When Don McIntyre devised the Ocean Globe Race, he imagined a revival of sailing’s greatest era of adventure. The early Whitbread Round the World Races made headlines beyond the sport of offshore racing: they created legends. Half a century on, this new race could never fully recapture the same race fever and romance, but it did write some fabulous new endings.

In April, after 145 days of racing, the 73ft ketch Pen Duick VI crossed the finish line at Cowes to win line honours. Marie Tabarly was skippering the boat her father, Éric, built to win the Whitbread. The greatest race eluded him twice, and in 1998, when Marie was 13, he was lost overboard in the Irish Sea. With this win, Marie, now 39, has completed the Pen Duick story in her own name.

Eight days later, Maiden took the overall race win on handicap. In the 1989/90 Whitbread, Maiden skipper Tracy Edwards demonstrated that women could race on equal terms (not a given at the time – a rival horridly dismissed her all-female crew as ‘performing seals’). Now in the hands of skipper Heather Thomas and a crew of 12 young women, the Maiden team claimed the title of the first all-female crew to win a round the world race.

With its throwback rules shunning modern electronics and technology, the Ocean Globe Race has curiously ended up reflecting back deep social changes. Yet the challenge itself is much as it was back then: the feat of pushing big, labour-intensive yachts and large crews for up to 40 days at a stretch. Marie Tabarly called Pen Duick “a colossus to manoeuvre, a beast”, which sums up the lion-taming required of these old ocean racers.

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Physical racing in the Ocean Globe Race

Pen Duick was the fleet’s heavy weather specialist. “In that kind of weather, we can maintain our speed when the others are decelerating. We were sometimes surfing at 22-23 knots under spinnaker and we can average 12-13 knots without too many problems and cover 260 to 280 miles a day, or more. For an aluminium boat weighing 34 tonnes, she is fast,” says Tabarly.

To skipper or run a watch on these boats you need eyes everywhere; things can happen fast. “A gybe on this boat is a hard manoeuvre. At the bow, it is rock ’n’ roll with the two spinnaker poles, each weighing 70kg,” she says.

Maiden, too, is a very physical boat to race, requiring a lot of crew and teamwork for sail changes. The Dacron sails and inventory are “very similar to how it was in the Whitbread”, says Heather Thomas. There are no furling headsails, they are hoisted on a Tuff Luff headstay and have to be dragged up on deck to be hoisted.

“You have to be quite smart in the way you approach changing sails. If you’re overpowered, you can’t steer the boat properly, and it’s not going to be very efficient. It’s also where mistakes are made. I think that a lot of boats spent too much time with way too much sail up and it led to more gear damage in the fleet,” she says.

Ian Herbert-Jones was first mate on Spirit of Helsinki, a Swan 651 that raced in the 1986/87 Whitbread as Fazer Finland and took 2nd place in the Ocean Globe Race. The inventory consisted of three genoas, a jib top, a staysail on an inner forestay staysail – all hanked on – a slab reefed main and four symmetric spinnakers. The interior was a normal Swan cruising layout with varnished teak joinery, so the sails were kept stacked on deck.

“It’s a nightmare!” says Herbert-Jones. “Moving the No 1 genoa from the side deck to bow is a multi-person job.”

“Spinnaker peels were not too bad; we were quite well organised and they can be done by a single shift quite easily,” says Simon Curwen, navigator and later co-skipper on Translated 9. “But the big headsail changes or yankees in heavy weather on deck were different. You know you’ll be getting wet hoisting big sails, dropping and getting them tamed, bagged up, tied down, and shifted to windward every tack. These were a minimum three-person job.”

More than half the fleet had headsail furlers, but they come with their own problems and performance penalties. “As long as furling systems don’t break they can reduce sail wardrobe and save people getting hurt,” says Curwen. Ian Herbert-Jones agrees: “In hindsight, with mixed physical abilities, our boat would have been better with headsail furling as we would have made headsail changes more readily.”

Southern Ocean highs

Southern Ocean legs are traditionally thought of as sleigh rides; you picture boats hammering downwind and helmsmen wrestling with the wheel as foam-crested seas rear up astern. In the Ocean Globe Race there were fast speeds in big breezes, particularly in the Roaring Forties on the first leg to Cape Town – Maiden, for example, reported a new top speed of over 20.6 knots. But in the Southern Ocean itself, the fleet saw frequent large areas of light winds.

In the first Whitbread race 50 years ago, there were no ice limits and boats were free to follow a Great Circle route from New Zealand to Cape Horn. One entry, CS e RB, a 50ft Robert Clark design, dipped down below 62°S, where they sighted icebergs looming sinisterly out of fog.

