A competitive cruise along the west coast of Scotland
The Scottish Islands Peak Race is one of the world’s toughest yacht races, but it’s run for cruising sailors. Bob Aylott talks to organisers and participants
We were being swept backwards as waves washed over the mast and bits of the boat were breaking off. The sea was very rough, the engine wasn’t making any difference and the boat was totally out of control.’
Scottish Islands Peak Race director Nick Macdonald still vividly remembers his experience in the 1985 edition of the race. He was sailing a 22ft E Boat when they were caught in a tide race off the Isle of Arran in a rising Force 9. Without VHF radio and having used all their flares, they were eventually rescued by the lifeboat.
With the crew in safety, Nick suddenly remembered the Icelandic sweater his wife Alison had taken nine months to knit. ‘I couldn’t go home without it,’ Nick said. ‘I went down below desperately looking for the sweater among the chaos of the wrecked cabin. Just as I found the sweater, a burly lifeboat crewman burst down through the hatch screaming nautical words and dragged me out.’
Combining sailing and mountainrunning, the annual Scottish Islands Peaks Race is as gruelling today as it was then, even if safety measures have improved no end. It is an extreme adventure race for teams of amateur sailors and fell-runners. Yachts sail 160 miles around the west coast of Scotland to deliver athletes to the start of each run, which are equivalent to three marathons back-to-back, up three mountains. Each boat team consists of three sailors and two runners.
The haunting sound of bagpipes wafting across Oban Harbour broke the morning silence. Was it an ill omen of sinister things to come, or a friendly welcome to visitors? Onshore, excited crews of racing veterans and virgin sailors gathered on the grass for a briefing from Nick.
The race was to start with a short hill run in Oban and a sail to Salen on the island of Mull, where the runners would head over Ben More. Crews then sail to Craighouse on Jura and run up the Paps before sailing to Arran for a run up Goat Fell before a sail to the finish line at Troon Yacht Haven.
On the road behind the Oban Sailing
Club, runners jostled for position on the start line. Meanwhile, on the water, sailors in dinghies fought for the best positions to pick up their runners, ready to row them to the boats. The sound of a foghorn signalled the race start. Now all that was left between the fading horn and the finish line, three days away, was true grit.
Since its inception in 1982, the race has attracted between 40 and 60 boats each year, with 34 starters at the 2015 edition in May. Nick Macdonald described the race's challenges.
‘You have to be big enough to actually take on this race,’ he said. ‘It’s working as a team. Often the first time you will meet your crew is on race day, but now you all have to work together. Most of the sailors will get very little sleep and they have to be familiar with these waters or similar.
‘Because of huge seas, race rules now say you must have two fresh sailors to go round the Mull of Kintyre. The wind and weather conditions can be horrendous there and the number of tidal gates you face is frightening. Another potential danger is the Corryvreckan whirlpool between Jura and Scarba. At peak flow, it has currents of more than 10 knots.’
For now, the rain held off, but under overcast skies a Force 5 swirled around Oban Harbour for the start of the thirty-second Scottish Peaks Race. 34 yachts under full sail fought for position in a chaotic free-for-all as frantic runners rowed dinghies to find their yachts and be the first to leave.
First out was team Loblolly on Obedient, an Outremer 45 catamaran owned by retired GP Gordon Baird, 62 and skippered by his son Iain, 30, a solicitor. They were followed closely by team Torrential Timing with skipper Peter Foulds, 60, on
Clockwork, an Open 40. It took an hour for the rest of the fleet to pass the harbour entrance en route to Salen on Mull for the first leg. Last to struggle across the line was the youth team Glen Almond on Clyde
Challenger, a Clipper 60.
A 25-knot easterly pushed the fleet to Salen, but the event soon lived up to its reputation as one of the toughest races in the world. After only 18 miles of sailing and one mountain climbed (Ben More, at 3,169 ft), fourteen teams retired at the first hurdle. All had runner-related problems except for Flying Dragon, which had also blown out her spinnaker.
Sea conditions on the second stage from Salen to Craighouse were good for those at the front of the fleet, with flat seas and a slight wind from the west. That increased to 25 knots as the leaders arrived in port, leaving those still sailing with a blustery reach, and worse to come for stage three.
