Man was stepping on the moon, but the sailors from two dying empires still sought adventure on Earth, providing a Wirral author and yachtsman with stories of triumph and tragedy. David Charters reports
HE KNOWS the salted spray himself, this writer raised on high-sanded cliffs overlooking a rugged coast – and he has felt the slap of puny, man-made boats on God’s water, the billow of the sails, the sting of the unseen wind drawing tears from his eyes, leathered hands and yellow jackets, as, steadily, he has steered into many adventures.
For each departure from land to sea is an adventure, as Chris Eakin well knows. The swelling water, which looks so inviting on magazine photographs, is full of quirks and menace and secrets.
But his subject today stretches back, long before his own experiences as a yachtmaster, to extraordinary happenings, which gripped the nation through much of 1968 and 1969.
It was billed as the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, but it became a wider celebration of British eccentricity and derring- do, somehow surviving in a fast- changing world – though Gallic pride was represented by a philosopher armed with a catapult, who was in hot pursuit of “infinite truth”, while a splash of Latin glamour was added by a Biblically-bearded Italian. His quest for glory was thwarted by a peptic ulcer.
At the time, Neil Armstrong was preparing for the mission, which lead to him scuffing his boots on the moon’s surface and America triumphing in the Space Race with the “giant leap for mankind”.
But back in Blighty, nine men were preparing for the first round-the-world yacht race, which would have journalists from old Fleet Street frothing with excitement and flashing cheque-books in a bid to sign exclusive deals with the extraordinary array of competitors. ITV and BBC news teams were also locked in fierce competition to find the best stories.
One man in particular, a doomed dreamer with high ambition and modest ability, drew us all into his own tragedy and stirred the imaginations of the journalists.
Stories of the characters, who starred or at least featured in this bizarre event, have always enthralled Eakin, a reporter and a news editor on the Daily Post in the late 1980s, who now works as a journalist on the BBC News Channel.
All nine competitors were matched against the sea, but they were also exposed to long periods of self-examination, searching deep into themselves, seeing their frailties as never before.
This side of the story appeals at least as much to the writer in Eakin as the race itself. How does the individual emerge, or in one case fail to emerge, from such a trial?