Crews in the following editions also ran these risks until a more cautious attitude and more precise satellite imagery of where larger icebergs were drifting led organisers to hitch the route north. For Southern Ocean-bound races today, the most southerly point is usually Cape Horn itself at 56°S.

One of the unintended consequences of shouldering the route away from ice limits is that a fleet can be forced towards and entrapped in high pressure. “We kept getting high pressures that were in the way of the ice limits, the waypoints that you had to go around. So you could dive quite deep, but you had to come back up and it was kind of a race around high pressures all round the world,” Heather Thomas says. “It was very slow going at times.”

Weather information was restricted to what could be obtained by HF radio, but whereas there were many stations globally able to provide weather information back in the Whitbread days, today there are very few. “There are literally only three stations emitting useful info. Two, Northwood in the UK and Hamburg, are in Europe and overlapping down to the Canaries and then it stops.

“Then Australia does good transmissions from Cape Leeuwin through to New Zealand and that’s the extent of it,” says Herbert-Jones. And some yachts’ radio reception was poor. Spirit of Helsinki’s was one of them. “We were getting some weather over HF radio and weatherfaxes which were unreliable and so blurred you couldn’t read them, so we were staring at these old, fuzzy images trying to work them out. I’d be happy never to see another weatherfax again,” he says.

Competitors were not allowed to contact ham radio stations but inevitably there were ‘discrepancies’. One boat was known to be in daily contact with a ham operator, and in receipt of everything from rugby scores to weather and positions of all the boats, which they blatantly relayed to the fleet.

“But,” adds Simon Curwen, “a huge element of co-operation and tone was set by one or two boats. Maiden especially set the standard of information and removed the majority of non-sharing.”

If bad weather over a sustained 35 knots or winds Force 8-9 or more were forecast, the fleet was alerted by the race office by sat phone SMS or Yellowbrick texting service. Much of the time it was back to absolute basics: recording barometer readings and making observations of the changing sky – “looking out of the window, seeing what you are seeing and building a picture. People got much better at it as it went on,” Simon Curwen adds.

“Everybody will say the lack of weather makes it super tough and very frustrating at times, for example the lack of GRIB files and software such as Explorer that helps you take tactical and strategic decisions. Suddenly in this race I am literally going up and down the companionway and looking at the clouds. People joked: ‘Here comes Ian staring at the sky’,” says Herbert-Jones.

Celestial navigation was enjoyed by some; hated by others. Boats had to have GPS plotters and AIS MOB locators under a sealed screen, to be used only for emergencies. But it needed to be checked every day and it was an open secret that some were using this for primary positioning information.

“If you’re out in the middle of the ocean, you don’t particularly need to know where you are with a massive amount of accuracy, just when you get a bit closer to land,” says Maiden’s Heather Thomas. “If there was sun, we were taking maybe four or five sights a day and doing DR at least once every three hours to keep an eye on our course and distance. It becomes kind of second nature to you and the calculations become quicker and quicker as time goes on because there are only small differences between each day of similarly timed sights.

“I was a fan before and now I love celestial nav. We shouldn’t let it die out. It gives you a very in-depth understanding of where you are and what the sun, moon, and planets are doing just as doing weather observations gives a very keen understanding of what’s going on.”

Yachts were not given daily fleet position reports by the organisers, but began to share them with each other over SSB radio as well as weather forecasts received. “Comms became very important,” says Herbert-Jones.

“We were committed to a fleet call once a week but we had a good radio and could communicate with all the fleet so we set up these sheds [schedules], a buddy call twice a day at 0700 and 1900. We would freely share and relay weather information with boats that had poor reception and help with repair solutions. There were one or two boats who didn’t play as nicely for various reasons at different times or would go radio silent. But most played – a massive contrast with a modern race where you wouldn’t do that.”

Modern races seldom have stages as long as 40 days any more. Sponsorship opportunities have added more stopovers to the classic route, and boats have become faster. Even the longest transocean cruising passage of a circumnavigation is rarely more than 30 days. The Ocean Globe Race and Clipper Race are now unusual as a series of ultra marathons with four stages of 6,500-8,000 miles.

Life on board

The concoction of sleep deprivation, cramped quarters and the shock of going totally off grid for so long were a potent recipe for team bonding and discord. Different boats had varying levels of living standards. Spirit of Helsinki’s crew, a group of shareholders in the project, were widely considered to be living in comfort. “We were an absolute luxury cruise liner compared to others,” agrees Herbert-Jones. “We had twin diesel heaters, we had no issues making water and were having hot showers. One owner really liked his spa sessions.”