With a severe warning from the Met Office of ‘Sea state: very high’, boats leaving Craighouse on Jura would face nine-metre waves as they took on the notorious Mull of Kintyre. Race leader Gordon Baird said it was the first time in 20 years he’d had such a warning. ‘We seriously considered retiring at that point,’ he added. Meanwhile, skipper Alan Rankin with team Triway to Hill on Tradewinds, a Corsair F27 trimaran, decided to call it a day and go no further.
Not that it was much called for in this year’s competition, but one of the peculiarities of the Scottish Islands Peaks Race is that rowing is allowed. All boats carry oars as standard equipment and most of the skippers expect the runners to double up as oarsmen when the wind drops – not always popular with the runners.
Some boats are even modified with rowlocks and super oars up to 60 feet long. Other skippers have built Heath Robinsonesque push-bike contraptions, with pedal power working a steamer paddle off the transom for light winds. Others simply use the dinghy as a man-powered tugboat when the conditions demand. Everyone has to fight to cross the finish line first.
‘ By the time the frontrunners had Troon in sight, their nearest competitors were a speck on the horizon’
By leg three, from Craighouse to Lamlash on Arran, the fleet had spread out and boats were now separated by hours rather than minutes. Weather conditions around the Mull of Kintyre were bad, with squalls reaching 40 knots. Yacht skippers had to hold their nerve and pray they would avoid disaster.
After a hard beat through the narrows and into Lamlash Bay, it was still blowing hard amongst the moorings. Team ‘Nae Booze tae Troon’ on Bequia, an X412, lost her spinnaker overboard. After dropping her runners off she went back out to look for it. Meanwhile Gordon Baird on
Obedient lost his starboard engine and the Lamlash lifeboat went to rescue a cruising yacht caught up the worsening weather.
From the start, it had looked like a twoboat race. One of them was Obedient with Gordon, the course record holder. The other contender was optician Peter Foulds, 60, on Clockwork. Both Gordon and Peter are Scottish Peaks veterans, clocking up more than 20 races each.
Contending for the youth title were students from Fettes Collage in Edinburgh, led by Iain Loudon. The school has entered a team for the race for the last six years. This year they have the youngest competitor, 16-year-old Evie Watson, in their team.
Iain told me the biggest injuries for the youth teams hadn’t been twisted ankles, blistered hands or broken fingers. ‘It’s actually chafing for the runners,’ he said. ‘One year the skipper had commandeered a runner’s precious jar of Vaseline to smear on the battery terminals and the runner was in agony by the end of his run up the 3,000ft Goat Fell.’
The last leg, however, was incident-free for all the boats still racing. By the time the frontrunners had Troon in sight, their nearest competitors were little more than a speck on the horizon astern, and they could afford to play it safe with a gentle cruise to the finish line.
I asked Gordon what their winning tactic had been. ‘We had a fast, very seaworthy boat,’ he said. ‘People say catamarans don’t go to windward well, but this one does. We always do extremely well on reaches and this boat looks after her crew. A big racing yacht wouldn’t do well in
this event because you wouldn’t get into Craighouse. If you take a boat that needs ten people on the rail, she won’t perform that well in this race. It is the ultimate test for cruising boats. Speed is the tactician’s greatest friend and you need a fantastic cruising yacht.
‘It’s not really a race, more like a fast and competitive cruise. It’s about testing your boat for cruise-ability. The aim is to get round a fixed course and face whatever the weather and tides throw at you – to be able to move on from any catastrophic disasters that can happen. If you’ve done that, then for the rest of the year you will be confident you can go cruising.’
Peter Foulds on Clockwork told me he’d made one big mistake. ‘Because of the tide, I knew it was the worst possible time to leave Jura,’ he said. ‘We were pushing tide for a full six hours. The question I asked myself was, whether I should take an outside route round the Mull of Kintyre, or should I stick to the inside?
‘Checking various pilots and our plotter, it looked as if there was less tidal stream against us on the outside than on the inside, but the inner tidal stream would turn sooner in our favour than the outside stream. I went for the outside option and we had a lot more tide against us than I anticipated. I’m not sure if that was an error of tactics or one of timing.
‘There were two boats 12 miles behind us, Superstition and Bequia. As they arrived when there wasn’t as much tide against them, they had gained a lot on us at that point, closing the gap to six miles purely because of the tide. They weren’t held up as much as us, or Gordon, who had gone through before. This is where races are won and lost and I was worried.’
In the end, in what proved to be a fast but not a record-breaking year for the race, Obedient was overall winner and first in class while Clockwork came in second overall and first in class.