Like some who find the desert the real hero of the David Lean classic Lawrence of Arabia, the actual hero of sea voyages is the sea, with its known tendencies and its unpredictability. The sea spares none. Not even the world’s best sailors.
By late April, of the 16 sailors who had started the 2022 Golden Globe Race (GGR), only three were left in the main race category that demands solo, non-stop sailing.
Two others stood pushed to the Chichester Class (one stopover availed). The rest had retired: this included two major accidents — one boat sinking in the Indian Ocean last November and another getting rolled and dismasted in the southern Atlantic Ocean in April this year.
Storms aren’t all that the sea serves up: it also treats sailboats to windless conditions.
Nothing captured the sea’s effect on a race and those tracking it as well as this comment, posted on GGR’s Facebook page after the world was informed of Kirsten Neuschafer being seven nautical miles from the finish but with no wind to push her on:
“All of us on the YouTube live chat are pointing hairdryers, leaf blowers out windows and waving towels and beach blankets towards coastal France!”
By the afternoon of April 28, the situation must have felt similar to Abhilash Tomy’s fans too. Anticipation had built up and the Indian sailor was expected at Les Sables-d’Olonne in France that day. But thanks to the weather, the ETA (expected time of arrival) stood revised to late morning on April 29.
Eventually, at 04:46 hours Universal Time Coordinated (UTC) on April 29, Abhilash crossed the finish line to come second in the prestigious race. It was the 236th day since the race began.
Neuschafer is also the first South African to win such an event. Her voyage was remarkable not just for the quality of solo sailing but also the rescue of a fellow participant, Tapio Lehtinen.
The rescue happened in November when Lehtinen’s boat sank suddenly in the Indian Ocean. Neuschafer was awarded the Rod Stephen Seamanship Trophy by the Cruising Club of America for the rescue.
The first among the participants to reach Les Sables-d’Olonne after a full circumnavigation was Simon Curwen of England. He had led the race by a considerable margin for much of the voyage before the need to repair his boat forced him to halt in Chile, relegating him to the Chichester Class of the race.
Simon nevertheless caught up with the competitors who had gone past him during the halt, overtook them and finished ahead of all at 10:38 UTC on April 27.
Two things set the GGR apart from other races involving circumnavigation of the planet. It has the flavour of a retro-sailing event, with some aspects of the technology allowed by the race having been pegged back to conditions that existed several decades ago.
Second, a non-stop voyage around the planet takes a massive toll on both sailor and boat. This is where Abhilash’s story becomes special. In 2013 he had become the first Indian to complete a solo, non-stop circumnavigation in a sailboat as part of the Indian Navy’s Sagar Parikrama project.
In 2018, he participated in that year’s GGR only to end up seriously injured (his boat was rolled and dismasted) following a severe storm in the southern Indian Ocean. After the rescue, he underwent surgery and rehabilitation and eventually got back to flying and sailing, the activities that defined him as a naval aviator and one of the all-time greats of Indian sailing.
He then signed up for the 2022 edition of the GGR and returned to the race with the Bayanat — the boat named after his main sponsor for the voyage, a company from the United Arab Emirates that specialises in AI-powered geospatial intelligence.
Abhilash is now retired from the navy. His passage in the 2022 GGR wasn’t easy. Although he kept himself in the basket of race leaders, the position likely revealed little of what he was actually enduring.
In 2022, there was a new ingredient in the mix — the memories of the September 2018 accident. Those tracking the 2022 race and reviewing videos posted from the periodic rendezvous with sailors at checkpoints suspected that Abhilash was battling anxiety in the portion of the GGR leading to the southern Indian Ocean.
This was vindicated by his subsequent admission (in communications with the race organisers) of a weight lifted after he got past the site of the 2018 accident.
From that point on, his worries seemed mostly about addressing the needs of his boat, which kept developing complaints. But he found solutions, improvising with what was available on board.
The resultant absence of a stopover for repairs featuring external assistance kept him alive in the competitive solo, non-stop segment of the race.
Amid this struggle, he coped with his old injuries acting up as a consequence of long hours of work, steering and maintaining the boat.
What reached Les Sables-d’Olonnes on April 29 should therefore be a package of Abhilash and Bayanat that captures what it takes to sail single-handed over an extended period of time.
“It’s a big moment for me,” Abhilash said after the finish, according to a video posted on the GGR Facebook page. He underlined that this was the first time an Asian had secured a podium finish in a round-the-world race in any format.
“I’m happy to have completed the circle. The stigma of losing a boat (in 2018)…. I didn’t want to, you know, once is an accident, twice is a habit! So, I really wanted to get Bayanat back and I can tell you, Bayanat got me back,” Abhilash said.
Asked about the impact of his podium finish in India, Abhilash underlined how small the number of yachts in all of India was. He said that if he could think of a circumnavigation race and complete it, it meant Indian youngsters can do a lot.
Responding to a message of congratulations from Admiral R. Hari Kumar, the navy chief, Abhilash recalled the support he had received from the senior officer in his effort to take part in the 2018 GGR. Abhilash recalled that when he suffered the accident in the 2018 GGR, Kumar had been in the operations room directing the rescue.
(The writer is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai)
