With a far flung club like the OCC there are inevitably gaps in communication,

especially through the healthy gossip which helps to make a club tick. This was

largely compensated for by the much improved and regular Newsletter produced

by Secretary Jeremy Knox. He developed a regular format, with snippets on

members gleaned from around the world, rally reports, small ads, and – most

important – a two year rolling diary of Club events. It came out quarterly, on

time, and did much to restore confidence after the recent upheavals. As a further

step to transparency a ‘Know your Committee’ feature was begun, in order to

introduce Committee members to the Club at large.

Chris Watney’s paper on the way forward had included a need to modernise

Flying Fish, which had remained outwardly the same for the 25 years of David

Wallis’ editorship. In 1988 David produced a suggested new cover design, but

the Committee rejected it as too modern. However they did agree to change to

A5 size, having stuck with the smaller quarto – which had meant having the

paper specially cut to size – long after the introduction of the new metric sizes,

and for one issue in 1989 Flying Fish was a slightly larger edition of the old

style. However, David’s next attempt to modernise the cover, with a compass

rose overprinted with a rather mean-looking flying fish travelling west to east,

was agreed. Unfortunately the compass rose was not quite central and showed

15°15' Westerly variation, which would have been correct for the English Channel

in the middle of the war. It also had some messy and meaningless position lines

and soundings sketched in around it. Nevertheless, it was certainly a move

away from the past, although not entirely approved by the elder brethren who

had made their boat bookshelves to fit the handy little size of old.

Unfortunately, despite the enhanced outward appearance, Flying Fish was

otherwise in decline. David was not a well man, but he never confessed how ill

he was and refused help to the end. Anne Hammick, recently back from her

north Atlantic circuit with sister Liz, for which they had deservedly won the

Barton Cup, offered to help, as did Mary Barton, but he steadfastly refused any

assistance. David did not blame the scarcity of issues entirely on lack of funds,

but showed his conservative attitude towards modern techniques in his editorial

in 1987:

An unbelievable eighteen months have elapsed since we were

last able to publish. The secretary blames non-payment of

subscriptions. He may well be right, though I think that the policy

of computerising the club has a lot to answer for. Bigger

organisations than ours have come to grief on the same rocks.

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Computers give undeniable advantages, but they are impersonal,

and still need human guidance.

In his next issue he let his frustration boil over when he complained of ‘the

incompetent bungling of the previous Committee’. Some of the trouble could,

however, be laid at David’s own door as both proof-reading – which he insisted

on doing himself – and layout became more and more confused towards the

end. It is difficult to remove a stalwart worker, especially one who has been in

post for 28 years with little remuneration, but in retrospect a formula should

have been found when dealing with such an important aspect of the Club. He

died in harness in the spring of 1990 having just sent the latest issue to the

printers.

It was a pity that David left us on a down slope, as he had given so much of

his time to the Club and had developed the former Newsletter from a badly

printed sheet of foolscap into a compelling collection of seagoing yarns between

stiff covers, bearing the distinctive logo of our worldwide fraternity. He had

thus become a friend of thousands, even more so to those who sent in a scrappy

manuscript which appeared in print as an elegantly worded article. He was very

well-read and gave us the benefit of many well chosen aphorisms and quotations

in odd corners of the magazine. Only a year before his death his long service

was recognised by the award of the Water Music Trophy. A further piece of

silverware was added to the Club’s growing collection when, following his

death, David’s sister, Mrs Mary Coulter, presented a handsome engraved salver

in his memory. Simply called the David Wallis Trophy, it was decided that it

should be awarded annually to the member who had made the most valuable

contribution to Flying Fish.

On David’s death Anne Hammick stepped into the breach, initially on a

temporary basis, and started by tidying up the front cover. The compass rose

became central, the messy spider’s webs around it disappeared, and keen eyed

members will note that the variation became 13°45' West, correct for 1954

(see page 199). Anne also brought greater order between the covers with a

regular and predictable sequence of information. The Commodore got a column

and even the Admiral wrote in her first issue. She enlisted a team of proof

readers who between them managed to expunge virtually all errors from her

first and subsequent issues.

