Almost 40 Years Later, Still Racing Around the World

By Angus Phillips
Sunday, April 8, 2007

NORFOLK

We all grow older every day, and for those entering the "golden years" there are many ways to play out the string. The TV is a comfort, the sofa beckons. Or you can do as Sir Robin Knox-Johnston has and save the best.

"It's an attitude of mind," says the 68-year-old knight of the British Empire, who won his title for being the first to race nonstop around the world alone, piloting his 32-foot, homemade wooden ketch Suhaili to first place almost 40 years ago in the 1968 Golden Globe Race.

"You have one life -- paint it in bright colors," exults the graybeard, who was in Norfolk last week preparing for the final leg of his latest grand journey. "We ain't coming back. If you feel like doing something, go out and do it. The world is full of people saying what you can't do. I hate that!"

Knox-Johnston was perched at a cocktail table outside a pub on the Norfolk waterfront, puffing a Marlboro Light and eyeing the clock. It was early for drinks, but the strapping, tanned seaman made no bones about the "wee dram" he looked forward to when the sun dipped over the yardarm. "I might have two," said he with twinkling eye.

A few paces away, his blazing fast, ultramodern 60-foot race boat Saga Insurance, nicknamed Grey Power, bobbed in the chop on a bright spring day, a greyhound fresh in from the stormy, 12,000-mile passage from Fremantle, Australia, around Cape Horn, the world's most feared headland at the tip of South America.

Knox-Johnston stands fourth in the Velux 5 Oceans Race, which started in Bilbao, Spain, last November and ends there later this month. The race has two stops -- Fremantle and Norfolk -- and takes competitors through the famously barren, forlorn Southern Ocean, where wind and sea spin unimpeded around the globe.

Fourth sounds pretty good with just 3,000 miles to go, considering he's older than any of his rivals by a quarter-century. But the good news is tempered by the fact that only five boats remain. Seven started, but two top competitors, Britons Mike Golding and Alex Thomson, dropped out with hull and rig damage off the tip of Africa.

Knox-Johnston came pretty close to disaster himself when his keel snagged an inch-thick fishing net thousands of miles from nowhere on the way to Australia. After a day dragging the burden along, he took a swim in the Southern Ocean to cut it free, donning a drysuit to keep from freezing and scurrying back as quickly as possible, "before I got too cold to haul myself aboard."

"It looks like I'll be spending my sixth Christmas at sea," he wrote that night in an e-mail from the boat, "but my first without any alcohol, which I'm not looking forward to. At least the weather is seasonal -- snow and hail and wind squalls of 40 knots and more."

Ah, life on the rolling wave. Knox-Johnston said he decided to go to sea at the tender age of 8. "Why?" he wonders aloud, 60 years later. "What influences a boy that age? What was it? The rest of my life is ruled by a decision made by an 8-year-old."

As a youngster growing up far from the sea, the son of a linen merchant, he memorized the names and armaments of scores of British warships. At 17, he joined the merchant marines and learned the trade -- navigation, wire splices, painting and chipping, maritime law, engineering and sailing, he said, "because in those days lifeboats had sails."

At 27, he was a merchant marine captain and a lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy Reserves. He built Suhaili while stationed in Mumbai and sailed it home to England around the Cape of Good Hope with his brother and a friend. The voyage took 1 1/2 years. "We ran out of money in South Africa," he said, "and had to take jobs."

He jumped at the opportunity later when the Times of London announced it was sponsoring the Golden Globe. Old salts thought him mad. "Some old fellow on the dock at Falmouth saw me working on the boat and said, 'Are you the silly Johnny that's going to sail nonstop around the world?'

"I said I was. He said, 'Can't be done, and even if it could, you couldn't do it.' What a stupid thing to say!"

Nine boats started that race but seven dropped out, leaving only Knox-Johnston and Frenchman Bernard Moitessier to round Cape Horn and head north for the finish. Suhaili led by 20 days, but Moitessier probably would have won on corrected time, having started later, Knox-Johnston said.

But the Frenchman, in one of the most puzzling decisions ever made in competitive sport, opted not to turn left at Cape Horn. He liked it so well in the deep Southern latitudes, he simply carried on to round Australia all over again, abandoned the race and wound up in Tahiti.

The first Golden Globe later was chronicled in a book called "Voyage for Madmen."

"I object to the title," said Knox-Johnston, chuckling.

With one leg to go, victory in the Velux 5 Oceans has been all but sewn up by the Swiss defending champion, Bernard Stamm, who holds a two-week lead over second-place Koji Shiraishi of Japan. Stamm can lose only if he sinks or breaks down irreparably.

The only podium place still in active play is third. Spaniard Unai Basurko has a one-day, 17-hour lead over Knox-Johnston. The two are pals off the water, but the Englishman intends to upend his mate. "I have to catch him," he said. "There are two Unais: One, my friend, whom I love, and the other, my competitor, whom I hate."

The boats depart Norfolk next Sunday at 1 p.m. after four days of public festivities at the Waterside Mall, where all competitors are tied up. The boats will be on display from 10 a.m. Thursday till Sunday morning, when they depart for the starting line off Hampton Roads.

Knox-Johnston will be around, unmistakable in his snowy beard, very likely with a cigarette in one hand and, if it's after 5, a cocktail in the other. His secret to longevity and good health?

"They did a survey of 20 people in England who lived to be 100," he said, "and 16 of them credited it to a dram every evening. I'm not going to argue with 80 percent."

As for cigarettes, "The smoke tells you where the wind is."

(To follow race developments, check the Web site http://www.velux5oceans.com.)

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SHAD SEASON: Shad fishing was booming on the Potomac near Chain Bridge early last week, but slowed when the weather cooled. Expect the spring run to resume in earnest as the water warms again, say the folks at Fletcher's Boathouse (202-244-0461).