A R T I C L E S

Another Kind of Racing
by Jim Bates

Childhood fantasies are almost always best left alone. That way the magic never fades or tarnishes. Adult fantasies, when they become reality, are rarely like the dream, because there is no magic. This is the story of an adult fantasy.

THE BEGINNING

I learned to sail my second year of law school. Somewhere along the way I read books by Joshua Slocum, and it whetted an appetite for solo voyaging that lingered in the recesses of my mind. After I entered the cut-throat world of the personal injury trial-lawyer, I bought and sailed a number of boats, and the fantasy became single-handed racing across oceans. Sir Francis Chichester became my hero. The stresses of life fed the fantasy and it became my escape. I would visualize myself, the intrepid sailor, braving the elements. Seeing Sir Francis being knighted by the Queen before tens of thousands of admirers after his circumnavigation didn’t do much to alter my perceptions gained from reading all the books I could find on the subject. I must admit that seeing the calm matter-of–fact way Sir Francis went about the business of sailing solo did not do much to change my perceptions of the reality.

When he joined my yacht club in 1979 or early 1980, I met Luis Tonizzo. Luis sailed the 1980 Observer Single-handed Trans-Atlantic Race (OSTAR) in a small production boat, a Dufour 27 Spirit. He had the bug to do it again, and set about on his return to build a boat especially for the purpose of winning the 1984 OSTAR. I did not realize the bug was contagious, although I should have suspected it when I sent in an entry in August of 1982. The Royal Western Yacht Club, the regatta organizer, informed me the entry list was full at one hundred, and that I was 44th on the waiting list. I did not think much of it, as I did not have a boat anyway. The fantasy was still just a fantasy. In December of 1983, I settled a large case and had cash. As if the gods were just waiting for the moment, I received a letter from the Royal Western Yacht Club that I was now eligible to enter, as those ahead of me had dropped out. I cast about for a boat, and after much looking, decided to have a J-35 modified at the factory for the OSTAR. A price was agreed upon (or so I thought, but that’s another story) and construction was started in late January, 1984. My life had taken a sudden unexpected turn with my fantasy suddenly becoming reality, and an obsession.

Looking back, I am amazed that so much was done in such a short time. Tony Lush had worked his own deal with J-Boats and his sponsor, and had signed on to advise the designer and builder as to the peculiarities of a single-handed sailboat. Up until that point, Tony’s claim to fame was sinking in the previous BOC Around Alone while in the Southern Ocean. I must say that on the whole he did a wonderful job advising Tillotson Pearson, Inc., the builders of J boats. Except for a few bugs, the boat that resulted was very well conceived. It was a battleship in strength, and between the forward and rear bulkheads, carried tanks for 1800 pounds of movable water ballast on each side. Pipe berths were installed over the settees. Other than the pipe berths, the boat had no upholstery at all. The engine was replaced with a small diesel which, with no propeller shaft, became a 12 volt generator. The boat had watertight bulkheads fore and aft, and two pumps, powered by 50 amp electric motors to transfer water from the two tanks on either side, through a complicated series of valves. The steering was by a tiller-driven autopilot, complete with spare, and windvane. The electronic package was an extremely complex computer driven system, as used on 12 meters.

GETTING THERE

The boat was delivered to New Orleans at the beginning of March, 1984. I elected to commission the boat myself. Big mistake. The job was monumental for the time I had available and for my own expertise. None of the commissioning was particularly difficult, but all of it was time consuming and required meticulous attention to detail. In addition, my friends all allowed as to how Bates had taken leave of his senses and had gone crazy. I heard that at home too. The boat was named the “Big Shot” after a local root beer bottler, who gave me some stock as a form of sponsorship. I later sold that stock for $2600.00, which was the sum total of my sponsorship.

There is a race requirement that each skipper complete a non-stop 500-mile qualifying single-handed voyage in the race boat. I elected to sail out 250 miles into the Gulf of Mexico, from Gulfport, Mississippi, and back, even though my wife was very pregnant. I figured that would wait. The voyage was uneventful other than the losing of all my halyards by the time I neared Chandeleur Island on the return leg. I could not sail upwind against a 40 knot headwind with no Genoa, so I threw out the anchor and waited for the wind to die down to fix the problem. A passing United States Coast Guard buoy tender towed me to Pascagoula where I learned that I had missed the birth of my son by eight hours.

