Across the vast, undulating tapestry of the ocean, a sublime maritime odyssey is slowly unfurling itself: the Golden Globe Race. Considered one of the toughest yacht races, it began on September 4, 2022, at Les Sables d’Olonne (LSO), a picturesque coastal town in France, with 16 participants. Two stood apart: Abhilash Tomy, 43, on his Rustler 36 masthead sloop Bayanat, the only Asian in the race; and Kirsten Neuschäfer, 39, on her Cape George cutter CG36 Minnehaha, the only woman contestant.
In the race’s final leg, Abhilash is ahead of Kirsten, thanks in part to a special manoeuvre the Kochi native pulled off last weekend. As they neared the Azores archipelago, Kirsten navigated east to make her way to LSO, but Abhilash continued to climb north, much to the puzzlement of many. The bold move paid rich dividends. On April 18, Bayanat had the wind on its stern and picked up speed, while Minnehaha was caught in a large area of calm, with little or no wind.
On Wednesday afternoon, Abhilash was doing a comfortable 5.1 knots, while Kirsten was moving at a sluggish pace of 0.8 knots. As they enter the Bay of Biscay, Abhilash is ahead of Kirsten by 30 nautical miles, though there are still over 1,100 nautical miles to the finish. To put it in cricket terminology, “it is a T20 match, and this is super over”, says Captain DK Sharma, a former navy spokesperson.
In 2013, the Goa-based sailor—who took voluntary retirement in January 2021 to focus on his sailing skills—completed a solo, non-stop, unassisted journey across the world aboard the INSV Mhadei, becoming the first Indian to do so. He was awarded India’s second-highest peacetime gallantry award, Kirti Chakra, for the feat. The next natural stop was the Golden Globe Race.
He participated in the 2018 edition. Then a name yet to impress upon the global sailing community, Abhilash turned up at LSO in Thuriya, one of the smallest and slowest boats in the contest. Even in his maiden race, he was already its strongest contender. The ocean, however, a tempestuous and capricious partner, is not always kind. On September 21, 2018, Thuriya was caught in the fury of a vicious storm.
The boat’s mast snapped, throwing him 30 feet onto the deck below, resulting in a debilitating back injury. In the darkness that followed, the crippled Thuriya and her wounded sailor drifted, at the mercy of the fickle sea. Even in this dire moment, the sailor’s spirit did not waver. Taking refuge in his boat’s cabin, he turned on the emergency beacon and awaited rescue. Eventually, three days later, he was saved by a French fishing boat, the Osiris.
With titanium rods in his spine and five vertebrae fused into one, Abhilash had to learn to walk again following the 2018 injury. Yet despite these seemingly unsurmountable obstacles, he announced his interest in competing again. Commander HS Rawat, the last commanding officer of INS Vikrant, who had followed the 2018 race closely, calls Abhilash’s return “a miracle”. It was not an easy decision for Abhilash’s wife, Urmimala, to let her husband race again.
“Boldness and panache were Abhilash’s signature this weekend as he showed off his strategic skills. He crushes the competition with nearly 160 miles covered to the finish,” read the recent race report. This is a race with many conditions that impose limitations on the sailor. One of the rules demands that participants use only those navigational instruments available to Sir Robin Knox-Johnston during the original race in 1968, so no GPS, chart plotters, electric autopilot, satellite phones, or electronic compasses. Stripped off the comforting embrace of technology, sailors must rely on celestial navigation, the sextant, and the whispering winds to guide them.
Don McIntyre, the race’s founder and chairman, says, “I was inspired by the voyages from the ‘Golden Age’ of solo sailing. Now, races have become increasingly performance-oriented, sailed by elite sportspeople in extreme yachts.” The retro nature of the Golden Globe Race was McIntyre’s idea of putting the “spice back into sailing”.
It was not always smooth sailing for Abhilash though. The fuel lines that powered the boat’s engine were fouled, the main sail tore, and the wind generators, halyards, and wind vane were also damaged. Amid all these problems, however, his resourcefulness and humour shone through. In his recent weekly satellite call with McIntyre, he joked, “I have to finish the race before June 16. My visa expires then.” On one occasion, he tweeted: “I need a toilet door. Not used to such lack of privacy,”—a reference to how he had to chop up his toilet door to rebuild the damaged wind vane.
“What are you thinking of every day now? Is it the race, the finish, your family, or all of it?” McIntyre asked. “Mostly the latter two,” said Abhilash. The sailor’s journey is a lone odyssey. Yet, in the vast, ceaseless churn of the oceans, when ethereal whispers of the wind are the only company, a sailor turns his gaze to the sky. Amid the celestial ballet, he seeks that unceasing shimmer of a lodestar, the brightest in the sky: in Abhilash’s case, it is the family, his ‘secret sail’.