#whitbread 1985

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Skip Novak and Simon Le Bon in the 1985-86 Whitbread Race

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Grant Dalton received a call the day after New Zealand’s America’s Cup ‘disaster’ in 2003. It set him - and his country - on a truly remarka

1978. New Zealand had become a stopover for competing yachts.

I was staying at my grandparents’ home in Auckland, which overlooked the harbour. A Kiwi sailor, Peter Blake, was a crewman aboard the yacht, Heath’s Condor. I had taken a keen interest in the race since their departure from Cape Town.

I remember watching as the big, wooden, mahogany Condor sailed into Auckland Harbour carrying a massive yellow spinnaker. Condor won the leg to Auckland.

My life changed at that moment. I knew what I wanted to do.

I decided I had to do the offshore thing. I didn’t have a lot of experience. I hadn’t been offshore. I was a skiff sailor and an accountant.

I left my job and started offshore racing on keel boats doing the Admiral’s Cup, the Fiji Race, Noumea and the Hobart. I also took up sail-making and applied to Peter Blake with a view to joining his new build, a boat called Ceramco in the 1981/82 round-the-world.

I wasn’t accepted.

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The Trivial Pursuit game asked about something other than the three things about Simon Le Bon I know, but the bonus fact turned out to be one of those three things!

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Some useful reference images for GG: The Whitbread boats docked in Auckland and a weatherfax printed aboard Lion New Zealand.

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The Cape Town part is less cringey here than in Blake’s Odyssey, Blake says they passed Robben Island “where Mandela was imprisoned”, talks about meeting with people who are working to reform the system and provide equal opportunities for Black South Africans, and says that “communication and understanding” will be key to fixing the situation— which they were, in the end.

But the “We shouldn’t have economic sanctions or ban them from sports, international interaction will do more to inspire them to be better” argument he makes when that doesn’t seem to be working with Russia or the Gulf States today but the bans DID help force reforms in South Africa… yeah, Peter Blake was on the wrong side there. And saying that the Boers are stubborn and resist change because their ancestors had to be to settle in “a wild and mostly empty land” is pretty uncomfortable wording. Blake certainly wasn’t pro-Apartheid, but he comes off as way more accommodating and passive about it than Skip Novak, who was smuggling in banned books in his own seabag. Really, the whole situation of the Royal Naval Sailing Association keeping the Whitbread route through Cape Town up to 1985 when so many other sports had already banned and/or distanced themselves from South Africa looks bad in retrospect and would be an interesting subject for an historical article or thesis.

(The crew making comments in the log making fun of Greenpeace also hasn’t aged too well— and given Blake’s environmental work later on, he might have thought the same thing later in life.)

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I don’t normally say “that is some leaded-gasoline behavior” about Peter Blake, but making the people on a spectator boat think you’re going to shoot them with a flare gun… is kind of leaded-gasoline behavior.

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Whatever happened to that guy, anyway?

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Drum: An Extraordinary Adventure

(Simon Le Bon and Drum in the 1985-86 Whitbread Race. Much more polished than the gritty, swear-y account Skip Novak gives in his book One Watch at a Time.)