I learned a lot from the qualifying sail and set about getting the boat ready to go. Just before Easter weekend I had a truck driver haul my boat up the east coast as far as he could before the weekend shut down the hauling of over width loads. He made it to Norfolk, Va., where I met the boat and put it in the water. My friend Jerry Tiblier agreed to sail with me to England. Two other persons, who I barely knew, had also previously agreed to go. We all set about commissioning the boat. While we did so, a sailor from the Navy, (Norfolk is the home of a huge U.S. Naval base) came by and told us that if we did not already have a personal relationship with God, we were sure going to meet him in the North Atlantic. On the last day before setting sail for England, the two other guys who were going to help deliver the boat to England changed their minds. The truth was that they were scared. One is a well-known writer of articles in the national yachting press. He told me he didn’t think the boat would make it. On April 28, 1984, Jerry and I set sail for England, in a very stiff breeze, with cans of diesel and water tied in the cockpit. The next day the wind lightened up, and the trip became a nice sail. A week out we were proceeding nicely across the Grand Banks when a storm came up on our tail. The wind and waves built for about a day until it was blowing 50 to 60 knots. The waves had gone from big, to huge, to mountainously frightening. There was no visibility, being very foggy. I had gradually reduced sail until we were down to the storm jib alone. Even it became too large for the conditions. We were out of control going down the waves and finally I was down to bare poles. The boat was still going 8 to 9 knots, but now the waves were catching us. By that time they were hitting heights of approximately 32 feet. Anyone who still believes in the myth that deep-water ocean waves don’t break had best not test his theory. The waves were catching us, and were breaking over the boat. As the stern of the boat would go up the wave, the wave would roll over and break into the cockpit. By then Jerry and I were exhausted, and the stints at the tiller trying to drive the boat downwind were getting shorter and shorter. As the crest of the waves would tower over our heads, we would release the tiller and wrap both arms and legs around the cross-cockpit traveller before the wave broke into the cockpit. The power of the waves was incredible. We would be torn loose from our death grip on the traveller and be completely under water, floating over the boat as it was knocked under and over. Eventually the boat would struggle back to the surface, and we would be grabbing and sputtering and gasping for air all at once, in a state of absolute terror. I would be totally disoriented as I tried to find a handhold on the boat to grab. Without being tied on by safety harnesses, we would have been killed. I always came up on top of the boat. Jerry was not so lucky. Twice he came back up in the water on the side of the boat. The last time was while I was down below. He had to get back on board by himself because I could not hear his screaming over the deafening inferno of sound made by the storm.

When Jerry appeared at the hatch , a dripping apparition looking like he had seen a glimpse of a future he did not like, I called off all attempts to drive the boat, I lashed the tiller in a variety of positions until the boat rode as comfortably as possible and we both remained in cinched up pipe berths for the next 36 hours. We drifted 60 miles in the storm. I was scared, wet, cold, demoralized, and thoroughly beaten. Jerry even promised that if we lived he would never drink again. No, I do not know to whom he had made the promise. Later events proved that he must have had his fingers crossed. In any event, the storm died down, and we timidly ventured back out on deck where we learned we had lost the majority of our water cans. Diesel was everywhere from leaking jerry cans that had overturned. I wanted to quit! But Jerry convinced me that I was being irrational (where that notion came from at that late date, I don’t know). Besides which, he still wanted to see England.

From that time on, life became a succession of storms and calms. We would have a 175 mile day followed by a 45 mile day. The wind came from everywhere. Jerry’s main interest in conversation centred around his escapades with nubile young maidens, which struck me as an exercise in sado-masochism at best, considering the proximity of the nearest one. Shortly after the big storm, the main water tank ran dry. Rather then measure it, I had taken the factory’s word as to its capacity. Its capacity proved to be only half as much as I was told, although at the time I thought I had just sprung a leak. As it was, we were halfway across, and there was nothing to do but conserve our last little bit of water. The deadline for arriving in England was Sunday, May 27th, one week before the Saturday, June 2nd start. Every calm day we cursed, praying for wind, and hating it when it brought the huge waves that knocked us down all too frequently. We drank our last water on May 20th. From that time on, we had only the little moisture in the aluminium vacuum pouches of food to live on, plus one bottle of wine. I even tried licking the condensate off the overhead in the morning. On May 22nd, my 40th birthday, we opened the last and only liquid on the boat, the bottle of wine It gave us two cups apiece, and a thirst that you would have to experience to believe. We were never able to hail a ship or get the attention of anyone to beg water. It became an obsession and occupied our every thought. Finally , at dawn on May 26th , we rounded Lands End, the southern tip of England. Because of dehydration, Jerry could not get out of his bunk to see the sight. I felt a huge boost, knowing that I was alive, and had sailed the Atlantic.

