Coming last, learning lots

Gosport & Cowes 22/03/2025

We came last. But that is not the whole story.

The race organisers, the Junior Offshore Group (JOG), were celebrating their 75th anniversary and offering free drinks after the finish but we were aiming to head back to Gosport. Soldiers know a free drink soon becomes a party. And so with all the discipline that came from a life in uniform we did not stay in Cowes after the race, and pour that first free drink into our tired bodies, setting on fire any plans we'd had as we looked around and the thought entered, the thought of the great night that could be had surrounded by these sailors. Instead, we turned north.

The Royal Engineer Yacht Club (REYC) is one of the world's oldest, founded in 1846, they were preparing for this year's Fastnet which was the race's 100 year anniversary and today the world's largest offshore yacht race.

Fastnet is known for the storm that killed racers in 1979. In The Weather of the 1979 Fastnet Yacht Race, Alan Watts, a meteorologist, described the 50ft waves faced by the 303 yachts with around 2700 crew during the race, Watts quotes Willard J. Pierson, an oceanographer, who said:

"It always continues to amaze me that seafaring men are not aware that in a storm this kind of thing must happen sometime. In any wave system, after a long enough time an exceptionally high wave will occur. These monstrous outsize waves are improbable but still possible; hence, they do happen. They can happen at any time, and the exact time of occurrence of such an outsized wave can never be predicted."

Watts argues instead that these waves may be predicted, that we need to know more about the 'meteorological conditions that make such waves certain', using the barometric data from the yachts he finds they were 'no more than a millibar or two out', their instruments were accurate and after correcting the data he argues the wind field did not 'develop uniformly across a broad front', the official charts had isobars 'drawn at a more or less equal interval', whereas Watts finds troughs from the yachts' data. The storm sparked the UK’s largest peacetime rescue operation.

Bob Fisher in The Observer reported '21 deaths and 136 sailors were rescued from 23 boats' because of 'rogue waves the height of seven-storey buildings', with a wind 'up to 50 knots' at 0400hrs. Life rafts capsized, others were lost, their passengers died. Bernard Hayman, a former chairman of the Royal Yachting Association and former editor at Yachting World, writing in The Sunday Telegraph described capsizing life rafts as a 'potentially man-killing problem' and being careful not to deliberate on what he would have done, described how many of the abandoned yachts were still afloat, 'many hours later', and asks if this was a case of 'an almost uncontrollable desire to get-the-hell-out-of-it' and whether that came from inexperience, fear, panic, the cold? Hayman notes the organisers, the Royal Ocean Racing Club (RORC) were not 'a group of marine cowboys', instead 'thoroughly responsible' and the investigation would have to answer difficult questions, including on crew experience. Today, RORC insist a significant proportion of the crew must have completed courses in Sea Survival, First Aid and sailed 300NM with their team in the boat they will use for Fastnet.

JOG's Lonely Tower was my first race and time with the REYC. We rose at 0600hrs and motored to Cowes, along the way, the skipper, Murray explained the discrepancy between the Royal Engineers' version of who had won the first Fastnet race. On RORC's website, it states the winner was Jolie Brise owned by RORC's first Commodore Lt Cmdr E G Martin OBE. The Engineers claimed the first race was not the official one, it had been called the Ocean Race, not Fastnet, which came the next year when the Engineers did win in 1926. Either way, the REYC had entered each one and were not going to stop now.

At the start line now, 96 boats readied pointing east, it felt like standing on a busy motorway as yachts turned to avoid each other, people shouting for others to move. Murray pointed out JOG's building which looked like a shed in a small garden, people outside with binoculars checking the numbers and names of the boats. And then we were off, the course was through two forts, around Nab Tower, back through the forts and into Cowes. The imposing forts were built in 1865 and 1880 and sold in 2024 for over £1million each, according to the BBC. Rounding them we saw several boats raise spinnakers. Murray waited to see what the wind was doing and noticed the other boats veering powerfully off course so we waited before deploying ours. For Murray, this was about us learning, we were not going to win so along the way he helped me with all the questions I had.

It had also been an opportunity to meet a former colleague who had rejoined the Royal Engineers as a soldier, between diving to either side of the boat to sit on the edges as we heeled, he told me sailing was seen as an officer's sport and soldiers did not see it as for them. I told him this was a shame. The military offered adventurous training to test soldiers under stressful conditions outside of war, I'd jumped from planes over the English countryside, skied down mountains in France, Germany and climbed in Cyprus, others had gone on to find great success in sport, the British Army was represented in the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics.

We finished in 6 hours 10 minutes and 50 seconds. Two boats had retired.

On motoring back to Gosport we responded to a PanPan, an urgency signal, rescuing a boat which had a line wrapped around its prop. We helped clear it and towed them in.

On the train home, I read. I’d bought the RYA’s Competent Crew book and REEDS Skipper’s Handbook and could see I’d need another book soon, instead of buying separate ones for each course I’d seen skippers use The Complete Yachtmaster by Tom Cunliffe which still included the basics such as how to tie a bowline, so I planned to find a good guide which I could keep for the years of learning which I hoped were ahead of me.

Logbook:

Until the next time thank you for reading and please share this post with friends,

Adnan
Burnley, 2025

Adnan Sarwar is a philosophy student at the University of Oxford and a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He won The Bodley Head/Financial Times essay prize, edited for The Economist and is an Iraq war veteran of the British Army.

References

Fisher, B (2009) The night the sea showed sailors just how small we really are, [Online] The Observer, Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2009/aug/09/sailing-fastnet-race-admirals-cup-1979. Accessed 18 April 2025

Hayman, B (1979) Learning from disaster, The Sunday Telegraph

Watts A. (1990) The Weather of the 1979 Fastnet Yacht Race. [Online] Journal of Navigation. 1990;43(3):353-363. Available at: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-navigation/article/abs/weather-of-the-1979-fastnet-yacht-race/66857E9E8CAD8A2E81ED844C468C0F7B. Accessed 18 April 2025

BBC, Historical sea forts each sell for more than £1m, Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clmmj1g3n5yo, Accessed 18 April 2025