Golden Globe lessons
All but six of the 18 Golden Globe Race entrants retired or were rescued. Barry Pickthall reports on what set the survivors apart
How self-steering, rig failure and barnacles decided this solo round the world race
Take 18 ordinary long keeled cruising yachts – production boats you are likely to find in any marina – a similar number of mainly amateur sailors all with modest budgets seeking the adventure of a lifetime, add a good dose of determination and you have it: The 2018/19 Golden Globe Race, a retro solo round-the-world race celebrating the 50th anniversary of the original Sunday Times event which led to Robin Knox-Johnston (later Sir Robin) and his famous long-keeled yacht Suhaili becoming the first to sail solo non-stop around the Globe.
When the race was first mooted back in 2015, the organisers thought they might be lucky to attract nine entries, the same as the original. Within two weeks, it had inspired 25 to put their names on the line. Within two months they had 150 more asking to join, each seemingly with a different motive. In the end, the entry was limited to 30 and 18 managed to make it to the start from Les Sables d’Olonne, France last July.
They were a disparate bunch: tailor, fireman, developer, foreign exchange dealer, marine surveyor, delivery skipper, two sailing instructors, an Atlantic rower, merchant sailor and two naval officers, one retired. Only five had completed circumnavigations before. Their ages at the start ranged from the 28-year-old British sailing instructor Susie Goodall to 72-year-old French professional sailor Jean-Luc Van Den Heede. This would be his sixth solo circumnavigation.
Success boiled down to planning, preparation and execution. Each skipper had to prove that they had at least 8,000 sea miles under their belt and complete 2,000 solo miles, preferably in the boat they were racing, before the start. Some took short-cuts, completing their solo preparations day-sailing from port to port, and quickly became unstuck in the race. One found he couldn’t cope with the loneliness; another couldn’t sleep and several did insufficient testing of their wind vane self-steering systems. For them, equipment failures began soon after rounding Cape Finisterre into the Atlantic.
Wind vanes
The eventual winner, Jean-Luc Van Den Heede sailing the Rustler 36 Matmut, used a Hydrovane system and completed the 28,000-mile distance without complaint.
Close rival Mark Slats sailing another Rustler, Ohpen Maverick, had an Aries wind vane that had already served him well during a previous circumnavigation aboard a heavy 52ft steel yacht. The Dutchman said at the finish: “In heavy weather, and particularly at night, when you can’t see where the waves are coming from, the Aries did a far better job than I could ever do. In those conditions, I tended to leave it to its own devices and go below.”
By the finish, however, the stainless steel mounting tubes cracked and had to be supported by makeshift plywood splints.
Another with an Aries was Australian Mark Sinclair (see PBO Summer 2018). His rebuilt Lello 34 Coconut had the look of a Brinksmat security truck, with everything from mast, rigging, doghouse and interior beefed up to survive the worst the Southern Ocean could throw at her. The 40-year-old Aries had been original equipment, which he had simply returned to the Dutch manufacturer to service. Sinclair set out not to win, but to enjoy the adventure and diligently kept away from bad weather. That put him at a severe disadvantage fleet wise, and he was forced by lack of water and huge barnacle growth on the hull to retire half way round to his home port of Adelaide, but of the Aries “I didn’t have to touch the helm once!” He proclaimed proudly.
Rigs
Five boats were dismasted, which was more than expected. Race founder Don McIntyre, himself a solo
circumnavigator, says: “There are lessons to be learned. I don’t want to hide behind the words ‘bad luck’, but some of the rigs were built by the best names in the world; they knew what they were building for, but the rigs still fell down. We had well prepared boats, top sailors and they came unstuck. Sir Robin Knox-Johnston is now preparing a detailed analysis, which will make good reading for all who go to sea in small cruising yachts.”
Sir Robin says: “Common factors are emerging from my discussions with the skippers. The boats are fine. It is down to how you handle them.
“They have been getting rolled and dismasted and that is down to the handling and how they were being sailed at the time. The rate of attrition has been high, but it is much better than the first race when there was only one finisher.”
The final report is expected to be published at the GGR skipper seminar and prizegiving over Easter.
Five of the 18 yachts were ketch rigged. The extra downwind sail area they carried did not appear to give them a speed advantage over the single-masted cutter rigs. Of the two Endurance 35s, one failed to start within the start limit and the other stopped in Albany, Western Australia, after suffering forestay failure. Two others, a Biscay 36 and Suhaili replica, which were challenging for third place at the time, both suffered knockdowns and dismastings during a storm mid-way across the South Indian Ocean.
First to be dismasted was Norwegian Are Wiig and his production double-ended OE32. Wiig had been lying hove-to in 35-45 knot winds and 8m seas south of Cape Town when the boat was thrown over on her side by a rogue wave and continued to roll through 360°.
Such was the force that both deck and hull mouldings cracked open, a cabin window was pushed in, and the main bulkhead dislodged from the hull. The boat was flooded and the rig had to be cut away before the shattered mast sections could punch further holes through the hull.
Wiig, a marine surveyor, was repairing the safety pin of his wind vane self-steering when his yacht capsized. He was thrown out of the companionway and landed in the sprayhood, which was destroyed.
He did not call for assistance but left the bilge pumps to deal with the flood and set about plugging the window frame, before sealing the splits in the hull and deck with a glue sealant.
