Farewell to a Cherished Yachtsman

Three times in eight years, destiny had beckoned Sir Peter Blake and then turned its back on him, leaving him to his fate in a part of the world that had driven sailors in centuries past to madness.

It’s a section of the South Atlantic Ocean, between the equator and Ascension Island. On global maps of a certain age, it retains its ancient designation, The Doldrums.

Ceramco New Zealand, the race leader in the 1981-82 Whitbread Around the World race, was 23 days out of Southhampton, England, on its way to Cape Town, South Africa, as it raced through the warm, tropical waters. Boat failure had ended Blake’s previous two Whitbreads prematurely.

From the skipper’s log of Sept. 21, 1981:

0400--No. 3 jib, 2 reefs, lovely sailing.

0600--Sea [rough]. Rocketing along.

0800--Wind 25 knots SE, sea lumpy, fast sailing.

1235--Mast came down.

There would be times like this, their sponsor had warned them before they left, when “it’s no use calling for Mum.”

This was before the environmental crusades, the red socks, the two America’s Cups, the knighthood, the love and acclaim of a distant country, before the events last week that left this tiny country shaken, sickened and grieving.

Blake, 53, was laid to rest Friday in his hometown of Warblington, England, more than a week after pirates boarded his boat, Seamaster, at its mooring off the mouth of the Amazon, where he was trying to raise awareness about pollution. He was shot after he tried to resist, and police have arrested seven suspects.

Since his Dec. 5 death, Blake has been recalled as a man out of time, “an adventurer, in the tradition of the great explorers and risk takers of the 19th and early 20th centuries,” according to the Evening Post of Wellington, New Zealand’s capital.

He was also eulogized Friday as a hero who made fellow New Zealanders feel they shared his America’s Cup victories. “He had the ability to make each and every one of his fellow citizens feel that we had a part in the success and should share in it,” New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark told mourners at the funeral.

About 300 people squeezed into the parish church of St. Thomas a Becket, and about 1,000 stood in the graveyard outside on a clear, frosty morning, listening to the service on loudspeakers. Some mourners wore red socks, a tribute to Blake’s lucky red socks that were the rage during his 1995 America’s Cup bid.

More than a decade earlier, in that New Zealand spring of 1981, reports of the travails of Ceramco and its 12-man crew were followed on the radio with diligence and devotion by Blake’s yachting-mad compatriots.

They heard how the sails and mast were hauled out of the fretful equatorial waters. The recovered mast, about 20 feet high, was lashed to the stump of the old one, its base positioned on the cook’s breadboard to provide a firm support base. The sails were cut and reshaped with the on-board sewing machine.

All of this was completed in fewer than 24 hours.

A new course was set, roughly parallel to the eastern coast of South America, the yacht sailed south on the warm Brazilian current and prevailing northerly breezes. Just before the Roaring Forties, Ceramco turned left and headed east for Cape Town.

The journey covered 2,455 miles and lasted almost two weeks. It was a record for a competitive race under jury rig, and widely regarded as an epic of modern times.

“You would have to consider it one of the great efforts of the 20th century,” said English journalist and ocean racer Bob Fisher, who had crewed with Blake in other races.

A new mast awaited in Cape Town. It was paid for by Martin Foster, a lifelong friend of Blake, who had mortgaged his house to do so. Although out of contention for overall race honors, Blake would go on to win two of the next three legs of the Whitbread.

It is a story oft-told, a measure of the loyalty Blake inspired inside and outside the close-knit but highly competitive racing world. Blake’s racing rivals always expected the worst: He was unrelenting in his pursuit of victory.

In 1994, when he broke the world record for a global circumnavigation under sail, in 74 days and 22 hours, he finished the trip with broken ribs. He had won the Whitbread in 1990, at his fifth attempt.

For a professional sailor, there was but one trophy left to acquire.

Its imminent acquisition was heralded by a countrywide fashion statement. The red socks were seemingly everywhere in New Zealand in May 1995, but especially in its largest city, Auckland.

Above the boat shoes of the wizened Royal New Zealand Yacht Club members, with their shiny blue blazers and dull gold buttons; on the feet of the raucous teenagers who turned the post-victory celebrations at the Viaduct Basin into a nautical mosh pit; on the feet of the Auckland cast of “42nd Street” as the curtain rose; on the hooves of sheep and the paws of sheepdogs and underneath the “Wellies” (rain boots) of the hardest-bitten South Island farmers.

As the yellow ribbon is to the returning prodigal or embattled son, the red socks were to Team New Zealand.

At first they were simply a superstition--Blake, the skipper and campaign figurehead--had worn them on the way toward a most improbable achievement: the lifting of the America’s Cup from the United States for only the second time in the event’s 144-year history. Then they became a financial lifeline, with a New Zealand manufacturer donating half the proceeds from their purchase to fund the costly Kiwi campaign.

And finally, they became a national symbol of identity and unity as a tiny (population 3.5 million, plus 47 million sheep) nation basked in a rare moment of international attention.

At that moment, Blake, later knighted Sir Peter Blake, embodied how an obscure, distant land would like the world to see its populace, in the same way that New Zealander Sir Edmund Hillary, the first to scale the summit of Mount Everest, did, a generation earlier.

Blake was born to sail, as is true for many New Zealanders, and especially the population of Auckland, where about one in four households owns a sailboat of some description. He began sailing as a 5-year-old, in the seven-foot “P” class dinghies that served as the trainer wheels for every aspiring New Zealand yachtsman. “The worst boats in the world,” remembers Ross Field, who had raced with Blake for seven years, in two Whitbread campaigns.

By 16, Blake had already sailed 1,200 miles, from New Zealand to the Pacific islands. Two years later, he won the national championships in a 25-foot keel boat he had built himself. At age 24, he went out to see the world, crewing on an English entry in the 1973-74 Whitbread.

Twenty-two years later, he brought the world back to a place unaccustomed to this type of exposure.

As the home team, New Zealand retained the Cup five years later, in February 2000, amid the fitful breezes of Hauraki Gulf.

Possession of the Auld Mug aside, Blake’s legacy to Auckland is a billion-dollar overhaul of its downtown and waterfront to accommodate the event and all its trappings.

There is a term the English and New Zealanders use to describe their grief or despair, “gutted.”

“A bit gutted, I would say,” Foster replied, describing how he felt in the wake of Blake’s death. Then he amended the self-assessment, and in doing so, spoke for an entire nation. “Very gutted.”

Blake’s wife Pippa, daughter Sarah-Jane, 18, and son James, 14, issued a statement saying they intended to personally answer each of the thousands of messages of condolence and support.

“It is of considerable comfort to them that Sir Peter’s life, and now his tragic death, have touched so many others, and that his work in more recent times, to create greater awareness of the need to protect the environment, [has] not gone unnoticed,” the family statement said.

*

The Associated Press contributed to this report.