The Publisher
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Jul 9, 2009, 2:35 PM
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Re: [The Publisher] 1979 Fastnet Race - 30th Anniversary
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John Rousmaniere
July 9, 2009
For Scuttlebutt
The Fastnet at 30
By John Rousmaniere
Why didn’t you call your book Fastnet, Force 12?” my new friend half-asked, half-demanded. “Maybe it was blowing a mere Force 10 where YOU were, but not where I was.”
As our boat drifted around foggy Narragansett Bay last September, waiting for a starting gun, this shipmate and I reviewed some of the startling events that had been thrust upon us 3,000 miles to the east and half a lifetime ago.
Hair-raising tales of the 1979 Fastnet Race are told sometimes by acquaintances. My friend was in an American boat, a 64-footer, running at 20 knots toward the finish under number 4 jib alone when a crewmember decided she was carrying too much sail. They cut away that handkerchief – tack, sheet, and halyard – and watched it fly off through the dense cloud of thick spray suspended several yards above the sea. Other stories come through the interior voice of memory. With a shiver, I recall balancing precariously on the boom of a Swan 47 and tying in the third reef as she smashed toward Fastnet Rock with great wads of water simultaneously rising up from the sea and pouring down from the sail.
The Fastnet, our destination, is a ship-shaped lighthouse perched on a rock. It’s the outer turning mark in the odd-year 600-mile race that’s been run since 1925 from southern England to near Ireland and back again. Rarely easy, the race, with 303 boats, was hit in 1979 by a surprising, shockingly strong and unstable westerly blow, with gusts in the 60s and shifting constantly, and waves 30 feet and higher.
Boomerang, the 64-footer, and Toscana, my ride, came out of it with minimal damage. Not so lucky were the 100 or so boats that capsized or nearly so, the 24 boats that were abandoned, the five that sank, and the 15 sailors who died – all this in a sport whose total fatalities, until 1979, could be counted on two hands. For us in Toscana, the outlines of the calamity began to take shape on radio broadcasts as we ran home from the rock. Our navigator, John Coote, stuck his head up the companionway, paused for a few moments, and mournfully intoned words that I had never expected to hear when I first went to sea: “Men are dying out here.”
We did not feel the full thrust of the tragedy until after we finished at Plymouth, when Toscana approached a wharf crowded with silent, solemn women and men staring blankly out toward the Channel. On shore, I was approached by a man with an arm in a sling. Peter Johnson had sailed his boat and suffered the arm injury and broken ribs during three wild knockdowns, and now he was asking me to write a book about the race for his publishing house. The race was hard, but writing about it was harder. The seaman’s chores and the roll of the vessel are welcome distractions at sea, but on shore all is still, and the uneasiness planted by the sight of those people on the wharf grew with every interview with a survivor.
Back to hard facts, a proper question to ask is, “What’s the larger importance of the Fastnet storm?” My answer is that this is the watershed event in the long history of pleasure sailing, dating back almost 200 years. I don’t know of any other incident that has been both so catastrophic and so constructive in our sport – or, for that matter, in any sport.
The post-race review conducted by the Royal Yachting Association and the Royal Ocean Racing Club gathered more solid information about the behavior of boats and sailors in extreme weather than had ever existed through generations of anecdotes and cruise narratives. Building on this enormous data base, the boating industry and several non-profit organizations came up with the Lifesling, new rescue techniques, better safety harnesses, and other valuable innovations. Towing-tank tests of boat stability, heavy-weather steering, and storm tactics were run by the U.S Yacht Racing Union (now the U.S. Sailing Association), the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers, and the Wolfson Unit in England. The Cruising Club of America produced a manual on offshore design and gear, Desirable and Undesirable Characteristics of Offshore Yachts, with chapters by Olin and Rod Stephens, Jim McCurdy, Bill Lapworth, Tom Young, and other leading sailors and designers of that era. When Olin wrote, “Some modern ocean racers, and the cruising boats derived from them, and dangerous to their crews,” people paid attention, and rating rules were improved.
Regulations and gear can’t solve every problem, which is why one of the most important developments in the wake of the 1979 Fastnet was that large numbers of sailors finally began to talk about safety – until then the elephant in the yacht club – at safety at sea seminars and other forums. Talking leads inevitably to stories, stories attract people’s attention, and so, as long as there are veterans of that wild August night telling those stories, lessons will be learned.
Attached: Toscana running home as the storm began to die with John Rousmaniere steering.
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JohnRousmaniere.steering in 79Fastnet storm.JPG
