Special Report
I’d been holding on to the companionway stairs when the boat lurched suddenly to port and I crashed headlong into the galley. After I brushed myself off and returned to the cockpit, a little shaken but otherwise composed, the skipper, Kevin Farebrother, informed me I had blood running down the side of my face.
Fortunately, I was in good hands. Not only is Farebrother a firefighter from Perth, Australia, he also served in the British army’s Special Air Service and is a highly trained emergency responder. Without batting an eye, he had me fixed up with gauze and antiseptic within minutes.
We were sailing from Falmouth, England, to the Golden Globe 2018 starting line in Les Sables d’olonne, France, in the SITRAN Challenge, a three-day charity race. We’d gotten off to a casual start in Falmouth. Sir Robin Knox-johnston fired the start pistol from his yacht Suhaili a half-hour before the official start time, much to the befuddlement of the organizers and media. But when Sir Robin says go, you damn well go. We were one of the last to cross the line, but none of the skippers seemed to be in any hurry; no one was going to risk their boats on a warm-up race.
The real race would start two weeks later, on July 1, and at the time, little did either Kevin or I suspect that his dream
A feeder race sailed with would-be circumnavigator Kevin Farebrother, a mountaineer from Australia, provides a glimpse into what motivates someone to join a challenge like the Golden Globe Race 2018.
BY FIONA M GLYNN c
challenge would fall victim to the realities of the sea. It did, however, when on July 16, he withdrew from the competition, saying he’d been unable to get into a routine that would allow him to weather the demands of singlehanded sailing. Still, my sail with him during the feeder race provided some insights into what drives a person to even consider such an undertaking.
The race was organized to mark the 50th anniversary of the original Golden Globe, one of the most infamous races in sailing history. In 1968, nine sailors set out to become the first person to sail around the world solo nonstop. Only one would cross the finish line nearly a year later: British sailor Robin Knox-johnston. He made history, arriving in Falmouth after a grueling 312 days at sea. But there were other competitors who captured the public’s imagination. Despite being on track to log the fastest time, Frenchman Bernard Moitessier quit the race at the last minute to “save [his] soul” and continued sailing for a near second lap around the world. At the other extreme was British competitor Donald Crowhurst, who falsified his position reports for seven months at sea while bobbing aimlessly in the Atlantic.
I was just settling into the feeder event, cozy in the Tradewind 35’s protected cockpit, when I looked down below deck and noticed Farebrother running ropes from the forward bulkheads to the companionway door. He was running fixed lines, a mountaineer’s solution to the Tradewind 35’s sparingly placed handholds (and perhaps an attempt to prevent clumsy journalists from bouncing their heads off companionway stairs).
Having summited Everest three times (and other challenging peaks, including Denali and Mont Blanc), Farebrother is an accomplished mountaineer and no stranger to adventure. On one Everest trip, he found a climber collapsed just below the summit, suffering from extreme altitude sickness. He and a Sherpa were able to move her down to Camp 2, in effect saving her life. “Some people are selfish. They’ll walk right by and not even share their oxygen,” Farebrother explained. “I’m going to save someone if I can. That’s just who I am.”
Had Farebrother completed the race, he would have become the first person in the world to have gone around the globe solo nonstop and climbed Everest. However, he is no professional sailor. In fact, he barely had the qualifying 8,000 nautical miles necessary to participate in the race. Farebrother’s introduction to sailing began only six years ago, and was further inspired by Knox-johnston’s A
World of My Own, which he read on his last summit of Everest. He realized he had found his next adventure. He’s not blind to his lack of experience, but joked in a recent press conference, “When things got tough, Sir Robin just went below deck and drank rum. I figure I can do that.”
What sets this race apart from any other is the retro twist. The 18 sailors who planned to start the GGR 2018 are limited to technology that would have been available on Knox-johnston’s boat in 1968, which means no GPS, radar, AIS, electronic charts, satellite phones, weather routing, GRIBS, computers or electronic autopilots (all of which make modern sailing immeasurably easier and safer). Also on the list of prohibited items are electronic watches and clocks, MP3 players and calculators. Instead of digital cameras, competitors will be documenting their experiences using 35mm film and Super 8 film stock.