In her first editorial in the 1990/2 issue Anne quoted a rather plaintive letter,

but perhaps it pointed towards a weakness that had crept in:

‘Reading Flying Fish I often feel that one needs to be a member

of an inner clique to contribute – everyone who writes seems to

know everyone else! We recently spent some time on the

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Amazon, but I don’t imagine that an account of our adventures

would interest other members, as none of them know us.’

The writer was invited to join the ‘clique’ by contributing, but unfortunately

she didn’t. However, there is no doubt that a few eloquent members seemed to

hog the pages, despite the Editor’s frequent pleas for more folk to write, as she

could only work with the material provided.

A more gratifying letter was received from Founder member Ernest Chamberlain

in Gibraltar, reminding us of the sailing he had enjoyed in the old days and

saying how much he would like to hear some other old-timers’ reminiscences.

We were rewarded with a rejoinder in the next issue from fellow Founder Joe

Cunningham who, like several of the originals, had qualified in a little Vertue,

his being named Ice Bird. It was an appropriate name, as he explained in an

article published the following year. He was a practising doctor in Newfoundland

and visited many of his patients, winter and summer, by boat. What more

enjoyable way of carrying out his duties than under sail? Joe thought. So he had

a Vertue built in Southampton and sailed her back, qualifying with a 26 day

singlehanded passage from Ireland to Madeira. His article was accompanied by

some delightful sketches which somehow brought it alive better than any

photographs.

This reminiscing had started a trend. In the same issue we heard, after a long

gap, from old timer, if not founder, Roger Fothergill. He had bought Tern IV,

one of Claud Worth’s famous boats, many years previously and in the early

days of the Club had regaled members in his inimitable style with the many

lively incidents that befell him, always stretching one’s credulity. This recent

admonition to the old hands got him going again and now he stretched our

belief even further. In his later years he had taken to sailing smaller boats,

which gave him considerable problems with overweight crew:

‘This same Miss B distinguished herself again later on that week.

She and three others were with me in an open centreboard sloop

beating into a jumpy sea when, losing her grip somehow, she fell

with a crash between the centreboard casing and the lee gunwale.

Now I have already hinted that Miss B was a woman of weight. I

put the helm down in a flash and got the vessel about, as

otherwise this sudden transference of ballast might have capsized

us. As she didn’t get up immediately, and fearing that she might

have been hurt, I hove the sloop to and went to offer a helping

hand. I gave a polite pull, which had no effect at all, and finally a

jolly good heave – nothing stirred. The awful truth dawned on

me. Stuck fast by Jove! Wedged like a cask, ‘bung up and bilge

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free’.

How to shift her was the problem: it called for a jack, which

was a thing we didn’t have – a man can’t think of everything and

cargo screws went out with the windjammers. I collected the

rest of the crew and, grasping whatever seemed to offer a

convenient handhold, without enquiring too closely as to its nature,

we tailed on and hove with might and main but couldn’t start her

an inch. Stifling a suggestion which was almost on my lips for

someone to strike up a chantey, I cast about me for some other

method. And it was then I noticed that by some happy mischance

the two sweeps with which the vessel was equipped had both

been stowed on the same side of the centreboard casing instead

of one on each side and, in short, Miss B was lying on top of

them. Calling to mind the man who said ‘Give me a fulcrum and

I will move the Earth’, I mustered all hands again, one to each

end of a sweep, and with a quick ‘Heave Ho’ we broke her out

like a bale of cotton, none the worse for wear and quite unruffled

in spirits.’

Nor was obesity confined to his female crew; of one male member he reports:

‘When given any task to perform he set off on all fours, but due

to the motion of the ship and his almost spheroid shape he always

ended up completely prone – flat he could never be – rocking

gently about his equator.’