Jerry stayed around for the start of the race, then returned home to New Orleans. Eventually, he ended up living in the Caribbean with one of those nubile young maidens he constantly dreamed of.

That afternoon we pulled into Plymouth Sound, after 28 days at sea, and up to the mooring at the Royal Western Yacht Club. Considering our rather uncouth appearance and odour, they were remarkably nice to us. The most serious damages were a bad lower rudder bearing, and severe wiring problems. I flew immediately to New Orleans to get a new bearing, only to be told by a warranty man at the factory that the installation was bad, and that the bearing was just loose in the hull. His solution was to put silicone seal in between the bearing and the hull. Inexplicably they had replaced the bearing on Tony Lush’s boat. My pleas for a new bearing were to no avail. And I flew back to England where I worked on the boat, non-stop for a week, re-wiring, repairing, and becoming increasingly more frightened as the day of the start neared.

THE START – THE RACE

On the morning of June 2nd, the butterflies in my stomach were the size of eagles. I was terrified and could hardly function. I started up the generator to top off the batteries, and immediately ran it dry. Someone had shut the fuel valve on the tank while inspecting it during the pre-race inspection. My hands were shaking so badly I broke the bleed screw off while trying to get it restarted. I literally ran from shop to shop around the Mayflower Marina, where I was docked, looking for an identical screw. I finally found one with a slightly different thread. It dribbled fuel but the engine ran. Unfortunately the fuel it spilled went into the bilge, and every time I ran the diesel, I pumped more into the bilge. It became very messy and uncomfortable before the race was over. I was pulled out to the starting line, late. As a joke, I had a life size inflatable nude doll standing next to my backstay. Coming out of my slip, I was pulled into the mizzen boom on the boat next to me and broke it off. On the way out to the starting line, the towboat, an underpowered sailboat, pulled me into a channel buoy, and punched two holes in my side. By that time I decided that I might not survive the tow out, and told them I would sail the rest of the way. I arrived at the line barely in time for the starting sequence, and began setting up. The 60 foot multihulls were hurtling by at speeds in excess of 20 knots with little scampering Frenchmen on them, not looking at all worried about the other 99 boats on the line, nor, it seemed, looking where they were going. The line was in two sections, with monohulls starting on one end between two British warships and multihulls on the other end between two more British warships. The boats were milling about together behind the line before the start. Numerous spectator aircraft and helicopters were buzzing overhead at mast-top heights, and hundreds of spectator boats were interspersed with the competitors. The winds were over 20 knots, and the waves were six feet, making for a very exiting and hectic start. Many spectator vessels were following me. I can only assume that they thought the doll was real. I got the start at the leeward end of the line, jib reaching down the coast toward the southern tip of England. Soon I noticed that the whole fleet was going to weather of my course, out into the English Channel. There were few Englishmen in the race, and I knew that there was not a lot of local knowledge in the fleet, so I worried. In an hour I was alone. Finally I checked my electronic compass with a hand-bearing compass, and discovered that I was 20 degrees off. I had stacked a metal can near the sending unit in the rush to stow the boat. To top it off, the weather forecast said a gale was coming down the Channel.

An hour and a half into the race I finally sat down and relaxed. I thought about the hectic morning. I was taking water through the holes in my side and I was alone and scared. I broke down and cried. Jack Hunt, a fellow competitor on Crystal Catfish, told me before the start of the race that for an American, the first week of the race was the hardest. After that, you could see the end in sight, and it was downhill from there, so I continued. I stayed busy stowing the boat and putting the finishing tune on the rigging. That night, the storm never came. I had shortened sail, and lost two to three hours to my sister-ship, Survival Tech, sailed by Lush, and to City of Slidell, sailed by Tonizzo. The final ignominious event that occurred that first day is that I almost sailed the boat up onto the lighthouse at Bishop Rock in the Scilly Isles as I slept, exhausted.

