More than a contest was lost

FOR 36-year-old Donald Crowhurst, a father of four whose marine electronics business was on shaky ground, the London Sunday Times Golden Globe sailing race around the world was just the ticket to help his family and make his business a going concern.

But the voyage ended in tragedy for Crowhurst, whose sad tale has inspired books, plays, novels and now a new documentary, “Deep Water,” which opens Friday.

Crowhurst’s boat, the Teignmouth Electron, was found abandoned in the Atlantic after 243 days at sea. It is believed that Crowhurst committed suicide by leaping from the boat. His body was never recovered.

“I think he believed winning the race was possible,” says Louise Osmond, who directed the film with Jerry Rothwell. “He believed he could do it.”

In 1968, the Sunday Times announced the first nonstop, single-handed, around-the-world sailing race. The first person home would receive the Golden Globe statue; the one who went around the world with the fastest time would receive 5,000 pounds. Competitors had to leave England by Halloween of that year to avoid the winter rage of the Southern Ocean.

Nine men signed up for the race, including sailing veterans Robin Knox-Johnston, Bernard Moitessier and naval commander Nigel Tetley. Crowhurst was the only amateur sailor among them.

Crowhurst believed that a trimaran would give him the fastest time, but he didn’t have the money to build one. A local businessman named Stanley Best agreed to fund the construction on the condition that if Crowhurst should fail to complete the voyage, he had to buy the boat back from Best. That put Crowhurst in the position of facing financial disaster if he bailed out of the race at any point.

“Deep Water,” which played in England last year, features interviews with Crowhurst’s widow, Clare, his oldest son, Simon, Knox-Johnston and Donald Kerr, a publicist who gave Crowhurst a camera to record the voyage. It also is filled with vintage news footage, other footage captured by several of the contestants and Crowhurst’s logs and audiotapes.

Crowhurst began his trip Oct. 31, but already things weren’t going well for him. Many features he’d envisioned for the vessel were never finished. “The boat he was going to build was so ambitious,” Osmond says.

Crowhurst fell behind immediately. His hatches were leaking. Alone and feeling the pressure of his creditor -- not to mention the BBC, which was covering his story -- he had to decide whether to continue to the Southern Ocean with a leaky boat or return home and face bankruptcy and humiliation.

Suddenly, he began sending messages to press agent Rodney Hallworth that he was not only making progress, but at a record pace. The newspapers were filled with Crowhurst’s achievements. Soon his family began to think he had a good chance to win the race, considering he was now only one of four men still in the competition.

But Crowhurst was lying. The truth was that he was lagging farther and farther behind. He even started a second logbook that listed his real position, while the first showed his falsified positions. Crowhurst had become trapped in his own lie.

“In finding a way to address a relatively small problem,” Osmond says, “he creates a bigger and bigger disaster for himself in trying to debate if he should turn back. He keeps deciding not to and then ends up making the deception, which is just tragic.”

Not only can one hear him unravel on his audiotapes, his log books also vividly chronicle his fear and his descent into despair. “The log books were found on the boat when it was found drifting in the mid-Atlantic,” Osmond says. “Rodney Hallworth sold them to the Sunday Times. Eventually, the family ended up in the possession of the books. Clare very generously lent us the use of them.”

The logs, Osmond says, are quite disturbing. “They are so much the last record of his days. You can see some of the pages are water-stained. Also, toward the end, when he is in an increasingly distressed frame of mind, the pencil is scoring through the page. The imprint of the pencil and the paper are so thick, you feel the stress and the upset that was taking place as he was writing the last distressed entries.”

Clare CROWHURST, Osmond says, still doesn’t believe that her husband committed suicide.

“There are so many mixed emotions for Clare,” the filmmaker says. “I think she feels anger and huge sadness. They had to live with the consequences for a long time. Life was really hard for them. She was willing to say, ‘I acknowledge his mistakes and the things he did wrong and my own anger with him, but this was the man I loved.’ ”

The race also had strange effects on other competitors. Moitessier ended up messaging his wife after he rounded Cape Horn that he wanted to continue around the world a second time. He never returned to France, but found a new life in Tahiti. Tetley, who was rescued off the Azores after his boat collapsed, was given a consolation prize and built a new trimaran. He committed suicide for unknown reasons in 1972.

Knox-Johnston won the race and gave the 5,000 pounds to Clare Crowhurst. “He just sailed around the world again,” Osmond says of Knox-Johnston.

As for the Teignmouth Electron, “various strange things happened to it,” Osmond says. “For a while it was used as a kind of rental holiday boat.”

But rumors that the boat was haunted put an end to the excursions.

“It was just deposited on the island of Cayman Brac,” Osmond says. “So it is still there. Though all of its innards were taken out, I think it’s wonderful and poignant.”

susan.king@latimes.com