One of the new Editor’s early duties was to record the death of the Admiral, Sir

Alec Rose, in January 1991 at the age of 82. Alec joined after coming fourth in

the second OSTAR in 1964, and then followed in the wake of Francis Chichester

singlehanded around the world in 1967–8. He was never publicity-conscious

like Francis, but that did not make him any less of a seaman – he just did things

quietly and in turn was afforded just as much respect. As Admiral he rarely

missed an AGM and on occasions took firm charge when circumstance

demanded. Always approachable and courteous, he was well summed up by a

member who wrote in Flying Fish after his death:

‘I only met him once or twice, but was impressed by his down-

to-earth attitudes and friendliness towards the people around

him, while at the same time giving off an aura of a person who

has achieved great things. I have always felt respect for Sir

Alec, who will be greatly missed by us as members of the OCC

and will leave a tremendous gap at the highest level of our Club.’

Another of Chris Watney’s initiatives, in conjunction with Andrew Bray, Editor

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Geoff Pack – a big man in every way

of Yachting Monthly, and Geoff Pack, the Assistant Editor (both ocean sailors

of considerable experience), was to organise a symposium on Long Term

Cruising to be run jointly by the Club and YM. The first event took place in

September 1990 at the College of Nautical Studies in Warsash, providentially

on a glorious September weekend so that delegates could soak up the imparted

wisdom with a backdrop of yachts sailing on the Solent. It was a great success

and was the prototype for a series of five such gatherings over the next 12

years. The programme was gradually refined so that during the space of 48

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hours a wealth of information could be delivered by a number of experts in

their fields, and the seminars became acknowledged as the accepted way of

launching timorous but ambitious deep-sea sailors. Indeed, they began to attract

delegates from all over the world, one seminar having representatives from

Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Australia and the Continent. They also produced a

welcome yield for the Club, the last being almost embarrassingly profitable.

The following year Geoff deemed his family of three children under six years

were old enough to undertake some long term cruising of their own so, armed

with the insignia of a Roving Rear Commodore, they left for an open-ended

cruise with a slow circumnavigation in mind. Within a year, however, Geoff

was invited back to be interviewed for the job of editor as Andrew was moving

over to take charge of Yachting World. Geoff had a predicament. He had left a

pregnant Loulou and family in Trinidad and she was within days of the limit

allowed for flying. If he accepted the job there was no time to sail home and he

was loathe to abandon their long-cherished family ambition. However, he did

take the job and Loulou packed up the family, sold the boat and flew home

within the few days of grace remaining. Shortly after taking up his new post

Geoff was promoted to Rear Commodore UK so his rank and connections

were re-established, but this time with more clout.

One of Andrew’s last projects before changing magazines was to revive the

series of ‘Ideal Cruiser’ surveys which had previously been undertaken by

Yachting World. A wide and deep questionnaire was circulated to all members,

with a very good response, and the results showed a marked move forward

from the still fairly conservative views expressed in 1974. The majority preferred

a production GRP cutter with an overall length of between 39ft and 47ft. This

compared with a wooden split-rig of around 35ft overall eighteen years

previously. The majority wanted fully-battened mains and over 80% would

have a roller headsail. Electrical requirements had made a quantum leap, with

over 90% wanting a refrigerator and more than half wanting a separate generator.

It was heartening to read that the number one priority for navigation was still

the sextant, however there were no purists left who wouldn’t take a GPS

along. An artist produced sketches of a boat representing the average views,

and she turned out to be a fairly conservative, fin-and-skeg, aft-cockpit cruiser,

dubbed the Flying Fish 43. Some years later, when Andrew had a boat designed

by Rob Humphreys, he used many details taken from the survey results.

During the years of muddle the trophies had been neglected. No OCC Award is

recorded between 1982 and 1988, though Flying Fish suggests that some were

decided upon but never actioned. Similarly there is no record of the OCC Award

of Merit being awarded before 1987. Mary and her team were determined to

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bring things up to date, and generously spread awards around the world to

deserving but overlooked members, some retrospectively.

The Award of Merit was given, undated, to Martin Creamer for a 1983–4

circumnavigation without modern instruments or charts, intended to show that

prehistoric movement around the globe was perfectly possible in the absence

of such impedimenta. Dr John Bockstoce, the curator of the New Bedford

Museum in Massachusetts, received the award in 1988 for the first traverse of

the North West Passage under sail from west to east, followed by a non-stop

passage to New York which he used as his qualifier when he joined the succeeding

year. In that same year Mike Birch also received the accolade for his incredible

recovery after colliding with a whale and nearly sinking his trimaran, Fujicolour.

