SAILING: Jonathan Spencer Jones
THE BY Global Challenge – billed as the world’s toughest yacht race – got off to a fast and furious start in driving rain and high winds in Southampton on Saturday, after some four years of preparation and training.
The 30 000-mile race, which will last about 10 months, involves 14 identical 67-foot steel yachts sailing the “wrong way” around the world against the prevailing winds and currents, on a route taking in stops at Rio de Janeiro, Wellington, Sydney, Cape Town and Boston before returning to Southampton.
Each yacht is skippered by a professional sailor, but the crews are made up of people aged between 21 and 60 from all walks of life – most with little or no experience prior to their training for the race – who are paying over o18 750 for the experience.
South Africa is represented on two yachts, with the Southampton-based Boris Webber skippering Courtaulds International and Worcester farmer Kobus Kotze crewing on Toshiba.
After just a few days at sea, the fleet is still fairly tightly bunched, but sea sickness has been common. Said Mike Golding, skipper of Group 4, undoubtedly also echoing the feelings of the other crews: “After an emotional and exciting start, most crew members suffering from effects of rough weather and many seeing Saturday’s dinner again. Skipper enjoyed a very large portion of lamb casserole as a result.”
The Challenge is the brainchild of Chay Blyth, and is the second race of its kind following four years after the British Steel Challenge, which had it origins in Blyth’s epic singlehanded, non-stop voyage along the same route in 1970-71. The first 5 000-mile leg to Rio is expected to take about four weeks to complete.
l Reporting on the race from one of the competing yachts, Simon Montague writes:
“I lay in the cockpit, gasping for breath. It was two o’clock in the morning and we were driving into big waves in a near gale. The sailor’s worst enemy, sea-sickness, had me in its grip and in two days all I had held down was a banana and a glass of water. We had just completed yet another sail change and, crawling back from a spray-torn foredeck, I felt as if the last ounce of strength had been sapped from me.
“Under the command of Richard Tudor, now a professional skipper, my crew-mates and I find ourselves in the unique position of sailing on the defending champion. We are all keen to repeat the success of three years ago when, after eight months, Nuclear Electric won the British Steel Challenge by the extraordinarily thin margin of 70 minutes.
“None of us is under-estimating what that means: the daunting prospect of pushing a 40-ton yacht as fast as it will go 24 hours a day for weeks on end. It is going to demand total concentration by the helmsman and endless trimming and changing of sails in pursuit of boat speed. The reward, or the incentive to push harder, will come with the regular satellite reports plotting our progress relative to the rest of the fleet.”