First OSTAR, seventh home

At 19, Oscar Mead was the solo transat race's youngest competitor and yet he posted a fine result

One of the joys of this OSTAR, the singlehanded transat race which concluded for most last week in Newport, Rhode Island, has been seeing young British solo sailing talent such as Katie Miller and Hannah White get their first foot on the ladder of their professional sailing careers. Aside from the dynamic, highly marketable young ladies, we’re pleased to say that there is at least one young man who we expect will become a force to be reckoned with in years to come.

Son of Cowes demon Etchells sailor Laurence Mead, Oscar Mead at a mere 19 years old was the youngest competitor in this year’s OSTAR. This was obviously young Mead’s first significant singlehanded offshore race, but for him it seems to hardly have been a case of hanging on and just 'making it to the other side'. Mead’s J/105 King of Shaves was seventh home into Newport, 2 days 7 hours after the race winner Jan Kees Lampe’s Open 40 but ahead of many bigger, faster boats. And finally his position corrected out into sixth overall.

While Mead is still something of a solo sailing newbie, he has been born into the sport through his family and has had already the benefit of racing on boats of widely varying sizes, from his dinghy of choice – the 49er – to competing on Frank Pong’s Boracay (the former Nokia Enigma mini maxi) as the nipper for the China Sea Race when the Mead family was based in Hong Kong.

Turning 18, he launched himself headlong into the highly valuable Racing at Petit Bateau series of warm-up singlehanded and shorthanded offshore races that are partially designed as a training ground to prepare sailors for the OSTAR. Now that Mead has had his first major taste of racing across a big ocean on his own, he has found he loves it and wants more.



He recalls: “I rang home one day, on day three or four, and I just said ‘this is it. This is what I want to do. I don’t want to do anything else. I want to go and sail full time’. I was a bit worried going into it, because I’d never done anything like this before. There was a concern that I might hate it and the dream I’d had for years was going to be shattered. But I got out there and it was everything I’d dreamed of and some.”

His longest solo passage previously had been his 500 mile qualification passage for the OSTAR. “On a scale compared to the OSTAR the qualifier was tiny. The OSTAR is like five Fastnets in a row: Hence the nerves when I started. I was confident I could achieve the length and the distance, but it is another thing when you set off with all the other boats - it is a long way and you know its going to be brutal.”

Like Katie Miller, Mead is doing all the right things, ticking all the right boxes to ensure that he is fully qualified to be on the start line of the Vendee Globe, if not next time around then the race after. Even in 2016 he’s still only going to be 26. At present, like Miller, he is studying at Southampton Solent University, only he is on the naval architecture course whereas Miller is training to be a marine surveyor. He has just finished his first year, but managed to get a dispensation from the University to sit his exams in September.

Perhaps most extraordinary about Mead is just how much he enjoyed his OSTAR, his emails back from on board Kings of Shaves baring a similar tone to those of ever joyful Sam Davies in the Vendee Globe. “I got an email from one of the other competitors – ‘you are putting us to shame, you’re so bloody happy!’” admits Mead.

The first 48 hours he reckons were the hardest. “I had a very tough first few days. My first night in the race was my first day at sea solo this year, just due to bad planning and mis-timing in the spring. I was going to do 800 miles, but I didn’t fit it in. So the first night was my first night at sea solo this year and it was 35 knots upwind. And I had a really really tough night. There was a lot of water downstairs and I made some bad reefs and bad sail changes. It was just a really tricky night. And the next morning I looked at the scale of what I was trying to achieve and I still had 3000 miles to go, I’d had a terrible night, I was soaked, I was freezing and it was like ‘this is REALLY tough’. And on top of that I was seasick… But a couple of days after that the seasickness had mostly worn off and I was into the swing of it, and that first couple of days, so as long as you rationalise, it was fine. It was a good challenge to be honest.”

Mead reckons the OSTAR was easier than it might have been in terms of the weather. “It was a wonderful trip. It could have been a much worse OSTAR. It could have been 40 knots on the nose 50% of the time. We had the first four days going upwind in 35-40 knots - I saw 46 knots across the deck. That was a baptism of fire for the fleet. It knocked out some of the less well prepared competitors. But every storm after that seemed easy. Most of the other storms were down wind.”

Had he ever experienced anything like that before? “The most I’d experienced was 35 knots and it wasn’t for that long. That was just in the Irish Sea. And I’d certainly never seen waves anything like that! And then when I got to this side, I’d never done that much sailing in fog. I knew the procedures for sailing in fog, but it is another thing entirely to go out there and be there in absolutely no visibility and hearing engines and ships around and keeping a cool head, it was a completely different experience to what I was expecting.”

Unlike some of his competitors who took the prudent course to the south across the narrower part of the Grand Banks to the south of Newfoundland, Mead, like Hannah White, stuck to a more northerly course hugging the rhumb line.

