Refitting for frozen cruising
WHEN veteran ocean racer Ross Field refitted his 55 foot Joubert Nivelt expedition yacht Rosemary, his approach was based on his 40 years of professional offshore racing experience. It meant he was always willing to embrace new technology and had honed a brutal approach to shedding unnecessary weight and complications.
Frostbite on the lungs, sinking by iceberg and being lunch for a polar bear: just a few reasons why I kept saying “no” when former Whitbread Round the World Race winner Ross Field asked me to sail the North West Passage. But then he said he was too old to sail in more than 25 knots or heel over at more than 15 degrees. That sounded like a splendid way to sail, so I said “yes”.
Ross has been around the world nearly five times, including as crew on Sir Peter Blake’s victorious, big red ketch Steinlager 2, sailing for New Zealand in the 1989-1990 Whitbread Race. In 1994 Ross campaigned and skippered the blue hulled Whitbread 60 yacht Yamaha which won its division
Ross liked winning, so he approached Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch for sponsorship. The result was News Corporation, with Bart Simpson’s cartoon head on the spinnaker. But a broken rudder broke News Corporation’s chances of winning that year.
Ross’s last professional offshore race was on the Class 40 Buckley Systems with his son Campbell Field in the 2011-12 two-handed Global Ocean Race. The organisers had placed a hypothetical scoring gate at longitude 47° south in the Southern Ocean leg from Wellington, New Zealand to Punta del Este, Uruguay.
Ross had declared it was bullshit and that it subjected the boats to greater dangers than ice as they battled 35 knots upwind to make the gate in yachts designed for downwind work.
His words proved prophetic: while leading the fleet, Buckley Systems launched off a huge wave that evicted Ross from his seat at the navigation station. The hard landing compressed his spine and ended their race. Ross endured a painful sail back to New Zealand and surgery with many months recovery.
That indicated it was a good time to stop offshore
