Standing on the dock in HMS Hornet, Portsmouth (now the Gunwharf Quay shopping centre) on Saturday 8 September, 1973, to count the 18-strong Whitbread fleet out, no one fully appreciated – least of all the many young crewmembers, some of whom had only signed on just days before – the enormity of what they were taking on.
Yes, Francis Chichester had already rounded the globe alone with one stop, followed by Alec Rose (two stops). Robin Knox-Johnston had become the sole finisher in the 1968/9 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race and Chay Blyth had completed the first west-about solo, non-stop circumnavigation two years later. But these were all solo challenges with an average speed of little more than four knots. The big question was how full-on racing yachts designed and built to compete in transatlantic or 600-mile events like the Fastnet classic, would hold together over 27,000 miles of open ocean.
Back then, we didn’t have anything like the hourly news feeds that social media now deliver. Indeed, the Royal Naval Sailing Association (RNSA), organisersof those first Whitbread races, encouraged skippers to report their positions 24 hours in arrears so as not to give their competitors listening in on these open conversations any tactical benefit from their position reports.
It was only nine months later when just 13 of the original number returned to Portsmouth to complete the course, that the full scale of the challenge became clear. Yes, the South African used the first leg simply as a delivery trip back home, but others like Eric Tabarly’s French favourite was dismasted (twice); , the British maxi skippered by Les Williams, which was first to finish the first leg to Cape Town, came close to breaking up in the Southern Ocean; and three lives – Dominique Guillet, Paul Waterhouse, and Bernie Hosking – were lost at sea. Those fatalities led to sustained pressure on the organisers to call an end to the event.
