SA
SAILING:Jonathan Spencer Jones.
‘THE boat, all 42 tons of it, was picked up by a wave and literally thrown over the next wave to land flat, down on her side. But she picked up and off we went again.”
And that, in Hurricane Fergus in the Pacific, just three days from Wellington, New Zealand, with the wind gusting up to 70 knots, was both the most frightening and best experience so far of the BT Global Challenge race for South African Boris Webber. Indeed, of his entire sailing career.
And for the 31-year-old Webber, who is skippering Courtaulds International, the race itself, which involves 14 identical 67-foot steel yachts sailing around the world from east to west against the prevailing winds and currents, is the fulfilment of another on the list of the goals that he has set himself since he started sailing in Port Elizabeth at the age of four.
Speaking in Cape Town during the three-week stopover there, just a few days before the start of the penultimate leg of the race to Boston, USA, he explained how he came to the Challenge, with experience including the 1979 Cape to Uruguay race at the age of 14, and in 1985 another Cape to Uruguay race and the doublehanded Round Britain race, both with John Martin on Voortrekker 2.
After completing mechanical engineering at Port Elizabeth Technikon, he did the 1993 Cape to Rio race, and finding that “the sailing bug had bitten again”, then moved to the UK with a view to getting into the sailing scene there. This proved more difficult than he expected, however, but after several “lean” months working in boatyards he met Mike Golding, skipper of race entrant Group 4, who in turn introduced him to Chay Blyth, who runs the Challenge Business. He has been working for the Business ever since, initially doing charter work and now the Challenge itself.
Of the event so far Webber said that while he had initially pushed hard, it soon became evident that the crew members were there to learn as much as possible from the experience and so his philosophy has been to sail perhaps somewhat overcautiously.
Lying 13th overall at the Cape Town stopover, Courtaulds has also had her share of bad luck, with a broken spinnaker pole in the first leg and then a broken bottlescrew in the last leg, which resulted in having to sail most of it under jury rig. There have also been numerous crew changes as people have left for one or other reason, and this has “set us back quite badly”, said Webber.
Out of the original crew of 12, only five are still aboard, while by the end of the race there will have been no less than 40 crew members.
Nevertheless the core crew are very motivated to do well – as attested by a third place in the Wellington-Sydney leg and the fact that they were in the lead for the first week out of Sydney until the bottlescrew went – and Webber anticipates two good legs to get up into the middle of the fleet by the time the race ends in Southampton in July.
Webber said the race has also provided a “huge learning curve” in terms of people management and he has a feeling of “paternal pride” in seeing the growth and achievements of the crew. He said the hardest part has been to hide his own fears and put on a brave front in the worst conditions.
Would he do the race again? “When I arrived in Cape Town I said definitely not,” Webber commented, but yes, he would like to do the 2000 race – but as a South African entry with local sponsors and full local crew. He also insists that the crew must be mixed so that it is not seen merely as a “white, elitist” event, and he has laid the seeds for this by speaking of his experiences to over 3 000 schoolchildren during the Cape Town stopover.
Webber sees sailing as an ideal management training vehicle and when his contract with the Challenge Business expires in September, he would like to get involved in this field. But in the longer term, he said, his ambition is to come back to South Africa and establish sailing as a training base for inner-city children and youth in general. These sorts of activities are beginning to happen in the UK and Europe – in France, sailing is part of the school curriculum, he pointed out – and it would be “a way of putting back into sailing what I have got out of it”.
The next leg of the BT Global Challenge to Boston begins on Sunday, with Group 4 in first place on overall elapsed time, almost a day ahead of second-placed Toshiba. Joining Courtaulds for the leg – and, he says, hopefully for the rest of the race – is Capetonian Lytton Coomer, who is filling a gap after a sudden crew departure due to a family bereavement.
Coomer, who is also an old friend of Webber’s, is a regular sailor with his own yacht but this will be his first ocean voyage and he is “fired up” for it, he says.
ENDS