A Voyage For Madmen
I recently read this book about the race to become the first person to sail around the World, single-handed without stopping and without resupply. After Sir Francis Chichester sailed around the World single-handed with one stop in Australia, the challenge was on for another sailor to complete the first non-stop solo circumnavigation. 1968 was the year when several yachtsmen were preparing for the challenge, and the Sunday Times very cleverly framed their support and coverage of the challenge as a race that anyone attempting the voyage would be entered into whether they liked it or not. This was the Golden Globe Race. First back would win the trophy and the fastest voyage would win £5,000.
It is a very enjoyable and interesting read with several lessons in project management that are relevant today for both business and expedition leaders.
It would be reasonable to assume that every entrant was an expert sailor, in a well-equipped and suitable yacht, with a good support team to have helped them prepare, but this was just not the case.
Four of the twelve sailors set off in yachts that were totally unsuitable for sailing in the Southern Ocean. Both John Ridgway and Chay Blyth had fibreglass coastal cruising yachts that were not up to the task and began to break up in the Atlantic before they even reached the toughest conditions in the Southern Ocean. They both had to retire. Nigel Tetley didn’t raise the sponsorship he needed to procure a suitable yacht and so settled for going in his live-aboard trimaran. It broke apart and sank on the final leg back up the Atlantic. He was rescued. Donald Crowhurst’s tragic story is more complex, he departed in a newly built but also inadequate yacht and he never returned home.
Time and again there are references to mission critical items failing and having no back-up or spares. Entrants were out of contact for months at a time when sea water got into their HF radios leaving them without any two-way communications. The quite useful self-steering mechanisms broke on several yachts and they didn’t have enough spares. The principle of not having a single point of failure on any mission critical items doesn’t seem to have been part of most of their planning.
Equipment failure can be planned for and anticipated. But setting off in a fundamentally unsuitable fragile yacht that couldn’t possibly complete the voyage made no sense for the sailors, or their sponsors, or their support teams. The before-you-start reality check is a useful step that these folks just didn’t take.
Dame Ellen MacArthur made a great point about her 2005 solo circumnavigation of the globe by saying that although she was alone on her yacht, she had a team of people behind her, and in her project team. In the Golden Globe Race, most of the support teams didn’t seem to have been up to much. They didn’t assess the psychological aspects of the months alone at sea beforehand, nor to have done much about it. In Donald Crowhurst’s case, the psychological stress of his situation, his dire finances, and the living nightmare of realising that his dream yacht was a failure were too much. He started to falsify the records of his position, in order to cheat his way to the cash prize. His yacht was found empty and his body was never recovered.
I also find it astonishing that so many suppliers, sponsors and backers gave their support, money, products and services to projects they must have realised were not up to the task before the sailors departed. If they had done any due diligence many should have either withdrawn their support, or, worked with the yachts to improve the situation before they set off. Several of them shouldn’t have left port. Even today it amazes me how few expedition sponsors do any due diligence testing.
It is a good read, and full of useful project management lessons, many of them are examples of what not to do. The basics of team selection, skills training, preparation, planning for every type of problem and mitigating them as best you can would have been useful tools for the 1968 sailors, and are just as valid for anyone embarking on a project or expedition today.