It’s not just the gear that’s old-school. All the GGR 2018 boats must have been designed prior to 1980, be less than 36 feet overall and have a full keel. Farebrother bought his Tradewind 35 from Don Mcintyre, the race organizer, and named it Sagarmatha, which is the Nepalese name for Mount Everest. Being an older boat, it required some refits. “We’re on a budget, so we’ve not refitted the whole thing,” Farebrother said. “The main things were the through-hulls and seacocks, new rigging, new sails.” Farebrother did most of the work himself.
One of the unique aspects of the Golden Globe is the affordability. Unlike modern yacht races such as the Vendée Globe that require $10 million to $15 million for a competitive entry, most GGR 2018 entries cost between $200,000 and $300,000. As such, most competitors are largely self-financed, with several of them selling their homes or working full time to fund their entries.
One of the few racers able to garner full sponsorship was Susie Goodall, 28, an offshore ocean sailing instructor. Backed by DHL, Goodall is the youngest competitor and the only woman in the race. We were coming up on the Chaussée de Sel lateral buoy when we spotted the red hull of Goodall’s Rustler 36, DHL Starlight, on our port side. Farebrother snapped into high gear. He grabbed the helm, trimmed the sheets and off we went. It looked like we were ahead. Farebrother grabbed the VHF and chirped, “Tsk tsk. DHL, always late on delivery,” to which Goodall smartly told him that he shouldn’t be so sure of himself before trimming up and neatly streaking past us. Soon, she was just a red dash on the horizon.
Farebrother laughed good-naturedly.
It’s not just the gear that’s
old-school. All the GGR
2018 boats must have been
designed prior to 1980, be
less than 36 feet overall and
have a full keel.
As the sun set over the
English Channel, it was
replaced by hundreds of
white, green and red lights
on the horizon. Of course,
in 1968, there was no AIS.
After all, for him it’s not about the race. When I asked him why he signed up, he told me, “It’s about adventure. It’ s definitely not about sailing; it’s just the challenge. Maybe it’s personal just to push myself to see how far I can go before I pull the pin and decide it’s too much for me.” Talk about foreshadowing.
We were beginning to feel the Atlantic swell, and I felt myself drifting on the edge of seasickness. As we settled in for the evening, we shared a single can of soup and struggled to finish it. While I’d just come off a Pacific crossing the previous year, I’d forgotten just how uncomfortable even a modest ocean swell can be. Farebrother, however, seemed hardly perturbed and went about equipment inspections, cooking and maintaining the boat with impressive energy.
Not unlike the rigors of ocean sailing, mountaineers operate under sleep deprivation, and at times, altitude sickness. Farebrother told me that on a recent mountaineering trip, he lost 10 kilograms over a few weeks. To keep himself and his boat in shape, Farebrother’s strategy is planned monotony. “I’m going to have the most boring routine, but it’s going to keep me sane. Things like checking for wear and tear, eating meals at the same times. I think it’s important to make it second nature so that when you are tired and cold and slow, you’re still able to achieve. It makes it safer.”
As the sun set over the English Channel, it was replaced by hundreds of white, green and red lights dancing on the horizon. Of course, in 1968, there was no AIS or radar. While on my own boat at home, I’d have had the comforts of AIS interfaced with my chart plotter and radar overlay, tonight I was faced with peering out into the darkness. Were those lights getting closer or farther away? It was daunting. The lack of AIS and radar seemed a considerable setback in a world that has seen shipping explode over the past 50 years. Many competitors have told me that risk of collision is what worries them most about the race.
So it was no small thing when we received a call from a fellow competitor who had lost all power and was adrift, without his primary nav lights, in the middle of the busiest waterway in the world. He asked me to relay his situation to race headquarters, and I duly took down his information. The race mandates that, for safety reasons, every boat must have two Iridium texting devices and two satellite phones on board for communicating emergencies to race headquarters. I soon learned that our comms equipment had yet to be tested (one of the objectives of this warm-up race was to test the communications systems). After agonizing hours of trying to set up the texting device, we finally managed to inform race HQ of the situation. Fortunately, the competitor made it in safely and was able to repair his boat in time for the start.
