Fastnet, Force 10 Quotes

“But the worst that the wind did was to be the primary cause of a huge, vicious, boat-flipping, morale-shattering seaway. The helicopter pilots, who, while hovering, had to dodge them, said the waves were as high as fifty feet. If that estimate were true, it still misses the point, for the danger of the waves lay not in their height but in their shape. “At daybreak the seas were spectacular,” remembered Peter Bruce, a commander in the Royal Navy who was navigator in Eclipse. “They had become very large, very steep, and broke awkwardly, but the boat was handling well.” George Tinley, who had been so badly beaten around in his Windswept, later said, “There were seas coming at one angle with breakers on them, but there were seas coming at another angle also with breakers, and then there were the most fearsome things where the two met in the middle.” After the gale, Major Maclean vividly described the appearance of the waves at night: “All around were white horses with their spray flurrying horizontally and slashing against us with the added impetus of the occasional rain squalls. But these white horses were just the top of some monster waves which hunched up, their tops flaring with spume, and marched on leaving us high at one minute so we could glimpse around, and then bringing us some fifty feet down into their troughs so we could appreciate the enormity of the next wave following. Some waves had boiling foam all over them where they were moving through the break of a previous wave, or, when the foam had fizzled away, they were deep green from the disturbance of the water. Otherwise the sea was black.”
― John Rousmaniere, Fastnet, Force 10: The Deadliest Storm in the History of Modern Sailing

“Several years later, I received a letter from a young Englishman. He said that his father had died in the race, he knew not how or why. He had come across “Fastnet, Force 10” in a library and now he understood. Now, he wrote, it was time for him to sail his own Fastnet and finish the race that his father had completed. I sympathized; I was on a journey of my own as a student in divinity school. Yet I worried that he might be a little reckless out there, and suggested that there are other ways to honor the dead. I never again heard from him, but I do believe that—as in the Cornish tale about the water calling, “The hour is come, but not the man”—he joined the line of landsmen inevitably rushing down the hills to the sea.”
― John Rousmaniere, Fastnet, Force 10: The Deadliest Storm in the History of Modern Sailing

“If Fastnet 79 teaches us anything universal, it is that the best storm tactic often is unrelenting human resourcefulness, courage, and spirit.”
― John Rousmaniere, Fastnet, Force 10: The Deadliest Storm in the History of Modern Sailing

“Salt water weighs sixty-four pounds per cubic foot, and a moderately large breaker that is six feet high, ten feet across, and six feet thick carries, at a speed as high as thirty knots, twenty-three thousand pounds of water. The average boat in the Fastnet race weighed considerably less than that. When a wave of such size and velocity breaks over a boat like a breaker on an Hawaiian beach, its force overwhelms the stability provided by the hull’s shape and the keel. The unlucky vessel rolls perhaps through ninety degrees, perhaps all the way.”
― John Rousmaniere, Fastnet, Force 10: The Deadliest Storm in the History of Modern Sailing

“the sea showed that it can be a deadly enemy and that those who go to sea for pleasure must do so in the full knowledge that they may encounter dangers of the highest order.”
― John Rousmaniere, Fastnet, Force 10: The Deadliest Storm in the History of Modern Sailing