#whitbread 1985

1978. New Zealand had become a stopover for competing yachts.

I was staying at my grandparents’ home in Auckland, which overlooked the harbour. A Kiwi sailor, Peter Blake, was a crewman aboard the yacht, Heath’s Condor. I had taken a keen interest in the race since their departure from Cape Town.

I remember watching as the big, wooden, mahogany Condor sailed into Auckland Harbour carrying a massive yellow spinnaker. Condor won the leg to Auckland.

My life changed at that moment. I knew what I wanted to do.

I decided I had to do the offshore thing. I didn’t have a lot of experience. I hadn’t been offshore. I was a skiff sailor and an accountant.

I left my job and started offshore racing on keel boats doing the Admiral’s Cup, the Fiji Race, Noumea and the Hobart. I also took up sail-making and applied to Peter Blake with a view to joining his new build, a boat called Ceramco in the 1981/82 round-the-world.

But the “We shouldn’t have economic sanctions or ban them from sports, international interaction will do more to inspire them to be better” argument he makes when that doesn’t seem to be working with Russia or the Gulf States today but the bans DID help force reforms in South Africa… yeah, Peter Blake was on the wrong side there. And saying that the Boers are stubborn and resist change because their ancestors had to be to settle in “a wild and mostly empty land” is pretty uncomfortable wording. Blake certainly wasn’t pro-Apartheid, but he comes off as way more accommodating and passive about it than Skip Novak, who was smuggling in banned books in his own seabag. Really, the whole situation of the Royal Naval Sailing Association keeping the Whitbread route through Cape Town up to 1985 when so many other sports had already banned and/or distanced themselves from South Africa looks bad in retrospect and would be an interesting subject for an historical article or thesis.

Drum: An Extraordinary Adventure