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Within a few hours, crews on Heath’s Condor and ADC Accutrac were busy on the sewing machines, patching up spinnakers that had blown during their opening manoeuvres.

But 20 days into the race, having encountered serious headwinds after sliding through the Doldrums, the problems on Heath’s Condor suddenly turned critical.

With an ear-splitting crack, the new carbon-fibre mast snapped off just above the spreaders.

“For a moment the whole crew were stunned. As the watch below came up to see what was going on, they just gazed disbelievingly at the mess as the realisation of what this meant dawned. All the hard work to get the boat finished in time had been thrown away in a moment. Gone was any chance of getting to Cape Town first on handicap or even just getting there first. Gone perhaps were our chances in the whole race – they lay in a tangled heap on the deck,” Knox-Johnston recalled in his book Last But Not Least.

No one was hurt but Heath’s Condor retired from the leg and headed straight to the nearest port, Monrovia, some 400 nm away on the west coast of Africa, where they spent 12 days replacing the carbon-fibre mast with an aluminium version and sampling the local food, which two days after returning to the race track, took its revenge by wiping out almost every crewmember with a grisly bout of food poisoning.

After escaping the Doldrums with a healthy lead, Flyer beat into Cape Town harbour to win the leg. Just two hours behind after 38 days of racing, was King's Legend. Six days later, 12 boats were safely tied up at the Royal Cape Yacht Club with the other three, which had all made harbour calls, on their way.