This year The Course History
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T H E R A C E
This year The Course History |
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1 June 1968
The 1986 race was notable in several areas: the use of computer routing by Williams, Williams' shortcut through the Nantucket shoals, and the heavy weather encountered by competitors. Williams had enlisted the help of computer boffins at English Electric, who programmed their KDF9 machine with Sir Thomas Lipton's performance tables and wrote programs to cross these with weather forecasts from the Meteorological Office. During the race a 48 hour forecast map was produced by the KDF9 at Met Office, Bracknell each day at 0530. This was fed into the English Electric KDF9 in Queensway. At 0800 Williams would radio David Thorpe of the Daily Telegraph with the boat's current position, course and speed. Thorpe would relay this to Queensway. The computer calculated speed over all the possible routes Williams might take, then the three best courses were radioed back to Williams at 1100. The system worked well throughout, apart from one fairly major calculation bug that was found when 6 days out. Nowadays it is fairly routine for competitors to carry portable computers which can perform this kind of sophisticated computer assisted routing far faster and more conveniently than the system described. Private routing advice or weather information is not permitted to competitors under the 2000 rules. |
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The shortcut taken by Williams was due to an oversight by the race committee when formulating the sailing instructions. Competitors were told that they must sail south of Nantucket Light but the Instructions said competitors must sail south of Nantucket! Williams was allegedly called from the skippers briefing to answer a telephone call and missed this being explained. With radioed assurance that disqualification would not result, he sailed Sir Thomas Lipton through the dangerous Nantucket shoals in a gale, breaking water on either hand, using Loran, Depth Sounder, Compass and Log. Quite an achievement and yet amazingly no valid protest resulted. All this plus the largest and fastest boat yet to be built for the race gave Williams the required margin to recover the 12hour penalty he had incurred before the race started and still win by 17 hours. Many days of fog, many days of gales, a huge force 11 storm on the 11th of June and Hurricane Brenda all contributed to the high number of retirement (RET) and yachts abandoned at sea (ABN). The high casualty rate caused lingering controversy within the sailing establishment. Eric Tabarly was not so lucky this time, being forced to retire his potentially race winning Pen Duick IV trimaran after collision damage and gear failures. Follett's remarkable achievement with the small proa Cheers on the Azores route marked the beginning of the rise and rise of the multihulls in the single-handed transatlantic race. Jester, after two previous races with Hasler on the far northern route, was sailed by Michael Richey on the previously untried trade wind route in the far south. His main problem appears to have been running out of wine halfway through the passage. He was only carrying 10 gallons! Reverend Stephen Pakenham (Rob Roy): "The application to this race of worldly standards of glory can seem incongruous to those taking part, for whom the criterion is the virtue inherent in each crossing, how one man in one boat accepts and uses whatever Providence provides. Any glory there may be is but a shadow of that virtue." |
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