Sailing Magazine
by Richard Crockett
Back in the day the Mercury newspaper in Durban ran the Idler’s Column daily. This tended to be a humorous look at what was news in the day, and for many it was the first piece they turned to every day. I know that I did.
The Idler was for many years John Vigor, an avid Mirror dinghy sailor who sailed aboard Dave Cox’s ‘Diana K’ as navigator in the 1971 Cape to Rio Race.
He was a good man with a wicked sense of humour and a very sharp pencil.
Here are his opening few paragraphs:
“Dear Bruce, – As far as yachting goes, most of the boys at Bert’s Bar couldn’t tell a stern board from an outboard. But they have deep-seated, almost instinctive feelings about what is right and wrong in sport, and they are 100 per cent with you in your decision not to protest against Geoffrey William and the ‘Sir Thomas Lipton’.
“They say there is far too much bad feeling in sport today, too many bad losers and too much bickering about results.
“When they first heard that Williams’s yacht was being helped by a shore based computer they were very unhappy, and when the Sir Thomas Lipton rounded a mark of the course incorrectly at the finish, they were incensed.”
This letter, I think, confirms what many people thought at the time. It’s another good read.
READ IT ALL HERE: 1986 07 02 – Mercury – Bruce Dalling – 003218 – S&A – OCR