“At one point I could physically hear people talking and the noise of the chain and the fishing line going out behind the boat and I couldn’t see anything. I was just sitting in the cockpit with my foghorn blasting out. I had lost my VHF aerial so I had no communications.” King of Shaves also was not fitted with a radar reflector.

“The length of the boat was the minimum visibility I had,” he continues. “I could see the bow and maybe a metre in front of it, but that was it. It was a very spooky thing. The light is very eerie as well. You are sitting in the cockpit listening to noises, with no vis, in eerie light.”

So how on earth does one sleep in those conditions? “In the end you have to take a very rational view of it. You won’t see anything in that fog and you won’t have any time to react if you do see it, so you may as well just go to sleep. You’ll know if you hit something because there’d be a bloody great bang and I obviously left a grab bag in the cockpit, then if there was a large splintering noise, I would run up on deck, grab the grab bag and kick the liferaft off the back, was my plan. There is an element of luck in that dense fog when you don’t have radar. Someone gave me three four leaf clovers before I left and I was surprised they didn’t self combust because I reckon I used all the luck out of them.”

Aside from the Grand Banks and the peasouper fog, Mead says that the final 100 miles into the finish were also hair raising when he was racing with Irish competitor Barry Hurley on the JOD 35 Dinah. “I decided that the smart thing to do would be to cut inside him which consequently meant I went all the shallow bits by Nantucket there. I got down to about 2m of water at one stage. I was on deck doing 8.5-9 knots in 2m of water, thinking ‘this is really not smart’. But it was fast. I managed to close the arc on him.” Sadly it was not enough and Dinah reached Newport two and a half hours in front of him.

Sticking to the rhumb line and taking the northerly route over the Grand Banks contributed to his good result, but Mead says that he also made the most of the strong downwind conditions the boats experienced mid-Atlantic as a depression rolled beneath them. “I had 24 hours of 25+ knots in gigantic rolling seas from astern and I spent the whole 24 hours with the small chute up and full mainsail and I just screamed the whole time. I was doing 17 knots, surfing at 21 – absolutely flying. And you can see on the tracker at that stage, I just minced all the other boats. I got perfect conditions and went like a train – it was unbelievable!”

No competitors, or their boats at least, come away from the OSTAR unscathed and in King of Shaves’ case the biggest hold-up was the electronics. “We lost the SeaTalk electronics system, so the pilot went down for about seven hours,” says Mead. “I was trying to steer - I was going upwind in 20 knots - so I had to take the shed off (we’d built a plywood shed to cover the hatchway) and unscrew the garage, I had all the headboards down as I tried to trace all the wires to a loose connection or a broken piece. In the end I wired the compass straight into the pilot, so it would steer heading and then just left it at that, because I couldn’t solve the problem entirely. Other than that it was only minor breakage - a lot of chafe, minor damage - nothing major like Katie [Miller] losing half her rudder. She’s knocked a foot and a half off the bottom of it. The worst I had was that I hit a huge log. There was a gigantic thumping noise I heard in the boat. I came up and there was a huge log floating away behind me. It gave me the jitters for about 20 minutes, but it was alright. It didn’t really cause any damage.”

From here, as mentioned, Mead aside from having to put back on around the 2kg he lost during the race, is back to the UK and his studies. The boat is up for sale in the States as they think they will stand a better chance of selling it there. As to what the next step up the ladder towards the Vendee Globe might be, he is uncertain. “We have been bandying ideas around, from a Mini campaign to a potential campaign in the Velux 5 Oceans. It is completely options open at the moment. I certainly am going to try and put something else together and go on from there.”

His sponsor, King of Shaves is happy, but if they are to continue with him remains to be seen. “I am going to have a meeting with them when I get back and we’ll decide the future. Hopefully we can go somewhere as a partnership. I asked Will King – how many razors I’d have to sell to get an Open 60 campaign out them…and it is quite a few…”

He says he is keen to get back into the 49er for a bit but understands that to be the best at what he wants to do he must gain experience on as wide a variety of boats as he can. “It seems that all the top sailors - Michel Desjoyeaux, Loick Peyron, etc - they all sailed multis and are really well trained in all the disciplines of sailing, not just the one style. So I am keen to replicate that. I’d like to get some multihull experience.” Wise words.



And what does father think? “I think he is pretty pleased. He is relieved I am back in one piece. I was going to do the delivery back with Hannah White and I put it to my parents and they said a catagoric ‘no – we need a month off!’ So I am going to come back to the UK and get some uni work done.”

So to sum up – Mead is annoyingly young, clearly a good sailor even offshore singlehanded, and he even enjoys it! In terms of his academic qualifications he could not be on a better course. On the media side, he is eloquent and a ‘good interview’. We cannot fault his path towards his ultimate objective and hope that a sponsor will see it this way too.