Sailing dick fight...

Rules. he don’t need no stinking rules

I don’t mean to be too picky about this but I was not the one that started it.  I wrote a piece about the amazing solo circumnavigation by the Polish sailor Szymon Kuczynski and compared it to a similar small boat voyage done by the South African sailor Ant Steward back in the early nineties. Ant sailed his tiny 19-foot yacht singlehanded around the world in an epic adventure that had him shipwrecked in the Seychelles Islands after hitting a reef. He was able to fix his boat and closed the loop on one of the most extraordinary sailing voyages of all time.

19-foot dinghy that sailed around the world

I called his boat an Open Boat. That’s the term that the yachts’ designer Dudley Dix used and I repeated it without knowing what a quagmire I was about to land myself in. Let’s just be straight about this. The boat is a 19-foot dinghy with no protection. Seems pretty open to me, but apparently not to the esteemed ocean voyager Webb Childs.

You see Mr Childs, a man for whom I have great respect, felt it necessary to chime in and point out that Steward’s boat was not an open boat and therefore it should not be referred to as an open boat. Webb added a picture of a Drascombe Lugger, clearly an Open Boat and the one, I presume, that Webb himself sailed most of the way around the world. I appreciate the correction and again, I have much respect for Webb Childs, but his narrow view of what qualifies as an open boat excludes just about all dinghies and small boats that currently exist including a laser and 420.

The quagmire that I discovered was, what seems to me, a blatant attempt by Webb Childs and a man by the name of Nobby Clarke, the person responsible for deciding what voyages make it into the Guinness Book of World Records, to make sure that Ant’s voyage did not qualify. Childs and Clarke went so far as the write an “Open Boat” rule that allowed the yacht that Webb sailed to qualify, but not Ant Steward’s yacht and to this day Guinness does not recognize his voyage. 

Drascombe Lugger

I think that’s highly unfair and we should set the record straight. Let me point this out. Ant Steward sailed all the way around the world. Childs did not. He missed the Atlantic, the Caribbean Sea and part of the Pacific, the hard part, the long windward slog from Panama up to San Diego. It was still an impressive voyage and I am definitely not taking that away from him.

I don’t like rules and I don’t like rule makers. In my experience they let the little power that they have go to their heads and I think that’s exactly what happened here. As I understand it Guinness has said that going forward they will not be recognizing anyone’s voyage in a small craft. I think that they are trying to discourage people from doing ridiculously stupid things just in order to make it into the record books. Ridiculously stupid things done on a sailboat will not qualify, but shoving a half dozen packs of hot dogs down your throat in the space of a couple of minutes is just fine I guess. See what I  mean about rules and rule makers? Discuss.

– Brian Hancock

The offending response..

Our friend Webb Chiles makes a an open and shut case…

This morning I walked the short distance along th

e harbor front to the Maritime Museum to view the boat in which a South African claims to have made an open boat circumnavigation. I had seen it when I was here in THE HAWKE OF TUONELA in 2008 and wanted to verify my memory.

As the photos clearly show this boat is decked. Decked from the bow to aft of the mast. Decked from the bow along both sides to the stern. Decked essentially as much as is GANNET or J-24s or every other small flush decked boat. There are Moore 24s with cut out sterns that look very much like this boat.

If I were to seal off GANNET’s companionway and live and sail her from the cockpit, she would still not be an open boat. She has a deck. CHIDIOCK TICHBORNE did not. Neither does Steve Earley’s SPARTINA, a Welsford Pathfinder. They are open boats. Not having a deck is what makes a boat open.

The South African sailor did complete an interesting small boat circumnavigation. He did not do it in an open boat.


(If you don't know what the fuss is about. An "open boat" is a boat that doesn't have a cabin or shelter. Most open boats are just the hull open to the air above. But there are other open boats. The hull may have a deck that offers no shelter. So this is a dick fight about whether a boat that had a small deck and no shelter qualifies as an open boat.)