Setting Sail
Reflections on solo sailing
Solo sailing was much on my mind this past winter, mainly because of the Golden Globe race. For those of you not familiar with this event, it’s a singlehanded round-the-world race in cruising boats of no more than 36ft and without the help of electronic navigation, in the spirit of the original Sunday Times Golden Globe race in 1968.
Like the original race, this iteration of the Golden Globe was packed with drama, perhaps even more so. At the time of writing there were only six of the original 19 entrants left as the leaders drew close to the finish in Les Sables d’Olonne, France. The rest had succumbed (only figuratively, fortunately) to varying degrees of calamity, ranging from equipment failure to knockdowns, pitchpolings and dismastings. There was some high drama played out in the nether regions of the world’s oceans that had me and other race followers chewing our nails in suspense. The days when I might have considered such an adventure are in my life’s wake, so I am lost in admiration for 73-yearold Jean-Luc van den Heede, who led for most of the race while younger competitors struggled to rein him in.
But the only story that made headlines was, of course, one of near-disaster. As a onetime newspaper reporter I know full well that good news doesn’t sell papers, and it took a near-tragedy involving not some bewhiskered old salt but a plucky young woman to get this race some massmedia attention. Few will not have heard of 29-year-old Briton Susie Goodall’s pitchpoling and dismasting in a Southern Ocean storm, and her subsequent rescue by a freighter that fortuitously was within a few hundred miles of her in the same lonely stretch of the Southern Ocean.
Those of us with long memories will see the parallel here between Ms. Goodall’s unfortunate experience and that of another lone female sailor, Abby Sunderland, back in 2010. At the tender age of 16, Sunderland set out from Los Angeles in an ill-timed attempt to become the youngest person to circumnavigate solo and nonstop. Her Open 40 raceboat, Wild Eyes, was rolled and dismasted in the Indian Ocean in June, during the fierce southern winter. Sunderland was soon rescued by a fishing boat, following which she and her family became the subject of fierce criticism as an army (navy?) of armchair admirals joined in a mass excoriation.
In an uncanny coincidence, the upturned hull of Sunderland’s bright yellow boat— rendered unsinkable by the loss of its keel and its numerous crash bulkheads—made an appearance off the coast of Australia in late December, a couple of weeks after Goodall was hoisted off her stricken yacht. The parallels between Sunderland’s and Goodall’s bad luck are obvious, yet Goodall did not receive anywhere near the same amount of social-media savaging.
Sure, the Sunderland team made many mistakes, but what got lost in the aftermath was the moxie of a teenaged girl who set out on a voyage that very few of her older, mainly male critics would have had the courage to attempt. In that, she and Susie Goodall stand shoulder to shoulder, and if there’s a lesson to be learned from their experiences it’s that the wild seas of the southern oceans pay no heed to the calendar. s