The next day, and practically everyday after, I worked continuously at repairing damage. The first auto pilot burned up by the second day. The first night I had a fire in the port water transfer pump. The third day a fire in the electrical distribution panel, and on the fourth day, while on port tack, for the first time with the damaged side out of the water, I was able to stuff epoxy in the holes and cover them with duct tape like huge band-aids. By now I was pumping the boat out every two hours. When the last water pump went out, on the sixth day, I made the interior bilge pump into a water transfer pump. It took me two hours after every tack, to pump the water from one side to the other after every tack. If anyone thinks I was tacking on five degree headers he better think again. The wind blew an average of 25 knots on the nose; average seas were eight to ten feet, in storms they grew to fifteen to twenty feet. The water ballast made the boat go through all the seas, and over none, because the boat became nose heavy. However I was making 7.5 knots over the bottom, carrying a number 4 and a storm trysail, in at times 40 knots of wind. The days became an unbroken succession of broken gear, sail changes, boredom, terror, and personal misery. I was freezing and wet. The water temperature was 40 degrees. I wore three sets of thermal underwear, jeans, a sweater, and foul weather gear for the entire race. The SSB telephone calls I was able to make put me 30 miles behind the leaders for the first week. The rudder was slamming so bad from side to side, it hurt my hand. The Atoms wind vane, steered upwind beautifully, and the race was mostly a beat. It could not, however, steer off the wind or in light air, which for the first two weeks was not much of a problem as there was none of either.

My diet was mostly Yurika foods. It was a vacuum-packed survival food that I boiled in sea water, and poured over pasta or rice. Being in a continual rush, I never gave much thought to eating. I became very bored on the trip over with the monotonous menu, so I bought 200 candy bars and three loaves of Italian bread to spice it up on the way back. I suppose I was lucky I did not become a huge fat pimple. Little things like relieving oneself became a major ordeal. The boat would fly through the waves, and fall with very loud bangs into the valley behind the waves. My Porta-Potti was in the bow, and had no handholds. Imagine, if you will, trying to stay centred on a toilet under those conditions, and you will understand the ordeal. In any case, because of the diet, and perhaps stress. I was well constipated, so it did not happen too often.

There were about 30 boats in my class. In my class, the race was between myself, Lush, Tonizzo, and two multihulls. The first was British Airways, a trimaran, sailed by Bill Homewood, and the other , a catamaran. Double Brown, sailed by John Mansell. For the first part of the race, the multihulls were generally south, and I thought ahead. Double Brown developed structural problems about halfway across, and sank. After that, the four of us led our class, pulling out well over a hundred miles in front of the next person behind us by mid-Atlantic. The lead in the big multihull class changed frequently as the big boats would self-destruct, capsize, and/or sink. I would listen to each new leader on the BBC radio broadcast about the race each day, and think that to be in the lead was unlucky, as it meant that you were the next to sink.

On the afternoon of the sixth day, a pod of pygmy killer whales followed me for two hours. They were 15 to 20 feet long, and followed in a line right behind my transom. I felt like Little Red Riding Hood (the part about what big teeth you have) and retired below where I locked my doors and pondered why they were called killer whales. One does not always think so clearly under stress.

The lower rudder bearing was loose and the wiggling rudder was killing my speed. The only way I could stay competitive was to carry more sail in the storms than what I considered safe, or comfortable, and certainly more sail than Lush and Tonizzo, because in the lighter air the rudder really slowed me down.

The Argos satellite transmitter each competitor carried broadcast his position daily to the race headquarters at Newport, and I would call daily to get my position, as well as the position of the competition.

Two weeks into the race I realized I was two-thirds of the way across the ocean. Ahead of me the Grand Banks loomed, and, as reported at the pre-race skipper’s meeting, with the most icebergs reported in recorded history. The Grand Banks lay directly between my location and the Newport finish line. It was a dead beat at that time, so I chose the southern tack to skirt the south end of the iceberg line, along with Tony Lush who was just ahead. Tonizzo headed straight west across the northern Grand Banks.

The weather continued unabated, and the days drug on, grey day after grey day. The waves made it prohibitive to sit in the cockpit because they went completely over the boat, totally filling the cockpit. As I would lie in my bunk, I would see the water spraying into the boat around the edges of the hatch, under great pressure. I would imagine I was in a diving submarine, with loose hatches. As I was laying in my bunk, I heard a voice on my radio. In the middle of the Atlantic, when you hear a voice on the VHF, they are talking to you. It turned out to be Jose Ugarte, a competitor from Spain sailing a 45-foot boat, who good-naturedly informed me that I had almost run him down, passing less than 100 feet from him. He was under storm canvas riding out the stiff winds and waves. He informed me that the Big Shot was a spectacular sight as it would completely submerge below the waves with only the mast and sails above the surface and coming out the back of the waves and falling with a great splash, before it entered the next wave. Incidentally, two days later Jose woke up and went on deck to find himself sailing alongside a twelve-story tall iceberg. We had not gone far enough south to avoid all of them, although I personally never saw one. Truthfully, if I had, the borderline state of paranoia I lived in might have done me in.

