Sailing Magazine
by Richard Crockett
My sincere apologies for the rather long break, but who would have thought it would take a full month to have an iMac repaired in Cape Town, and three weeks to have a faulty NAS drive replaced under warranty! Plus a few other challenges thrown in on the way certainly did not help.
Normal service has now been resumed.
So as today is the first day of August, I have decided to dedicate the day to ‘Voortrekker 1’, Bruce Dalling and the birth of the South Atlantic Races known by most as the Cape to Rio Races.
Why? It’s very simple actually, as it was on 1 August 1968, that’s 55 years ago today, that Admiral H H Biermann suggested in his speech welcoming Dalling home, that “South Africa should take a lead in arranging a South Atlantic yacht race”.
A group of committed ocean racing types took this proposal to heart, and despite the odds, they staged the longest ocean race in the world at the time – the race from Cape Town to Rio in 1971.
The rest is history now as 18 races across the South Atlantic have been completed.
There are three separate pieces to today’s archive news as follows:
Journey’s End. South Atlantic Race Proposed: 1968 08 01 – stitched final 334 – 801 – OCR 1
2 Rescued in Path of Voortrekker: 1968 08 01 – stitched final 334 – 801 – OCR 2
No Hitches in ‘Operation Trekker’: 1968 08 01 – stitched final 334 – 801 – OCR 3