While not testing your comms before going to sea might sound like a glaring oversight, it’s more understandable when you see the pressure the skippers were under. In the days leading up to the start, Falmouth had been a flurry of activity: film crews and couriers running up and
“Parts of this race, like
the Southern Ocean, are
much more dangerous than
Everest. It’s the length of
time, it’s the exposure, it’s
the solitude.”
down the docks, cockpits loaded with boxes of unopened gear, fans knocking on the hulls to ask for autographs (the docks were open to the public in the day). Not ideal conditions for preparing your boat for 10 months at sea. At a safety briefing I sat in on, one of the organizers chastised competitors for having safety gear, such as EPIRBS, still in boxes at trial-run safety inspections. “You have to have your equipment installed. You have to show us you know how to use it,” he said with frustration.
Many competitors believe the race is actually harder today than in 1968 because of the logistical burden of meeting modern safety requirements, especially considering that most competitors have only two or three people (usually unpaid volunteers) on their teams. The GGR safety inspectors are exacting, going over the boats in extraordinary detail, not only checking off the basics you’d expect in an offshore race (emergency rudders, life rafts, EPIRBS, PLBS, etc.) but also penalizing competitors for small infractions (one competitor was dinged for having expired bottles of water on board). “In mountaineering, there’s some logistics,” Farebrother told me. “But [the Golden Globe Race] is different. This has been going on for two years. There’s so much to do, and you’ve got to tick the boxes, get the forms, there’s so many rules. There’s two races, one to the start line, and then there’s the actual race.”
We arrived in Les Sables d’olonne, completing our 300-mile warm-up race in a little under three days. In just two weeks, Farebrother and the other competitors would set sail for an estimated 250-plus days, a considerable amount of time, especially when compared to François Gabart’s recent round-the-world record of 42 days. The slow speeds of the older boat designs make this race a contest of survival over speed.
I asked Farebrother if he thought the risks involved with the GGR 2018 compared to something like climbing Everest. Was sailing in this race more dangerous than mountaineering? Perhaps a precursor to how things would turn out, he said, “Parts of this race, like the Southern Ocean, are much more dangerous than Everest. It’s the length of time, it’s the exposure, it’s the solitude. I don’t think there’s anything that compares.”
Watching Farebrother and the other sailors make the final preparations to their boats in the last days leading up to the start, I found myself questioning the point of this race. Some of the competitors had paid a very high price to reach the start line: their jobs, homes, relationships. And now they were going to risk their lives to achieve something that was done 50 years ago. Why?
No competitor has a good answer to this question, perhaps because people are seldom aware of what drives them to do extraordinary things. But I think it comes down to pushing boundaries, even if it’s just personal ones. In 2018, every ocean has been sailed, the great peaks have been summited, everything has been done. All that’s left is to do it faster. The upper limits are about speed, and technology has played an important role in compressing times and opening up the impossible. Sadly, technology has also ended the era of amateur exploration and accomplishment. Today, to do anything of note requires an obsessive focus, training like an Olympic athlete, and a considerable amount of money.
What’s special about the Golden Globe 2018, is that Farebrother and many of the other competitors are everymen. For the most part, they aren’t pros, they aren’t sponsored and they haven’t devoted their lives to the singular pursuit of sailing. For them, it comes down to a simple question: Can I do it?
After reaching his decision to abandon his voyage, Farebrother told race organizers he would likely head back to the mountains, comfortable with having learned the singlehanded life at sea was not for him. The Australian website mysailing.com.au quoted him saying, “For me, it is like getting into the back seat of a moving car to sleep when no one is at the wheel. As a result, I’ve had very little sleep over the past two weeks. My boat is now for sale!”
Still, having heard the news, I couldn’t help but recall one of my last days in the race village. I toured another competitor’s boat and spied a red crash helmet stowed in a locker. The skipper, somewhat sheepishly, explained that it was to protect his head in rough weather, a seemingly wise precaution when you consider the seriousness of a head injury thousands of miles from shore. I rubbed the subdued but palpable lump above my left temple and considered that it would take more than a few knocks to the head for me to ever consider signing up for the Golden Globe. But then again, the truly adventurous have always walked the line between bold and crazy.
To learn more about the Golden Globe Race 2018, or to follow along, visit the event’s website (goldengloberace.com).