“Talking Sailing” From My Archives. Southstar Race. Bertie Out on His Own

by Richard Crockett

Yesterday I shared a build-up report on the Stannic Southstar singlehanded race to St Helena and back non-stop. Today I share the report on the race.

Winner Bertie Reed called it “the toughest race I’ve ever sailed” after completing the 3 700-mile course at a record-breaking 5,16 knot average; hard driving Tony Abbott finished triumphantly three days later in a state of near collapse; funny man Paul Rodgers, after an eventful race which included near blindness, an intractable stowaway parrot, a close encounter with a massive shark and a keel fouled by a sunken trawler, vowed “Never again – at least not for a while!”; and the “old man of the sea”, 55-year old tail-end Charlie Ian Duncan straggled in, sick of it all, three days after the prize giving.

That was the Stannic Southstar race – summed up so well in the opening paragraph of the report.

READ IT HERE:  Pages from 1986 05 – SAILING Magazine – OCR