1981-82怀特布莱德环球帆船赛

01

It was not long before the happy crew faces, captured a thousand times by the world’s sailing snappers who had turned out to record the Solent departure, turned to frazzled frowns as problems started to materialise, both on the boats and far, far away.

Wealthy Italian steel magnate Giorgio Falck started the race at the helm of RollyGo but was taken off at Las Palmas due to a family illness. Reino Enqvist, skipper of Scandinavian, radio-ed race control to say he was quitting due to rigging, electrical and radio problems on board.

There was a leak in Flyer’s fresh water tank so each crew member was restricted to five small cups of water a day. Blyth lost a rudder and a spinnaker and several boats lost halyards and spinnakers during a half-hour tropical storm.

But worse of all was the lack of wind, which had skippers and crews groaning and moaning all the way to the Canary Islands when some trade winds finally kicked in and the spinnakers were dusted off and hoisted.

One of the main beneficiaries of these trades was Ceramco who made good progress through the fleet, but these promising moments were short-lived because within a few days, the Kiwi yacht dismasted. More precisely, her mast broke in two places, leaving a five metre trunk and a pile of ropes. Fortunately, the 14 metre top mast section was retained so the crew were able to lash the two together and carry on, albeit at a much reduced speed.

Blake decided on a route to Cape Town that would add 1,500 nm to the journey, but would keep them in following winds. Many thought he was mad, but the detour to the first stopover proved to be one of the race’s all time epic voyages and despite the handicap, Ceramco made it into Cape Town ahead of eight of the 26 yachts in the race.

Ceramco’s problems marked the start of a sorry procession of mast episodes. La Barca Laboratorio, the Italian yacht packed to the gunwales with scientists conducting experiments on human behaviour, were able to test their own reactions when their rigging went over the side, forcing them to head for Recife in Brazil to make repairs.

RollyGo was the next casualty. Around 1,600 nm out of Cape Town, the rigging adjuster failed and the spar had to be trailed for an entire night before a jury rig could be set up.

FCF Challenger split her mast, Norway's Berge Viking broke the fitting at the top of her forestay, limiting her use of headsails, US entry Alaska Eagle broke hull frames and European University Belgium damaged her rigging. Save Venice, of Italy, also had problems with her forestay, Bubblegum had problems with her rig and United Friendly sprung a serious leak.

Rarely before had one leg kept shore crews and race officials so busy as 21 out of 29 boats reported structural, rigging or equipment failure. Replacement gear was dispatched to various parts of the world and programmes for repair drawn up in Cape Town, though despite the chaos, competitor Tim Burrel still found time to meet then marry Cape Town secretary Carol Jennings. Five days was all it took.

First across the Cape Town finish line was van Rietschoten in Flyer, having sailed an immaculate leg. He also won on handicap, leaving the rest of the fleet in little doubt over his intentions and ambitions, but as race legs go, it was one of the most dramatic in the events short history.

02

Amazingly, all the repairs were completed on time and the restart went ahead on the due date. But within a fortnight, the radio was buzzing again with reports of more carnage as a further three yachts were dismasted and Flyer was forced to ease off the pace after two violent broaches in the Southern Ocean weakened the rigging.

But as the miles were negotiated, so the competition between Ceramco and Flyer began to intensify. There was no automatic means of logging positions so monitoring progress, when it was totally dependent on skippers volunteering information, proved difficult and unreliable. As the two boats locked horns in the Southern Ocean, the skippers started to use these haphazard communications as part of their tactics.

The competitive Van Rietschoten was the worst culprit. Divulge an inch and the competition will grab a mile, was his mantra, one that was reinforced by his watch leader Dalton. So when one night, van Rietschoten suffered a heart attack and fell unconscious, the emergency was kept secret. The first the competition would know about it was when they saw a body bag floating by, the skipper said later, but neither organisers nor rivals had an inkling that Flyer was dealing with such a major crisis.

Van Rietschoten: “Fremantle was ten days sailing away. If I was to die, the critical period was within the first two to three days so any diversion would have been wasted. As for Ceramco, the New Zealanders were breathing down our necks. If they had known I had a health problem, they would have pushed their boat even harder. We had to stay ahead and the less they knew about my condition, the better. When you die at sea, you are buried over the side. Perhaps those Ceramco boys might have spotted me drifting by and I was determined that that would be the only thing they would see or hear from Flyer on that matter!”

On the approach to Auckland, all of New Zealand was hoping it would be their boy wonder Blake emerging first out of the mist. It was felt his local knowledge would aid Ceramco’s progress and after the disappointment of the first leg, it would be a fitting victory. But as the front runners headed south into Auckland after rounding the North Cape, they encountered strong headwinds which favoured the bigger and heavier Flyer. A small lead was turned into an eight-hour advantage giving the Dutch boat their second win in two legs. Inevitably, the 6’4” blond Blake, who had been conspicuous at the wheel from some way out, was given a rapturous welcome by hundreds of boats and the excitement grew when it was later discovered that Ceramco had won the leg on corrected time.

