The crews were a mixture of sailors and others there for the fun and adventure. There were men lost at sea and boats with broken masts, booms, rudders and, occasionally, hearts. If Grant Dalton’s terse comment about
not celebrating New Year was a marker that changed the way the race was sailed, there is an anecdote about Clare Francis, the skipper of ADC Accutrac in the 1977/78 race, that speaks volumes on how it used to be. Clare apparently liked to gab on the phone or, in her case, the single- sideband radio. It was the only means of communication but there was no privacy. It was an open line and any person
tuned in on the same frequency could hear the conversations. Clare was married to a Frenchman who was racing onboard with her. One evening she was experiencing a bit of congestion and was constantly clear- ing her throat. ‘Sorry,’ she announced to all tuned in, ‘I have a frog in my throat.’ I am told that there was collective laughter floating across the Southern Ocean that evening.
SEAHORSE 39
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JONATHAN EASTLAND/ALAMY
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