Bob Fisher
I first got to know Fish properly when we shared a double bed for three days in a Florida hotel. We’d finished the 1980 St Petersburg-Fort Lauderdale Race absolutely sodden after three days beating up through wind-opposed Gulf Stream seas. Our shore kit was in a van broken down on the other side of Florida and the boat’s owner had booked what rooms were still available – the five-week long Southern Ocean Racing Conference ran into the colleges’ Spring Break – which were clearly not enough. It took a day for our wet sailing gear to
be processed by the hotel laundry. Unable to go to the bar in just our underpants, Fish arranged for the bar to come to us. One call to room service, and three trollies appeared laden with vodka, V8 vegetable juice, Worcestershire sauce, tabasco, ice and everything else for a Bloody Mary bar set-up. There was even some necessary stodge to mop it all: burgers and fries. A week later, in the hiatus before the
Miami-Nassau Race, he took me carous- ing with Ted Turner who was holding court late at night in the bar of the Biscayne Bay YC. Ted Turner must be one of the very few able to be more successful at being the centre of attention in a party. Mind you, Fish didn’t want for trying to match Turner song for song, tale for tale. You won’t find anyone who’s been in
Bob’s orbit not to have been influenced by him or without a story to tell. That was the impact of the man. Fish in one word? An impossible strait-
jacket for this Renaissance man. Well-read, erudite, bon vivant, tender, short-fused, influential, larrikin, competitive, inquisitive, innovative, journalist and author who, inevitably, will be the name that crops up time and time again in decades to come when researchers delve into the pageant of history that is the America’s Cup. Bob’s two-volume work, An Absorbing
Interest, is the 310,000-word chronicle that stands alongside Thomas Lawson’s book and, above all others, as the standard works on sailing’s greatest competition. More than anything, though, Fish was a
mighty fine sailor, better than the vast majority of people he wrote about. He won world titles in hot classes both as crew and helmsman. He had a tilt at Olympic selection in the Soling as middle man to John Oakeley and at the back of his own boat. He could have quite feasibly won an Olympic berth in the 1960s and
12 SEAHORSE
1935-2021 – Part I
1970s but was probably caught between the eras when backing was family money, patronage, your own business and the inklings of national funding. ‘If he had sailed instead of writing, he’d have got to the Olympics,’ says Hugh Welbourn. As it was, Fish chose writing, ‘to pay the
bills’, after early thoughts of dentistry and accountancy. In fact, his was a permanent presence at so many Olympics, as well as America’s Cups, Whitbread Round the World races and so forth. Tallying all of them up would be impossible. As Alice, one of Bob’s daughters says, ‘There didn’t seem to be an event that Dad wasn’t at.’
Fast living, fast driving, fast Horneteers For a local Brightlingsea boy the Essex foreshore was a fermenting ground. The 1890-1930s era of the Big Class yachts saw many of them pick Brightlingsea as their winter lay-up location. Steam yachts too. Local fishermen served in the yachts’ crew during the summer regatta season. The stories they told were a magnet to a young boy. Fish never lost that childhood inquisitiveness about yachts and yachting for the rest of his 85 years. Essex was a hotbed of the Hornet class,
no more so than Brightlingsea SC. With a plank for the crew, the Hornet in the 1950s and 1960s was just about the quickest Portsmouth Yardstick dinghy of its day. Bob won a string of titles, providing what every helmsman dreamed of in a crew. He
was strong, agile and pugnacious. He’d organise, set up and tune boats. He was tactically sharp. And he loved racing. Fish won the 1961, 1965 and 1969
Nationals with different helms (John Par- tridge, Mike Patten and Colin McKenzie), as well as two Hornet Worlds, the first in 1966 with Terry Wade and again in 1970 with McKenzie. In between he found time to win the 1966 Fireball Worlds on the helm, crewed by Richard Beales. ‘He was always dead positive,’ remem-
bers McKenzie today. ‘Some crews can feel edgy and nervous and you can sense that. Not Bob. He had so much enthusiasm.’ Not quite cut from the same cloth as
Woolf Barnato’s Bentley Boys of the 1930s, the East Coast Horneteers of the 1960s were a force of nature and became a big influence in the British marine industry. Keith Musto, Doug Bishop, Tony Allen, Beecher Moore, Kit Hobday to name a few. ‘I remember when they came to the
Island (of Wight) for an open meeting,’ says McKenzie. ‘I couldn’t believe the drive and energy they all had. It was tremendous.’ It was influential enough for McKenzie to leave Cowes and Ratsey & Lapthorn and set up the new Holt sail loft… next door to Allen Brothers’ fittings company in South- minster, Essex. Light boats and powerful cars saw Hor-
neteers trail their boats around the country at unfeasible speed, sometimes through borders and customs, for example to Zegrze, Poland for the 1966 Worlds. By the
PHOTOS PAUL MELLO/PPL/DOUGLAS WEST/BOB ALLER/GUY GURNEY/REG WHITE/BOB FISHER
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