“Van Rietschoten performed immaculately, as did Blake,” Charles Williams remembers. “It was the competition between them that not only created an enormous amount of interest in the race all around the world, but also transformed it from a purely amateur event into a serious yacht race. They set the world ablaze and it captured everyone’s imagination. In the previous two races, people were taking spinnakers down at night. Can you imagine!”

03

The jousting between the determined Blake and the ambitious team on Flyer continued throughout the third leg back across the Southern Ocean, making the race compulsive viewing for not just race followers, but for the first time, a growing band of armchair sports fans.

For some of the time, the two boats were in sight of each other and on four occasions, they crossed each other’s paths. Such was the interest in this thrilling battle, that interviews with skippers were broadcast live, with millions of listeners tuning in to hear Blake's reports in New Zealand. At the London Boat Show in Earls Court, British Telecom established a five telephone link up with several yachts, starting with a two-way between Jimmy Saville, the British disc-jockey and Chay Blyth, skipper of United Friendly who described to the crowds the Southern Ocean scenes around him – mainly icebergs – and what his crew were doing at that precise moment – which, he quipped, involved standing on the bow looking for icebergs.

Flyer and Ceramco were neck-and-neck as they rounded the Horn, with just 30 minutes or five nm separating the two. On standby, as expected, was HMS Endurance but a more sinister sight was a fleet of Argentinian warships on an espionage mission ahead of the invasion of the Falklands some weeks later.

While all this drama was unfolding, there were problems further back as the Southern Ocean took its toll on the boats. The start in Auckland had seen six fewer boats than at Portsmouth and a further two were forced to retire due to rudder and rigging crises.

Some of the drama was the stuff of dreams, as a crewmember on Ceramco discovered after a particularly difficult watch. He had a vivid dream that the mast had cracked at a point not visible to the naked eye and this proved to be divine intervention at work for sure enough, when the mast collar was later removed, the crew discovered a serious crack.

Jostling for the lead kept crews on Flyer and Ceramco fully stretched right to the finish line in Mar del Plata but it was the heroic Van Rietschoten, who completed the 6,175 nm crossing first, taking just 24 days. Remarkably, Blake finished seven hours later. The two skippers had staged one of the most enthralling ding-dongs since the Battle of Trafalgar and both were to have a profound influence on the race - transforming it into a Grand Prix event, contested by the world’s most dedicated and committed professionals.

04

Despite the focus on Flyer and Ceramco, the overall leader of the race by the start of the final leg to Portsmouth was, in fact the French boat Charles Heidseck, or Champage Charlie as she was known in the fleet, skippered by Alain Gabbay.

Van Rietschoten needed to cross the Solent finish line a whopping 92 hours ahead of Charlie, which looked unlikely unless the French boat came a cropper during the 5,970 nm passage. But the Dutchman was a tough competitor – his list of boat rules included a strict ban on complaints over the food – and soon he was employing tactics to unsettle his opponents.

It became harder to find out where the boats were, since he refused to reveal his position in case it conceded any advantage, a tactic duly adopted by other skippers. It was only a week before the end of the leg that the situation became clear. Flyer was 260 nm from the Azores and Charlie was 300 nm astern, three hours ahead on handicap.

Of the original 29 starters, only 24 were still in contention during the final leg and there were to be more casualties as the curtain came down on the third event. Les Williams in FCF Challenger lost a mast – the tenth dismasting of the race – and Claudio Stampi’s boffins on La Barca Laboratoire were forced to pump like billy-o after the keel bolts started to fall out.

It was at the Azores that the winners and losers were determined and as ever, it was the weather that had a lot to do with it, in the form of a High and a few lows. The two leading boats, Flyer and Ceramco, made it through before the light airs struck and powered off in the direction of the Needles, Flyer arriving without putting in a single tack. But Charlie and the other French boat Kriter IX had the brakes applied and without much else to do, the crews offloaded any remaining fresh water and all the beer and wine plus any surplus food, in order to lighten the load and increase the speed.

It was to no avail and when Champagne Charlie eventually arrived at the finish line, the crew on Flyer had been there already for almost five days, despite a last minute crisis which almost found them parked up after grounding briefly on Shingles Bank. The margin gave the legendary Dutchman a 19 hour advantage and thereby victory in the race for the second consecutive time. More significantly for Van Rietschoten, a fourth line honours win in four legs meant he had fulfilled his aim of being the fastest boat around the course, not just in 1981 but of all time, having carved an almighty 14 days off the race record.

Blake’s Ceramco notched up a second win on handicap, to bring a momentous race to a close, confirming the widely held view that while immensely skilled both as a seaman and yachtsman, the Kiwi giant was desperately unlucky. The dismasting, shortly into the first leg, had effectively ruled him out of title contention, but the way he kept his crew motivated to complete the circuit at breakneck speed was an inspiration for a whole new generation of Whitbread race skippers.

“For me, the most memorable thing about that race was the sheer scale of the disasters, but although the crews were mostly dedicated amateur sailors, and good ones too, some were pretty bloody useless,” said the Rear Admiral Williams who went onto head up the organisation in 1985, working, as the organisers did in those days, on an entirely voluntary basis.