Sixteen skippers begin 27,000-mile voyage "To young men contemplating a voyage I would say go."
Joshua Slocum offered that advice after returning in 1898 from a solo three-year voyage around the world in his 36-ft. 9-in. Spray. Last week 16 sailors from eight countries (five Americans, three Britishers, three Frenchmen, a New Zealander, an Australian, a Japanese, a South African and a Czech) followed the great Yankee skipper's advice. As a gunshot cracked across Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay to signal the start, each sailor turned his stern on the plush attractions of old Newport, his bow toward the starting line off Goat Island and the wild Atlantic, and his thoughts to the challenge upon which he was embarking. Then each crossed the starting line and began a 27,000-mile competitive voyage that should bring the winner, tired and shaggy, back to The Newport in the late spring of 1983.
The race is the BOC Challenge, named for its sponsor, the London-based BOC Group, manufacturers and marketers of industrial gases and welding products. Singlehanded sailing is not new. Britain's Sunday newspaper the Observer used to sponsor a contest called OSTAR, the Observer Singlehanded Transatlantic Race; solo sailors have crossed both the Atlantic and the Pacific in boats as small as 10 ft. Others, including Britain's redoubtable Sir Francis Chichester, have raced around the world from England and back. But the BOC Challenge is the first singlehanded around-the-world race to begin and end in the U.S., and in the same port that hosts the America's Cup Race.
Most sailing contests have offered the winners nothing more tangible than an engraved silver plate for their lonely pains. But the new event will award a total of $100,000 worth of prizes, with $25,000 going to the first boat in each of the race's two classes to cross the finish line.
The race will also be the most grueling test of nautical know-how imaginable. There will be four legs with a week's rest required at the end of each. The solo sailors must first cross the Atlantic to Cape Town, South Africa. From there, the small boats must follow a course that will take them over the southern reaches of the Indian Ocean and on to Sydney, Australia. The third leg of the journey spans the South Pacific from Sydney to Cape Horn and then to Rio de Janeiro, while the fourth will bring those skillful and fortunate enough back to Newport. "It's not a sprint, it's a decathlon," says Race Director Jim Roos, property manager of Goat Island and one of the contest's principal organizers. "This is probably the World Series of sailing."
His statement is not briny hyperbole. The route includes the legendary "Roaring Forties," those southern latitudes where no land mass breaks the force of the winds and waves can crest at 120 ft. The sailors must also cross the doldrums of the middle Atlantic, with its sudden dangerous squalls and alternate dead calms. The vast emptiness of the Pacific will provide the stiffest psychological test. "This sailor does it all," adds Roos. "He navigates his boat, he handles the sails, he cooks. He's got to be able to sew sails and make repairs." The race was to have included two women, but they had to drop out for lack of financial backing.