The Golden Globe race starts on September 6 from Les Sables d’ Olonne, France. It’s one of those events most thought was relegated to the history books never to be revived, until along came a cheeky, balding Australian who thought otherwise.
Among other crazy exploits, Don McIntyre has solo circumnavigated, lived for a year on a boat in Antarctica with his (now ex-wife) and has found a niche in the offshore sailing market by going ‘retro.’ Let me explain.
The first Golden Globe race was held in 1968. It was an audacious suggestion. The idea was to set off from a British port anytime that you were ready but before October 31, 1968 and circumnavigate the world without stopping and without any outside help. That meant hitting the Roaring Forties and Screaming Fifties and passing Cape Horn along the way.
Back then it was all sextant and sight reduction tables, taffrail logs (ask Google if you don’t know what that is), multiple cans of bully beef and beans and fairly crap foul weather gear.
Of the nine hopefuls that took part, all men, only one finished, the indomitable Robin Knox Johnston, now Sir Robin who was a merchant navy officer in the British navy and who sailed “For Queen and Country.” It took him 313 days.
There were, of course, many stories and I will cover them leading up to the start of this upcoming race but let me just hint. There was one sailor who went certifiably insane and made his own way to Davy Jones’s Locker, one sailor who sank after believing that he was being caught by a phantom competitor and one, a Frenchman of course, who decided that a single circumnavigation was not enough time to gather his thoughts so he turned around and did another lap of the planet finally dropping his hook in Tahiti.
Don McIntyre revived the concept and held a new race to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the original. The rules were simple; the boat had to be between 32 and 36 feet, full keel with rudder attached at the aft end of the keel, no electronics, just a tape player for music, a sextant for navigating and as many cans of bully beef and beans as you had room for.
This time, out of 18 starters, there were five finishers and the race was won by the French sailing legend Jean Luc van den Heede (It was his sixth circumnavigation – he knew the way…:)
The race was held four years later and was won by a young South African woman by the name of Kirsten Neuschafer. Let me just jump in here with a pet peeve. I am beyond tired of hearing those weekend sailors going out for an around-the-cans race in their J-34 stating, quite boldly, that a racing yacht was no place for a woman. These backward wearing baseball cap buffoons whose main reason for going sailing was being able to hit the free Mount Gay once back at the dock, thinking that they were superior to women really gets my goat and I can state here, categorically, that if the subject comes up again and I’m within earshot, there will be weapons involved.
Okay, rant and digression over.
Kirsten won the race handily and arrived back where she had started in France looking like she had just been out for a day sail. There were three official finishers (out of 18 starters), all of them having avoided the modern day pitfalls of ten times the amount of shipping, multiple pieces of junk floating just below the surface and weather that is changing rapidly due to climate change. In other words it’s a different ocean that they are sailing in.
In a future article I will pose the question, “was it harder to race the original Golden Globe not knowing what we know now, or harder now knowing that you can have 500 movies on your iPhone and pin-point satellite navigation, neither of which you can use?”
Over the next eight or so months Rule69 will be bringing you the trials and tribulations of a 25,000 nautical mile self imposed solitary confinement with the added fun of getting cold salt water splashed in your face every so often. For this event there is a brand new innovation; the GGR Window. We will delve into this in more detail in the future, but it’s essentially an onboard portal that will allow us, the audience, to go live onboard some selected boats and through video and a means of tapping into the on-board instruments from boat speed, to wind speed and sea conditions, it will allow us get a closer look at the daily life that these sailors are going through. It will also give us access to some of the skippers’ biometrics like heart rate and sleep patterns. The beauty of this is that it’s a one-way street; the competitors will be transmitting heaps of data while not being able to get any information in through the same portal.
In all this is shaping up to be an extraordinary race. Let’s hope that there are no psychotic episodes or anti-social French sailors. Along the way Don McIntyre will be your guide. We will do our best here at Rule69 to bring you along so that you can view this adventure through our eyes. – Brian Hancock.
