A hero of our time
Michael Beaumont
CLOSE TO THE WIND by Pete Goss Headline, £18.99, pp. 282 This is the story of a brave man: a man who turned into the teeth of a hurricane to save the life of a fellow competitor in a sin- gle-handed round-the-world yacht race. It is about moral courage, perseverance, over- coming pain, and guts. I am not sure read- ers these days are up to facing this sort of writing, but if they are, this is a wonderful book, a book to make the reader realise that he or she could never be a hero. I rec- ommend it. It helps if you know something of the sea and the sailing of it, but only in the way that to have fought in a battle would help in understanding the citation for a VC. All you need, in both cases, is a little imagination.
Pete Goss starts his story well before the race that filled the world's newspapers with his heroism and which won him the Legion d'Honneur and a big kiss from President Chirac. He describes his first transatlantic race at the age of 24 in a boat so tired out when he bought it that before he reached America he could not get at most of his food because the flexing of the hull had jammed the cupboards shut. When he craned the boat out at Newport to check the damage, the keel fell off in the car- park. He becomes skipper in the first of Chay Blyth's races round the world and makes perceptive comments about team- work at sea and the emergence of character in extreme conditions, interspersed with practical tips such as the importance of fol- lowing your safety harness from your body down to the clip-on point to the boat before you undo it, or you'll find you have unclipped someone else.
When Goss is faced with raising money to build a boat for the single-handed round-the-world race his courage does not fail. Millionaires hesitate before ordering 50-foot boats to a one-off design. Goss is almost penniless when he does it, is pre- pared on occasion not to eat for two days, and sells his car, television and house despite having, by then, a wife and three children. So his wife is pretty damn feisty too.
As the race starts there are vivid descrip- tions of the physical challenges to come. He feels sick and bits break — nothing disas- trous and the exhilaration of high-speed sailing is vividly evoked, the front two- thirds of the boat out of the water planing over its own bow wave at 27 knots, the speed of a motor launch or a naval frigate near full throttle. In a sailboat that means
driving down a dirt track in a car with no sus- pension — the shocks running up through my legs and my knees bent to absorb the impact. The noise was deafening and the moment bloody marvellous.
Remember that at times he was going down the face of a wave the height of a six- storey building.
Then everything starts going wrong. A leak develops in an area out of sight: it takes 24 hours to fix. As he finishes, the boat crash-gybes, the spinnaker tangles up and it takes four hours to sort out — up the mast. Then the autopilot goes, followed by the generator that is supplying power for everything, including the equipment that tells him where he is — somewhere in the southern ocean out of reach. All the competitors are out of reach of everyone except each other when the hurricane starts, and the by now repaired satellite communication system records the Mayday message that one of the French boats is sinking. Goss is the only one anywhere near. The rescue is 160 miles away, straight upwind. The only sail he can use in that weight of wind is the size of a tablecloth, and he has to find a man on a life-raft in a screaming, heaving wilderness. How he does it is described graphically and without heroics, as is the rescue, sailing to the near- est hospital in Tasmania, rejoining the race with a time allowance but no outside help for man or boat and, before rounding Cape Horn, having to operate on himself without anaesthetic to save an arm. By the time Pete Goss reached the finishing line in France he was a hero, greeted by 150,000 cheering fans on the walls and quayside of les Sables d'Olonne. This book explains what he did to deserve that welcome.
'A fortune we spend on elocution and then she gets a tongue stud.'
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