He then erected a jury rig using two spinnaker poles and the boom – something all competitors had to prove they could do before the start – and sailed the 300 miles north to Cape Town, a remarkable feat of seamanship.
The message to the 12 remaining skippers was that lying hove-to in the big seas of the Southern Ocean is not always a viable option!
Two further dismastings occurred during one particularly vicious storm 2,000 miles south-west of Cape Leeuwin. First to succumb was Irishman Gregor McGuckin and his Biscay 36 Hanley Energy Endurance, His first alert to Race HQ was ‘ROUGH NIGHT. KNOCKED DOWN. MIZZEN MAST GONE. ALL ELSE GOOD.’
Then, In a satellite call shortly before losing his main mast, the Irishman told Race HQ: “Massive sea and wind from the south-west. Now struggling to keep the boat facing downwind. We took a really bad knock when we lost the mizzen mast. It went off like a bomb and also hit the wind vane and the main backstay, I wanted to keep [the mizzen] but was forced to cut it free. Now sailing under bare poles and towing warps, and still making over 6 knots. Getting knocked hard by waves. This sustained Force 9 is incredible. The barometer dropped off the scale from 1015 in just a few hours.”
Then at 11:00 UTC McGuckin called the GGR Hotline again to say: “Rolled and dismasted. Cut mast away…no hull damage…no water below…safety gear and sat comms. secure…hatches and ports secure... towing warps.”
Ninety miles to the north-east, Indian Navy Commander Abhilash Tomy, sailing the sole Suhaili replica Thuriya, suffered a split mizzen boom in one knock-down soon after the storm struck. Then, shortly after, Race HQ received a message: ‘ROLLED. DISMASTED. SEVERE BACK
‘The boat was thrown over on her side by a rogue wave and continued to roll through 360°’
INJURY. CANNOT GET UP.’
Tomy was not towing warps, preferring to let the boat run free with minimal sail set, relying on the self-steering to keep the yacht sailing down wind and waves. It appears she broached side-on to the waves and rolled. The two were rescued and because of the severe weather and their situation, neither skipper was able to ascertain exactly what broke.
Danger remains even when the winds reduce. Dutchman Mark Slats found himself in the eye of the storm when McGuckin and Tomy were fighting Force 9 winds. ‘WINDS DROPPED FROM 60KNOTS TO 0 IN 15MIN. HORRIBLE SEA. 2 KNOCKDOWNS IN NO WIND.’
He told us: “We knew we were in for some very bad weather and the three of us had a radio sched. every two hours. We spoke to each other twice, but the third time no one answered, and shortly after Race HQ told us what had happened.”
Frenchman Loïc Lepage sailing the Nicholson 32 Laaland who ran out of water before Good Hope and had to stop in Cape Town (which demoted him to the race’s Chichester Class for making one stop) was the fourth to be dismasted. Budget restrictions had left him no option but to use the yacht’s original spar and replace only the rigging. He came up on deck when 670 miles south-west of Perth, Australia, to find that one lower stay had broken. By the time he had gone below to gear up, the cap shroud had also parted and the mast broke at the gooseneck.
The mast section was not in the best condition with many holes where fittings had once been. Was it a mast fitting or the wires that broke? Sadly the answer is now down in Davy Jones’s locker!
Susie Goodall’s Rustler 36 DHL Starlight became the fifth to suffer a dismasting during an extreme storm 2,000 miles west of Cape Horn. In her last text message to Race Control received before the dismasting she reported: ‘TAKING A HAMMERING! WONDERING WHAT ON EARTH I’M DOING OUT HERE’
In a subsequent message, she wrote: ‘DISMASTED. HULL OK. NO FORM OF
JURY RIG, TOTAL LOSS Position: 45’ 27.787 S 122’ 23.537 W.'’Later, during an emotional satellite phone call, she said: “The boat is destroyed. I can’t make up a jury rig. The only thing left is the hull and deck, which remain intact. We were pitch-poled and I was thrown across the cabin and knocked out for a while.”
Her problems began when the safety tube on her Monitor wind vane selfsteering broke and she was forced to trail a drogue anchor astern and take down the mainsail.
She was below decks when the boat was pitch-poled, and when she returned on deck to assess the damage, found that the line attached to the drogue had parted. The boat must have been on the cusp of a large wave, and without the pull on the drogue, would have surfed unfettered down the face and nose-dived into the trough ahead and subsequently rolled by the following wave.
Would any rig withstand that kind of a pressure? The only person to escape almost Scot-free from a similar scenario was eventual winner Jean-Luc Van Den Heede in the same region a month before. Conditions were just as fearsome: 65-knot winds and 11m seas.
At the finish, the Frenchman accepted he had made a mistake.
“Usually I run off down wind and down wave, but this time I was over-confident and continued on course for Cape Horn running at 140° to the waves. The boat was picked up by one wave, surfed down and cork-screwed bow first into the trough, rolling over by 150°.”
The pressure on the rig was such that the through-bolt attaching the lower shrouds to the mast ripped a 5cm gash in the side wall of the mast which he managed to repair by lashing the bolt to the spreader root and running a rope tensioner from the lower shrouds to the spreader tip.
This jury rigging required seven trips up the mast before he was satisfied, and it lasted a further 9,000 miles to the finish.
‘Was it the mast fitting or the wires that broke? The answer is now in Davy Jones’s locker’