In 1989 there were a further three Awards of Merit – Ewen Southby-Tailyour

for the invaluable assistance rendered to the Royal Navy during the Falklands

war through the coastal survey that he had made previously; Robin Knox-

Johnston, who had recently left the club but continued to make a great

contribution to sailing generally; and the skipper and crew of Creighton’s

Naturally for their skilful rescue in the southern ocean during the previous

year’s Round the World Race.

At about this time Sid Yaffe, Rear Commodore Australia, boosted the appeal

of the local branch by presenting a handsome trophy specifically for Australian

members who had started or completed a meritorious voyage from home waters.

It is a heavy piece of carved teak, depicting a vessel sailing over a background

outline of their continent. Like the Barton Cup, it is not competitive and therefore

is not always awarded. Three recipients have taken both the Australian Trophy

and the Barton Cup in the same year.

One of our earliest Newsletter yarns was of two young men attempting to sail

from the UK to Australia in a small boat named Skaffie. One of them rejoiced in

the name of Gordon Auchterlonie and the other was David Beard – still a

member, and Port Officer Brisbane for the past 20 years. Perhaps the most

difficult qualifying voyage is from Falmouth to Gibraltar, a distance of

1020 miles all with the temptation of many attractive harbours under one’s

lee. Multiply that five-fold and the temptation would be almost overpowering,

but in 1991 David stuck it out to became the first person to circumnavigate

Australia both non-stop and singlehanded. It was not in the same 20ft Skaffie

which had given us so much entertainment in the second year of the Club,

but in a 35ft steel Adams sloop of the same name. He had hoped to complete

the circuit in 70 days but in the event took 68½, and raised considerable

funds for his chosen charity, Save the Children. No one could rival David

for the most meritorious short-handed voyage and he was awarded the

1991 Rose Medal, as well as the Australian Trophy.

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The early 1990s witnessed a veritable explosion of intrepid voyaging, giving the

Awards sub-committee serious difficulty in sorting the merely meritorious from

the truly outstanding. As already mentioned, members were having to explore

further and further afield to find the challenge of somewhere new, and they

were not found wanting. Inevitably the ice sorted the men from the boys, and

there were plenty of men with voyages deep into both the Arctic and the

Antarctic.

It is difficult to understand what drives the ‘ice men’ without having

experienced the thrill and the fear of being in so hostile an environment, but

clearly the attraction is addictive as those who sail in such waters cannot resist

going back time and again. We heard earlier from John Gore-Grimes about

sailing with Warren Brown in Antarctica, and only three years later Warren

himself wrote about his sortie north into the Greenland ice. His boat gives a

greater degree of confidence than John’s Nicholson 31 or Willy Ker’s Contessa

32, but even at 61ft things can get worrying. Warren described how they were

beset off the west coast of Greenland in 1990:

‘On the night of 15th August we left for Qaqortoq (Julianehavn).

That night is one I will always remember, having never felt quite

so nervous at sea. We had hoped to reach Qaqortoq late that

night, but Greenland Radio announced that a F8 gale was in the

offing. War Baby headed for a gap between four very large

icebergs (I estimated their size to be about 250,000 to 300,000

tons each) and we were soon in the middle of them, with weather

conditions changing very rapidly. Darkness fell, the wind came

dead ahead at about 30 knots true, and a dense fog came in so

that one could see neither the bow nor the stern. I was not too

worried at that point – but then the radar went out and we were

blind. Not being able to pinpoint the icebergs we hove-to, and

tried to keep War Baby in approximately the same position as

when we lost the radar. It had been out for some eight hours

before one of the crew noticed that the shock cord holding the

main boom topping lift away from the mainsail had come loose

and wrapped itself around the radar, shorting it out. I did indeed

feel foolish, but also the fog had been so thick that we could not

have seen the snarl on the radar mast. I now realize why all

boats on the Greenland coast carry two radars.’

