Singlehanded offshore racing

Ed Gorman explains why this is his favourite form of yacht racing

"Michel passe le Cap Horn"

Like many who work daily on a computer, I regularly go through my various filing cabinets and chuck out all the stuff I've seen, read and can now do without. The other day I was doing exactly this when I came across an e-mail from a friend in France dated 12th January, 2001.

I was just about to press the 'delete' button when I remembered what this was. "FW: Michel passe le Cap Horn: photo!" read the title. That's right, it's that amazing picture of Michel Desjoyeaux passing Cape Horn in PRB during the last Vendee Globe, just a month or so before he made it back to Les Sables d'Olonne to capture the Vendee at his first attempt.

"Bonjour," read the first attachment. "Michel a passe le Cap Horn a 19h07 heure francaise. Il a immortalise l'instant...." Given the many more famous images of single-handers on the oceans - for example the paintings of Suhali running before massive seas off Cape Horn in 1969, or the pictures Pete Goss took from on board Aqua Quorum in the Southern Ocean while on his way to rescue Raphael Dinelli in 1997 - you may wonder why this one should seem so special.

In many ways it is a rather unremarkable shot. There are no huge seas, Michel is not about to die and nor is he dangling 80ft in the air from a halyard. In fact he could just as easily be out for a cruise off the Brittany coast on a drizzly day with light winds causing the odd white horse here and there.

No, what I like about the picture is the way it captures so much - in its under-stated way - that makes single-handed ocean racing great. Michel is alone on his boat just a mile or so off the most feared landmark in world sailing. Imagine that. Just to be there in those circumstances takes real guts, self-belief and supreme seamanship. We know he has already sailed something like 16,000 miles on his own, including running the gauntlet of storms and ice in the Southern Ocean, and you can see the cost of that in the deep lines etched into his face.

Like many great single-handers, Michel is a modest man and this underlines the second key message in the picture, namely the unmistakable sense of achievement. Soon PRB will be delivered into the relative safety of the South Atlantic. But in the meantime she and her skipper have conquered one of the 'Everests' of the sport - an achievement which is hard to surpass in any other field of human endeavour - and you can see how much that means to him. Fittingly, as the caption writer put it, the moment is captured for ever by Michel's own photograph as he stands in PRB's cockpit like a conductor referring the applause to the orchestra behind him.

I could go on...there's a riding turn on that winch etc, etc, and the water on the solar panels suggests a recent rain shower, evidenced also by the low cloud on the hills just to the north and west of the Horn.

If you have got this far, you have probably worked out by now that single-handed ocean racers are my heroes. That's because what they do combines so many admirable attributes. They have to be courageous but not foolhardy, they have to be superb mariners with resourcefulness and ingenuity, they need to be able to face up to themselves and to conquer loneliness and, these days, in order to be successful, they need to be authentic grand-prix racers.

Single-handed ocean racing has a romance and drama about it which no other area of sailing and few aspects of life in general can match. In an increasingly over-protective world, the single-handers are the ones who 'Just Do It' par excellence, who break out from the norms and do something which pushes them to the limits and beyond and for that they deserve our admiration and respect.

In Britain - the old maritime nation which often seems to have forgotten its sea-going heritage - we started it all in the modern era with men like Francis Chichester, Alec Rose, Robin Knox-Johnston and Chay Blyth, knights all of them. Now we are in the midst of a revival which madfor sailing has enthusiastically supported. The French have dominated this area of the sport for decades in recent years but these days they are having to fight a lot harder to stay at the top.

One of the major anomalies in sailing in Britain is that over the years, single-handers have won public acclaim and been showered with awards, yet the Royal Yachting Association has never actively supported them, primarily because of safety concerns. But advances in technology over the last 15 years have made solo racing safer than ever and we believe the time has come for the RYA finally to rid itself of this straight-jacket and get involved in helping to train and fund the new generation.

Of one thing we can be sure, Ellen MacArthur has captured the imagination of thousands of youngsters up and down this country and in the years ahead
some of them are going to start turning their own sailing dreams into reality.

For more on what can be done to further the sport of singlehanded offshore racing in the UK, see James Boyd's comment piece tomorrow on madfor sailing