Heed the lesson: be prepared to quit

There’s not much to see of Britain’s most notorious yacht any more: just a few delaminated shards of plywood lying in the sand dunes of Cayman Brac. But as the entrants for this year’s Golden Globe Race prepare for the off, Simon Crowhurst will be pondering the sun-scorched hulls of Teignmouth Electron, which he zooms in on using the plus button on Google Earth, dropping in from the heavens like a submarine camera viewing the bones of the Titanic.

There is a dark irony in the fact that Simon can locate his late father’s wrecked boat with the aid of a satellite because it was Donald Crowhurst’s mission to raise money for the production of his own navigational positionfinding invention, the Navicator, which indirectly led to his death. He entered the Sunday Times Golden Globe solo non-stop Round the World Race in 1968 when Simon and his siblings were just children.

Crowhurst suffered a litany of bad omens during the delivery of the 41ft ketch-rigged trimaran from her site on the Norfolk Broads to the Devon port. His wife Clare failed to break the champagne bottle against the hull during the launch at Brundall, then the boat was holed on riverbank pilings. Crowhurst was seasick crossing the Thames Estuary; he burnt his left hand as he touched a hot outboard exhaust, erasing the fortune teller’s ‘lifeline’; he fell overboard three times while moored in Cowes and watched as a foresail track lifted from the deck. He then found the port hull leaked, the rubber seal around the cockpit hatch coming away in his hands.

Not long into the race, Crowhurst realised his boat was a deathtrap. All three hulls were leaking badly through poorly sealed hatches. When he found a split in the starboard hull two months in, he knew that only death awaited him if he pushed on into the Southern Ocean.

Donald Crowhurst’s last act was that of a very brave man

But having remortgaged his home and borrowed money to enter the race, turning back would mean financial ruin.

Following a landing in a deserted spot on the Argentinian coastline to effect a repair, Crowhurst decided to wallow around in the South Atlantic, await the returning fleet of his competitors and drop in unheralded behind them, having fabricated an alternative and false log book.

This plan of a desperate man went horribly wrong as all but three sailors dropped out of the race. Then, in the false knowledge that Crowhurst was fast coming up astern, the other competitor in a trimaran, Nigel Tetley, was rescued after driving his boat too hard, causing her to break up. Now there were just two.

Sir Robin Knox-johnston gave his prize money to the Crowhursts after Teignmouth Electron was found adrift and abandoned.

The Sunday Times’ top reporters, Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, rapidly produced the definitive book on what happened: The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, concluding that the sailor deliberately stepped off his boat holding his chronometer as a sinker.

And so the decades have passed, each necessitating a glorious anniversary for those who raced and a gruesome reminder of man’s fate for the Crowhurst family. Over a few beers during the 40th of these, Simon told me he remembers his father’s boat being nightmarishly unready: even as a boy, he knew that the components still to be fitted when his father sailed were vital.

The Sunday Times race was first and foremost a stunt to increase the newspaper’s circulation. Chay Blyth, one of the men forced to drop out of the race, told me that in today’s world, Crowhurst could have sailed home, sold his story to the papers and made enough money to pay his debts. That Crowhurst decided his deception was not worthy of a good man is to evoke pity. Pity is no reason not to admire courage. Crowhurst’s last act was that of a very brave man. I salute him.