But even a boat as big and seaworthy as War Baby cannot prevent accidents.

After leaving Greenland for Ireland they were running before storm force winds

when:

‘One of the crew, who had been ill, had not fastened herself

properly into her bunk, and had then gone to sleep with both

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arms inside her sleeping bag. As War Baby took a violent roll

both bag and occupant were tossed some 15ft from the top bunk

on the port side of the main saloon, over the top of the table and

onto the cabin floor to leeward. She was in considerable pain

with a dislocated shoulder, a blow to the head and perhaps even

more serious injuries. We did not have enough sedatives to take

her all the way to Ireland, and with storm conditions we could

not retreat. There was no option but to get her off War Baby. A

single side band call via Greenland Radio to a doctor in Qaqortoq

confirmed that we were treating her in the correct manner, but

that we should make all efforts to get her to a hospital. An hour

later Greenland Radio put us in touch with the Merkattze, a large

German hospital ship on her way to Hamburg and, through great

good fortune, only some 125 miles astern. After ten minutes on

the radio they agreed to take off our injured crew member. By

increasing her speed to 14 knots and cutting ours to 4 knots by

trailing warps astern we arranged a rendezvous for early that

evening – at the time the decision was made we were doing 8 to

10 knots under bare poles in 55/60 knots true wind.

Designed to take sick crew off trawlers in bad weather, the

Merkattze was equipped with inflatable dinghies and special

derricks to keep them well away from the side of the vessel. As

I kept War Baby hove-to in breaking seas and winds of well

above 50 knots true, a trained rescue crew wearing hard hats

transferred the casualty aboard from our leeward side. Soon we

saw the rescue dinghy being hoisted two decks high, the ship

almost disappearing in the heavy seas. We were indeed fortunate.’

While little ice is to be found at Cape Horn it is equally hostile, as experienced

by Denise Evans, Wolfgang Neuhuber, and Michael Johnson who all reported

on that corner of the world in the same 1991 issue of Flying Fish.

Denise sailed her Tradewind 33, Dunlin of Wessex, from Wales to the Magellan

Straits, but that was the easy part. A less determined sailor would have given

up, but with her crew of son and friend they forced a passage into the Straits

against incredible odds. They were driven back by fierce winds and currents

so many times that the signal halyard almost wore through with the frequent

changes of courtesy flag as they crossed from Argentine to Chile and back

again. Denise describes their first attempt:

‘In the evening the wind dropped, enabling us to run down the

coast on a course to clear the dangers lying southeast of Cape

Virgins. We plotted the changing bearings on the light, calculating

that the tide would start to run into the Magellan Straits soon

after the light came abeam. But in the early hours the wind got

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up again, rapidly rising from westerly F5 to F9 and above, and

with wind against tide the seas grew to a ‘full, rolling boil’. It was

obvious that we could make no headway. Storm jib and triple-

reefed main were too much for the mast, which shook and

thrummed madly, even with no sail set. Fearful of losing it we

once again turned tail, streaming warps.’

For a whole day they lay out at sea, hove-to or a-hull:

‘Towards evening the wind moderated and we put up a scrap of

sail, only to take it down almost at once, and by 0330 on 17th

November we were lying a-hull again with the tiller lashed down.

As the glass started to fall in the early hours of 18th November

the wind dropped and went round to the north. Once again we

headed for the Cape, keeping well inshore this time so as to be

clear of Roca Virgen. We rounded the Cape and anchored in 39ft

halfway between it and Punta Dungeness, little realizing how well

we were to get to know this spot.

Innocents that we were, we expected to be able to move on up

the Straits with the next favourable tide, though it was clear that

we also needed a northwesterly wind. By the early hours on 19th

it had shifted obligingly. We weighed anchor at dawn, cheerfully

ran up our brand new Chilean courtesy flag and streamed the

log as we headed towards Punta Dungeness. As we passed the

point the wind backed to the west, rapidly rising to gale force.

This was no coincidence, it was a rule: at the start of the west-

going stream the wind freshens from the west. A no-win situation.

Disheartened, we turned back to Fondeadero and anchored in