Printable version  News feed

The reality of sailing in dangerous waters was brought home to roost early on when Great Britain II was hit at night by a ferocious squall just a few days out from Portsmouth. Bernie Hosking was thrown overboard, but eventually, after a frenzied search, his head was spotted bobbing around in the water, picked out in the searchlight’s beam. The seas were cold and rough, but he was pulled back on deck by the other crewmembers and given a hot, rather than a ‘stiff’ drink. There was no brandy to administer since Blyth was operating a ‘dry’ boat, but that was to change in subsequent legs.

“I decided it would be good for the crew if we had drinks on the boat so from the second leg, I started a ‘happy hour’ every night where every crewmember was given the choice of either two beers or two shots of spirits. We used it as an opportunity to catch up on the day’s event – sometimes it would be in the cockpit, sometimes down below, depending on the weather, but it was good for team morale. Once a week we also had a party with a theme so we would have to make hats or whatever and that was fun too.”

There were problems elsewhere. In the rush to get Burton Cutter ready for the race, the outlet pipes for the toilets had not been connected and the stench became unbearable when all the human sewage was dumped directly into the bilge.

The first ever boat to suffer a dismasting in the Whitbread Race was on Eric Tabarly’s Pen Duick VI. There was no possibility of repairs so a jury rig was built and the crew headed to Rio de Janeiro, some 1,200 nms to the south east. By the time, they arrived, a new spar had been flown in from France and after it was fitted, Pen Duick VI set off across the Atlantic once more, arriving two days before the re-start.

Race Control volunteers, about 20 of them, checked race positions when they had them and dealt with any messages that came through. Once a week, they plotted all the positions on the chart and passed the information to a computer made available for one hour each week by HMS Collingwood, the Royal Navy’s electrical establishment at Portsmouth.

At the back of the fleet, the Swedish yacht Keewaydin, which had started the race two weeks late, got as far as the Canary Islands before pulling out but Burton Cutter was a class apart and William’s crew was the first to cross the finish line in Cape Town, though it was the Royal Navy’s Adventure, skippered by Patrick Bryans, who won overall on handicap after arriving just three hours ahead of Blyth’s GBII.