The cold would work on me, making me unable to motivate myself to work. I really did not have foul weather gear or clothing appropriate for the conditions (another rushed last-minute decision). The lethargic state, combined with monotony and boredom, made it easy to put off sail changes that were necessary, and hard to have the desire and motivation to continue to race the boat, as oppose to cruise it to the finish. I wanted to curl up in my bunk, and not move, but eventually I would shame myself into going on. I swore that I would never berate a crew again. Sail changes took an hour routinely. One day, as I crawled back from the bow, where half the time I would be totally submerged while changing sails, the lifeline I was grasping broke. I almost went over. At a speed of seven knots, which I was doing at the time, there would have been no hope of survival or of catching the boat. Death comes in minutes in water that cold anyway. My heart was beating at a speed beyond belief, as I clung to my cabin top, afraid to move again.

With a week to go, I lost my SSB, and contact with the outside world. I became frantic to get home, racing as hard as I could. The winds started to lighten up a little after I tacked west for Newport, and lifted Tonizzo so that he never had to tack. I sailed over 200 miles further then he did. The second to last night, I was carrying my big chute dead free, making two knots. A huge vessel came over the horizon behind me, aimed at my stern. I had such little steerage, I could not get out of his way. Repeated calls finally aroused a very irate deck officer of the QE2, which was rapidly running me down, and he changed course. This is illustrative of a recurring problem. Ships cannot see small sailboats. A ship approaching from dead ahead at 21 knots closes with a sailboat making 7 knots in approximately eleven minutes. Eventually, you trust a higher power, and go to sleep.

The wind gradually started to increase as a final storm started rage out in the Atlantic. I was running with a number three and reefed main at 11 to 13 knots. I steered for 36 straight hours, but was not nearly as exhausted as I should have been, because of the anticipation of seeing land. As I neared land, a huge whale jumped out of the water close to the boat. That part of him that was out of the water was bigger than my boat. All I could think about was that if he hit the boat it would shatter and break up. Being the object of the affections of a 50 foot fish, was not my idea of the way to end the state of celibacy I had been living in. I suppose he went away and found someone his own size to play with, as I did not see him again.

My feelings of joy at seeing land are indescribable. The terror was finally over. I crossed the line in a blinding rainstorm at midnight, 22 days after I started. My fuel had run out six hours earlier. I lost 47 pounds in the 50 days I had been at sea, out of the last 57 days. Fourteen boats had sunk, no lives were lost, and I had averaged over six knots for the entire 3000 miles.

AFTERMATH

Would I do it again? Only with a sponsor. It cost about $150,000. The preparation, both mental and physical would be different. A diet and exercise program would have to be instituted. The constant motion is tiring, and there must be a way to exercise or your energy level droops dangerously low. At the end of the race I could not even raise the sails without being winded. The poor diet, averaging less than a thousand calories daily, was the primary culprit. It is as much an endurance test as it is a race, but it is still a race, and must be sailed as hard as you would sail a short triangle. The end found me placing third amongst the monohulls in my 30 boat class, and 31st in fleet. Luis Tonizzo and Tony Lush both beat me and are to be congratulated for fine efforts and good sailing. Both had better boat preparation, and because both had more single-handed experience, they had better mental preparation.

The reality was not even close to the fantasy, but in fact was infinitely more satisfying.

Could you do it? Strangely enough, I think physically anyone can. The hard part is the mental and emotional aspect of the trip. The fact that you are racing seems to add to the strain and stress, and to the periods of depression when you are not doing well. I imagine that single-handing in a non-race situation would not be so stressful.

I did not sail on a boat but twice more in 1984 , and had no real desire to. It took a long time before I wanted to sail again. I would like to do OSTAR again, and if I find a sponsor, I would. My new fantasy is to win the race.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This article was written in 1987, after a thorough review of the logs and tapes I made during the voyage. It was published in the 1987 race program of the Lake Pontchartrain Racing Circuit in New Orleans. I have not looked at it much since that time. I realize that after 20 years my present perceptions of reality would be different, in that 20 years of age would dictate that I would have some different attitudes and perceptions of the “reality” of the experience. If it was written today, the tone of the article would certainly change. Or maybe I’ve just forgotten some of the feelings I had at the time. In any case, the article is certainly factually accurate as far as my personal experiences are related, and I believe the other facts about the race are all accurate as well, but mostly came from listening to the BBC during the race, and talking to other competitors after the race.

Jim Bates