Ketch.
L/B/D: 32 × 11.1 × 5 (9.8m × 3.4m × 1.5m).
Tons: 14 TM. Hull: wood. Comp.: 1-5. Mach.: aux.
Des.: Production Promotions, Ltd. Built: Colaba
Workshop Ltd., Bombay, India; 1964.
Merchant marine officer Robin
Knox-Johnson was stationed in India with the
British Steam Navigation Company when he built
the teak-hulled ketch Suhaili. (The
name is Arabic for the southeast wind.) Ordered
home for work on the run between England and
Africa, he sailed Suhaili the 12,000
miles back to London with his brother and a
friend. A year later, motivated in part by
rumors that the French yachtsman Eric Tabarly
was planning a nonstop, solo
circumnavigation—and determined that an
English sailor should be the
first—Knox-Johnson began preparing for the
same. In the meantime, the Sunday Times
put up the Golden Globe award for the first
person to accomplish this feat. Between June 1
and October 31, 1969, six boats set sail: John
Ridgway's English Rose, Chay Blyth's Dytiscus,
Suhaili, the French Bernard Moitessier's Joshua,
and two English trimarans, Donald Crowhurst's Teignmouth
Electron and Nigel Tetley's Victress.
Suhaili sailed third,
departing Falmouth on June 14, 1968. Over the
course of the next 310 days, she would log an
average of 96.2 miles per day, following what
Sir Francis Chichester had called the clipper
route on his one-stop circumnavigation in Gipsy
Moth IV. Suhaili did not have an
easy time of it. A knockdown off the Cape of
Good Hope rendered her radio inoperable for most
of the rest of the voyage. Crossing the Indian
Ocean, Knox-Johnson decided to sail through Bass
Strait rather than south of Tasmania, and there Suhaili
took another knockdown that resulted in damage
to the water tanks, tiller, and self-steering
gear. Pressing on, he crossed the Tasman Sea and
sailed through Foveaux Strait between New
Zealand's South Island and Stewart Island, only
to run aground on a sandbar near Dunedin. (The
challenge judges determined that this did not
constitute a stop.) Shortly after this he
radioed his sponsors, the Sunday Mirror
and True magazine:
I am beginning to wonder how
much of the original boat I am going to be
left with by the time I reach home. So far I
have written off the self-steering gear, two
tillers, a jib, a spinnaker, half the cooking
stove, and the water tank. The cabin has
shifted and leaks, and its canvas cover is
cracking up.
This upbeat transmission was
his last for 134 days, during which Suhaili
ran her easting down in the Roaring Forties,
rounded Cape Horn on January 17, 1969, and
sailed up the Atlantic. There was no word of Suhaili
until April 5, when a British tanker spoke her
about 500 miles west of the Azores. Thirteen
days later she was off the coast of England, but
four days of adverse gales kept Knox-Johnson
from making port until April 22, when he landed
at Falmouth, having sailed 30,123 miles in 313
days.
While his achievement garnered
Knox-Johnson the Golden Globe, his fellow
sailors seemed poised to complete the circuit in
faster time. As it happened, none finished.
Blyth was forced to land in South Africa. Having
averaged 110.6 miles per day, Tetley's Victress
broke up after 247 days at sea, 1,200 miles from
Plymouth. After rounding Cape Horn, Moitessier
thought better of racing and decided to stay in
the Roaring Forties before turning north for
Tahiti, sailing 37,455 miles in 301 days without
touching land. Most curious of all was the fate
of Donald Crowhurst, whose Teignmouth
Electron was found drifting in the Atlantic
on July 10, only days after he had slipped over
the side.
Suhaili was repaired
and Knox-Johnson resumed long-distance voyaging
in her. In 1989, he crossed the Atlantic using
only fifteenth-century navigational techniques
and instruments. Two years later, Suhaili
made her first voyage north of the Arctic
Circle, when Knox-Johnson took a group of four
climbers and photographers to attempt Cathedral
Mountain, 30 miles inland from Greenland's
Kangerdlugssuaq Fjord (68°12N, 31°50W). Suhaili
is maintained in sailing condition at St.
Katherine Dock, London.
Knox-Johnson, A World of
My Own.
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