Along with Sir Peter Blake, he won in 1994 the second Jules Verne Trophy, for which they were also given the ISAF World Sailor of the Year Awards.

In 2007, at the age of 67, he set a record as the oldest yachtsman to complete a round the world solo voyage in the Velux 5 Oceans Race.

[2] In early 1962, in Cambridge, he married Suzanne (Sue) Singer, whom he had known from the age of eight; they had one daughter, Sara, who was born in Bombay whilst he was at sea.

Despite losing his self-steering gear off Australia, he rounded Cape Horn on 17 January 1969, 20 days before his closest competitor Bernard Moitessier.

The other seven competitors dropped out at various stages, leaving Knox-Johnston to win the race and become officially the first person to circumnavigate the globe non-stop and single-handed on 22 April 1969, the day he returned to Falmouth.

[5] He later persuaded African-American sailor Bill Pinkney to follow the southern route around the Capes, rather than using the Panama and Suez canals to circumnavigate the Earth, and to become the first Black man to do so.

Williams and Knox-Johnston jointly skippered (with Blake a crew member again) the maxi yacht Heath's Condor in the 1977 Whitbread Round the World Race.

During his tenure the money was collected to replace the STA's vessels Sir Winston Churchill and Malcolm Miller with the new, larger brigs Prince William and Stavros S. Niarchos.

He completed his second solo circumnavigation of the world in the yacht Saga Insurance on 4 May 2007, finishing in fourth place in the Velux 5 Oceans Race.

[14] In late 2008 and early 2009, Knox-Johnston took part in a BBC programme called Top Dogs: Adventures in War, Sea and Ice.

The programme saw him unite with fellow British legends Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the adventurer, and John Simpson, the BBC world affairs editor.