GILES MARTIN-RAGET
Update
and MSN, which says a chord was struck beyond the sport. Closer to home, the 600-plus ‘likes’ and the 110 or more comments on the RORC’s own Facebook pages say Deb Fish’s taking on the Com- modore’s mantle was widely popular. The comments were warm, welcoming and with an undercurrent that said ‘thoroughly deserved!’ You sense who or what she is doesn’t matter one jot to Deb Fish.
Cracking on, working out how to do the difficult and pulling together different disciplines, skills and knowledge pools seem to be her metier. ‘It shouldn’t be a big deal that I’m a woman,’ she says. ‘I’m a sailor like any other. But what is nice is that when I have done things before, either in my career or in sailing, and when I have been the first woman, others follow. To me, though, we’re all just sailors.’ Deb Fish’s career has spanned the academic world and govern-
ment service, for which she was awarded the OBE in 2011. Presently she is a Fellow at the Defence Science & Technology Laboratory (Dstl) in Hampshire. On the water she’s best known for her string
Her speciality as a lecturer was numerical modelling and data analysis. Part of Deb’s PhD involved taking instrument readings of the light of stars, then working out how it was absorbed in the atmosphere in order to calculate how much ozone was there in the northern winter. Every year Reading University had a field trip sailing in the Solent,
which comprised a couple of yachts with a skipper each plus a mete- orologist and as many students as there were berths. The idea was to taking wind readings, monitor shipping forecasts and make the first steps in translating the theoretical into the practical side of meteorology. Deb Fish liked it. So much so that she sailed and sailed as much as she could. She gained a Day Skipper ticket then moved into racing via pay-as-you-go charter boats. ‘This is one of the reasons I am keen on seeing routes into sailing
from wherever you start,’ she says, ‘be it as a kid, through dinghy sailing, on pay-to-play boats, a friend’s yacht, whatever. It’s part of making the sport stay healthy, by widening the catchment area.’ That she previously chaired the club’s membership committee
and led the Griffin programme shows that Deb Fish’s interest has already been matched with responsibility. The Griffin fund has run in various forms with differing boats since 1945, but always with one objective: encouraging youngsters into ocean racing. Doublehanded racing is a recurring theme with the new com-
modore. It’s been one of the RORC’s success stories of recent times, even if a wider acceptance of the discipline was dealt a blow when the IOC finally decided against its inclusion for the Paris Olympics. The pandemic gave doublehanded racing a boost in British waters.
When racing returned people went afloat with smaller crews and simpler campaigns. ‘Boat design has moved along too,’ reflects Fish. ‘It’s feasible to race competitively in boats designed for two- handed racing. You don’t have to have so much weight on the rail to steer easily and sail fast. Doublehanded is a great way to keep interested because you never get bored!’ Admitting racing just two-up can be ‘quite hard at times’, Fish
recalls the last Rolex Fastnet Race, spinnaker up in quite a lot of breeze and converging with shipping coming out of a Traffic Sepa- ration Scheme and thinking ‘how are we going to get this down?!’ ‘It’s not easy, but it’s a lot of fun and very rewarding,’ she says.
We’re not here for the beer… the winning 1993 French Admiral’s Cup team set out its stall early with a full fly-past of the Royal Yacht Squadron lawn prior to the opening 185nm Channel Race. Top down: Corum Saphir 50 (Farr), Corum Rubis Two-Tonner (Farr) and Corum Diamant One Tonner (Niels Jeppesen design)
of successes racing with Rob Craigie on his Sun Fast 3600 Bellino, most recently winning the 2023 RORC Season’s Points Champion - ship overall, having been third and runner-up in the seasons before. Scroll back through the previous RORC commodores and you’d
struggle to find another salaried, shorthanded sailor among all of the Lloyd’s underwriters, ex-Services and owners of businesses and land who have held that position. She describes her work under the umbrella of ‘support to oper-
ations’. Her OBE was in recognition of improvising armour for British army vehicles to keep the occupants safer. She played a significant behind-the-scenes role during the Covid-19 pandemic. She was one of two independent technical assurers of Dstl’s work. To give an idea of the scope of this work, she says: ‘For instance, we had staff deployed into Public Health England laboratories carrying out Covid- 19 sample testing for the NHS, and developed a tool to help decision makers, and the public, understand the risks of transmission. A wide brief pulling together an avalanche of data in an uncertain time.’ Another point of difference is that Deb Fish didn’t start sailing
until 30, by which time she had finished school in Weston-super- Mare, earned a chemistry degree and gone on to complete a PhD on the hole in the ozone layer at Cambridge. It was Reading Univer- sity’s Meteorology Department that proved to be the door into sailing.
16 SEAHORSE
Fish admits the reason she has tried many different types of sailing since the flame was lit at Reading University is that she likes being challenged. There’s probably no better example than the 2022 Round Britain & Ireland Race when – racing two-handed – she and Rob Craigie placed 2nd overall by seven minutes after 15 days’ racing in a fleet of similar designs. ‘A third of the way round there were four 3600s within sight of each other,’ she recalls. ‘Through the Goodwin Sands we were being tacked-on close enough to feel the dirty air.’ It is the balancing act between shorthanded and fully crewed,
between the traditional race programme and new events, between home waters racing and international competitions, which Deb Fish has given plenty of thought to already. ‘It’s something we’re con- stantly thinking about, but as always it comes down to how you bal- ance between the needs of the grand-prix sailors and the Corinthians.’ Fish highlights the Gordon Appleby Trophy as one of the club’s
key annual awards because of its importance to home waters owners funding their own campaigns and racing with amateur friends and family. ‘The idea is that you just need to compete in five races in the UK and don’t need to travel abroad. If you’re the best you can win.’ With grand-prix racing also a vital part of RORC activity, she is
swapping ideas with racing manager Steve Cole about tying separate races and events together. ‘One idea we are toying with is whether to have an international sub-series to stand alongside a domestic sub-series. Or perhaps an Atlantic Series such as outward to the Caribbean 600, a feeder race up the east coast of the USA and then a return race across the Atlantic. As ever, it comes down to how we can balance the needs of the grand-prix racers and Corinthians.’ Greater collaboration is seen as essential. ‘If we could partner
more with other clubs, our French and American friends, it would make us all stronger. We’d get a more international flavour and more boats. There is a critical mass where it’s lovely to race against boats like your own, so it makes sense to work with other clubs. Having a fleet within a fleet often is key to having a fantastic race.’
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