20 years on

Drum crew-members give their recollections about sailing the Whitbread maxi

On Friday the paparazzi, both sailing and general Fleet St, enjoyed a feeding frenzy as Duran Duran frontman Simon le Bon descended upon Cowes with his entourage to be reunited with the crew of his former Whitbread maxi Drum. During the Fastnet Race in 1985 Drum had gone down in yachting folklore when five hours into the race her keel had fallen off requiring her crew to be rescued from their maxi's upturned hull. 20 years on and it was felt time to lay this incident to rest. Phil Wade was put in charge of finding the boat and getting the old team back together to compete in the 2005 Rolex Fastnet Race - this time hopefully without incident.

The original Drum crew today reads like a Who's Who of ocean racing. Aside from Le Bon, osteopath brother Johnnie and managers Paul and Mike Berrow, the line-up included Skip Novak, photographer Rick Tomlinson, round the world record holder Bruno Peyron, Swedish navigator, doctor and Whitbread skipper Roger Nilson, Whitbread stalwarts Neil Chestron and Micke Olsen plus other industry figures like John Fitzgerald, Phil Wade, John Irving, Pascal Pellet Finet, Max Bourgeois, Johnson Woodison, Malcolm McKeag and offshore racing legends such as 'Chas from Tas', and 'filthy' Phil Barret.

Wade was able to locate a majority of the crew. One, Janni Gustafsson was killed in a motorcycle accident. Others were unable to attend due to other commitments - Rick Tomlinson is currently in Sweden in the middle of a photoshoot, Skip Novak is attempting to take a boat through the North West Passage, Bruno Peyron couldn't make it due to commitments with his maxi-catamaran Orange, while Max Bourgeois was storm bound in the South of France.

Finding the boat was no problem. After the finishing third in the 1985-6 Whitbread Round the World Race, the boat had been sold to Sir Arnold Clark, one of Scotland's biggest car dealers, and taken up to the Clyde. She has spent almost two decades chartering up there.

Remarkably the boat is almost in its original condition. "They still have the original lifejackets from when we went around the world, the same numbers, etc" Phil Wade told us. "The spinnakers, the sails - they are all the same. They have a new mainsail and we have just got a new headsail but they have put on roller furling, so we are not really competitive. They are day chartering up in Scotland so it makes a lot more sense." The three spinnakers the crew are taking on the Rolex Fastnet Race are all 1985 originals. "We are taking a lot of sticky-back," said Wade.

The new mainsail is smaller than the original as in the intervening years Drum's boom was damaged and then shortened. The new main is shorter in the foot and has almost no roach. Meanwhile just days before the Fastnet Elvstrom Sails came to the rescue supplying a new roller furling headsail for the race. The previous one they had used on the delivery trip down from Scotland was made from one of the original Whitbread sails.

Down below most of the electronics are new and the giant refrigerator-sized Skanti SSB gear had been thrown off, but only recently, as had the generator. Even the bunks still had the same canvas bottoms to them as they had in 1985.

For Roger Nilson stepping back on board after 20 years was an emotional moment. "I think quite a few of us had tears in our eyes coming on. It was quite emotional for quite a few of us. The colour is the same. The deck gear is the same. The inside is a bit different, because they put some interior into it. Some of the running rigging is original, like the blocks as you can see."

To modern eyes, Drum has the classic 1980s maxiboat shape with moderate overhangs but on closer inspection it is the size of the deck gear that really betrays her age - it is all enormous. While modern day Volvo Open 70s weigh in around the 13 tonne mark, Drum in comparision is around the 35-38 tonne mark and as a result the loads passing through her keel, hull and rig are huge.

Back in the mid-1980s the only available running rigging technology to handle the extreme loads was heavyweight wire-rope spliced ropes. "We had wire sheets and we had wire halyards as well," recalls Neal Cheston, today a well-groomed yacht broker in the South of France for Camper & Nicholsons. "In the Southern Ocean every time we put a kite up in anything over 20 knots of wind we put it up on two halyards. We just broke a lot of spinnaker halyards." He describes the experience of sailing a 1980s offshore maxi-boats as being very different from that of a modern lightweight equivalent: "An equal amount of terror I expect, just at half the speed."

While the huge amount of ironware that are the original blocks, turning blocks, winches, etc remain, much of the running rigging has been replaced with modern Vectran or Spectra, that is threat-like in comparison. "Now we’re looking at these new ropes they’ve got on there and thinking ‘wow, that’s too small’" admits Phil Wade, who today runs the superyacht Timoneer.

Wade's biggest worry, he says, is with the rig. "The mast and the rod rigging is totally original. Our biggest worry is the rod rigging. I have looked at it as has Filthy, but at the end of the day it is 20 year old rod rigging..."

For Neal Cheston spying the white hulled maxi in East Cowes Marina was the first time he'd laid eyes on the boat since he'd stepped off her at the end of the Whitbread in Gosport in 1986. "I have some memories of this boat and some of them are fond..." he quipped. "She looks very much like we’ve just done the round the world race. It’s all big gear. I recognise some of the running rigging because we nicked it from Nirvana, trying to save Simon some money. Most of us had come from the maxi-circuit."

20 years ago Cheston had been one of the six crewmen, including Simon le Bon, below when Drum capsized. "I was trapped in my bunk which folded up against the deckhead and everything fell on top of it so I was stuck in there and I scrambled my way out in a state of blind panic," Cheston recalls. "By the time I got out the interior was a bit cloudy because the batteries had been upside down and were dripping into the seawater which was forming hydrogen gas which was smoking, so it was a bit hard to see. We regrouped and took stock of our situation and we realised we weren’t in any immediate danger of sinking, so we stayed where we were and we were signalling to the people outside of the upturned hull. They asked how many we were and we asked how many they were and we knew there hadn’t been loss of life."

Like Cheston, Pascal Pellet Finet, today the skipper of the 170ft Dubois sloop Tiara, had a close call when the spare Dacron mainsail rolled on top of him pinning him to what had been the cabin top. "We cut him out with a bread knife cutting through the sail layer by layer, slashing in all directions," recalls Cheston vividly. "There was a deafening whistling sound going on I remember and I wandered around looking for it and I finally found the plug hanging upside down from the sink in the galley and I stuck the plug in and it sucked in - and that was the air going out of the inside."

During the 1985 Fastnet Race the keel fell off because of poor welding, says the boat's designer Ron Holland. "The welding was shocking and no one had looked at it. The top plate stayed with the boat and when I looked at that piece left on the bottom of the boat, I thought 'my God - there’s nothing there, it’s just air'."

On Friday Holland had a crawl around the boat and was impressed by her condition. "It doesn’t look much different. She looks very stable. There doesn’t seem to be much movement anywhere at all - it’s pretty good. When she was built she was pretty advanced. She was a Kevlar/carbon-Nomex core boat, which 20 years ago was pushing it."

Hopefully with light weather forecast for this year's Rolex Fastnet Race the crew will succeeed in making it around the course, although whether they will do so in a time short enough to enable le Bon to make the next date on the Duran Duran world tour, remains to be seen.