Translated 9, a Swan 65 (formerly Clare Francis’s ADC Accutrac from the 1977/78 Whitbread) had a fully fitted out interior that looked misleadingly snug and homely.

“You think it is going to be a very comfortable trip compared to a modern ocean racer but it’s not actually,” Simon Curwen says. “You roll around the double berth in the master cabin and if you take the cupboard doors off in the saloon you are sleeping up against the structure. It would be much more comfortable in a bunk with a canvas base that you can rack yourself in and change the angle.

“There was no space below for anyone not required on deck. We didn’t have a table as it would have been in the way of dropping sails and there was hot bunking for five people only. The cuddy did provide a bit of comfort but it was often occupied by people being seasick and lying out.”

There were very different approaches to food on board, just as there was in the pioneering first Whitbread Race. Back then, Chay Blyth’s men had a stiff military regime of freeze-dried food, favouring curry, and were allowed only one spoon each to eat with. By contrast, Ramon Carlin on Sayula II insisted that the ‘inner man’ was important. He ran a cocktail hour as crew came off watch and when Sayula arrived in Cape Town reported that they’d run out of wine and beer and had ‘only 24 jars of caviar left’.

This time around on Maiden there was nowhere below for crew to eat communally and the diet was 100% freeze-dried. Skipper Heather Thomas explains: “Crew prepared their own meals and ate whenever and whatever they wanted, within the realms of what we had on board.”

Others had fridges and freezers, and made good use of them with pre-prepared meals. On Translated 9, with an Italian owner and majority Italian crew, there was plenty of pasta and polenta. People took it in turns to cook and they ate together.

On Spirit of Helsinki, food was paramount. “We’d cook lunch and dinner and get together to eat. We’d have roast beef and three veg pre-prepared, and on one leg we ordered meals prepared by a local restaurant. We liked to wind people up about it on the radio calls. That’s where humour comes in,” says Ian Herbert-Jones.

Friends and foes

The long legs of the Ocean Globe Race produced some of the same human conflicts as the Whitbread Races of old, just possibly with less machismo. The first Whitbread Race was rife with tales of fights and mutinies, particularly after the Southern Ocean legs. It was said that one skipper in the 1974/75 race ran amok with a gun and had to be tied up for a day. Life at sea was cold and monotonous, an animalistic existence for those early pioneers, and if the race was going badly people became restive.

On the modern day Ocean Globe Race things didn’t go that far, but there were still tensions. “Some boats lost crew and they transferred to other boats; there was a fair amount of that going on. On Spirit of Helsinki, everyone managed to find their way through those difficulties but that is not completely true of every boat,” observes Ian Herbert-Jones.

“There were conflicts on Translated, as on every boat in the fleet, but there was also great teamwork, particularly with the youngsters on board having the adventure of their life,” says Curwen.

But some boats experienced defining moments when disappointments and disharmony had to be contained. On the homeward stretch, a heavy broach in 50-knot gusts reopened previously repaired cracks in the hull of Translated 9 and the yacht began to take on water. Co-skipper Nico Malingri reported obvious signs of delamination and the crew prepared to abandon. After some debate, they diverted to Portugal, where they retired from the race.

“There were two people in particular who were very competitive who would have rather carried on and risked sinking the boat than retire,” recalls Curwen. “We were taking on water and it was difficult to be sure about the structural issues. It was a very emotional conversation. There was sorrow and disappointment. Tears all round.”

Around again?

For Simon Curwen, who completed the solo Golden Globe Race in 2022 but was also forced to retire after diverting for repairs, this is the end of the adventure. “I’ve got to a certain stage I don’t think I’d put myself through that again,” he says. “But a number are already thinking of doing it again. And I will say that it has enhanced my love of the sea and sailing.”

Don McIntyre has published his rules for the Ocean Globe Race in 2027. Some of the same yachts will certainly be back with different crews. More yachts may also be considered eligible, so the fleet may be larger.

Although she’s moving back to racing in IMOCA 60 and Ultime classes, Marie Tabarly is a believer in this kind of race. “It’s exciting to see machines that, technologically, are pushing innovation to the top. But this creates huge carbon footprints and the world is no longer heading in that direction. Ocean racing like we do now is a form of excess. We need to start with making boats sustainable and creating new circuits.”

With its opportunities for older and less exorbitant yachts, the OGR is a concept of that type, and is also rich with human stories that the professionalism of elite events have tended to blot out. You don’t need to understand sailing at all to be interested in the experiences of the people taking part, which is precisely why those early Whitbread Races made sporting history.

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