Sunday Times Golden Globe Race

Bill King, a former Royal Navy submarine commander, built a 42 foot (12.8 m) junk-rigged schooner, Galway Blazer II, designed for heavy conditions.

To circumvent the possibility of a non-entrant completing his voyage first and scooping the story, they made entry automatic: anyone sailing single-handed around the world that year would be considered in the race.

In typical style, he refused the offer of a free radio to make progress reports, saying that this intrusion of the outside world would taint his voyage; he did, however, take a camera, agreeing to drop off packages of film if he got the chance.

Crowhurst's belief was that a trimaran would give him a good chance of the prize for the fastest circumnavigation, and with the help of a wildly optimistic table of probable performances, he even predicted that he would be first to finish – despite a planned departure on 1 October.

He obtained sponsorship from Music for Pleasure, a British budget record label, and started preparing his boat, Victress, in Plymouth, where Moitessier, King, and Frenchman Loïck Fougeron were also getting ready.

Fougeron was a friend of Moitessier, who managed a motorcycle company in Casablanca, and planned to race on Captain Browne, a 30 foot (9.1 m) steel gaff cutter.

On 15 August, Blyth went in to Tristan da Cunha to pass a message to his wife, and spoke to crew from an anchored cargo ship, Gillian Gaggins.

[citation needed] By this time he had already shifted his focus from the race to a more personal quest to discover his own limits; and so, despite his technical disqualification for receiving assistance, he continued sailing towards Cape Town.

Considering himself unready for sea, he "sailed" on 31 October, to comply with the race's mandatory start date, but went straight to a mooring to continue preparing his boat without outside assistance.

[37] This left four boats in the race at the beginning of December: Knox-Johnston's Suhaili, battling frustrating and unexpected headwinds in the south Pacific Ocean,[38] Moitessier's Joshua, closing on Tasmania,[39] Tetley's Victress, just passing the Cape of Good Hope,[40] and Crowhurst's Teignmouth Electron, still in the north Atlantic.

This would have been an immensely difficult task, involving the need to make up convincing descriptions of weather and sailing conditions in a different part of the world, as well as complex reverse navigation.

He tried to keep his options open as long as possible, mainly by giving only extremely vague position reports; but on 17 December he sent a deliberately false message indicating that he was over the Equator, which he was not.

From this point his radio reports – while remaining ambiguous – indicated steadily more impressive progress around the world; but he never left the Atlantic, and it seems that after December the mounting problems with his boat had caused him to give up on ever doing so.

[46] Knox-Johnston, thoroughly at home on the sea, treated himself to a generous dose of whisky and held a rousing solo carol service, then drank a toast to the Queen at 3pm.

Elated by this successful climax to his voyage, he briefly considered continuing east, to sail around the Southern Ocean a second time, but soon gave up the idea and turned north for home.

Crowhurst's actual position, meanwhile, was off Brazil, where he was making slow progress south, and carefully monitoring weather reports from around the world to include in his fake log.

He was carrying letters from old Cape Horn sailors describing conditions in the Southern Ocean, and he frequently consulted these to get a feel for chances of encountering ice.

After much debate with himself, and many thoughts of those waiting for him in England, he decided to continue sailing – past the Cape of Good Hope, and across the Indian Ocean for a second time, into the Pacific.

[58] The concern for Knox-Johnston turned to alarm in March, with no news of him since New Zealand; aircraft taking part in a NATO exercise in the North Atlantic mounted a search operation in the region of the Azores.

However, on 6 April he finally managed to make contact with a British tanker using his signal lamp, which reported the news of his position, 1,200 nautical miles (1,400 mi; 2,200 km) from home.

This news caused another sensation, as with his projected arrival in the UK at the start of July he now seemed to be a contender for the fastest time, and (very optimistically) even for a close finish with Tetley.

[61] Tetley, informed that he might be robbed of the fastest-time prize, started pushing harder, despite that his boat was having significant problems – he made major repairs at sea in an attempt to stop the port hull of his trimaran falling off, and kept racing.

He abandoned ship just before Victress finally sank and was rescued from his liferaft that evening, having come to within 1,100 nautical miles (1,300 mi; 2,000 km) of finishing what would have been the most significant voyage ever made in a multi-hulled boat.

Although he had put great effort into his fabricated log, such a deception would in practice be extremely difficult to carry off, particularly for someone who did not have actual experience of the Southern Ocean; something of which he must have been aware at heart.

Although he had been sailing fast – at one point making over 200 nautical miles (230 mi; 370 km) in a day – as soon as he learned of Tetley's sinking, he slowed down to a wandering crawl.

[citation needed] Unable to see a way out of his predicament, he plunged into abstract philosophy, attempting to find an escape in metaphysics, and on 24 June he started writing a long essay to express his ideas.

Inspired (in a misguided way) by the work of Einstein, whose book Relativity: The Special and General Theory he had aboard, the theme of Crowhurst's writing was that a sufficiently intelligent mind can overcome the constraints of the real world.

[citation needed] Teignmouth Electron was sold to a tour operator in Jamaica and eventually ended up damaged and abandoned on Cayman Brac, where she lies to this day.

[76] After being driven ashore during a storm at Cabo San Lucas, the restored Joshua was acquired by the maritime museum in La Rochelle, France, where it serves as part of a cruising school.

This race started from Les Sables-d'Olonne on 4 September 2022 and won by South African Kirsten Neuschäfer after an official time of 233 days, 20 hours, 43 minutes and 47 seconds at sea.