A few days later he made a long list of jobs that needed doing and concluded his chances of survival if he carried on were at best 50/50. It was quite a feat of seamanship, and only someone of Crowhurst’s brilliance could have carried it off convincingly.After a few days’ practice he felt sufficiently confident to send his first ‘fake’ press release, claiming he’d sailed 243 miles in 24 hours, a new world record for a single-handed sailor. Her husband Victor seems to bear her antics with utmost calm and nonchalance. Over the course of a week, he wrote a 25,000-word manifesto that described how mankind had achieved such an advanced evolutionary state that it could now merge with the cosmos. To make sure his radio signals weren’t picked up by the wrong land stations, he maintained radio silence for nearly three months, from the middle of January until the beginning of April, which he blamed on his generator breaking down again.Unbelievably, he even put ashore in a remote bay near Buenos Aires in Argentina to buy materials to repair one of the hulls, which had started to fall apart. He would say the most amazing things, but then no matter how crazy they seemed, he’d be clever and ingenious enough to make them come true. And yet, despite the thousands of words written about him, we really know very little more about him than we did 50 years ago.The challenge was turned into a contest by the Sunday Times which, in March 1968, announced two prizes: a A voyage for madmen, so was the original Sunday Times Golden Globe Race deemed.
The BBC had a crew on standby to record his homecoming and hundreds of thousands of people were expected to throng the seafront at Teignmouth to welcome him home.It was everything Crowhurst dreaded.
By now 35 years old, he could see the same pattern repeating itself, of high ambition thwarted by petty practicalities. Soon after departing, his ship began taking on water and he wrote it would probably sink in heavy seas. Eric Tall/Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images Donald Crowhurst with his wife, Clare, and their children (left to right: Rachel, Simon, Roger, and James). Photo: Getty ImagesNext he got as job as a travelling salesman for an electrics company, but was again dismissed after crashing the company car.Ever-persuasive, he talked himself into a job as chief design engineer for an electronics company in Somerset, and in 1962 set up his own company, Electron Utilisation, to manufacture electronic devices for yachts.The company got off to a good start, selling a simple but well-designed radio direction finder which Crowhurst dubbed the Navicator. Don't do it!"? Photo: Guy Newman / AlamyNone of the clever inventions he had devised for the boat were connected, including the all-important buoyancy bag at the top of the mast, which was supposed to inflate if the trimaran capsized. For all these reasons, giving up was not an option.It soon became clear his estimates for the boat’s speed had been wildly optimistic: he had estimated an average of 220 miles per day, whereas the reality was about half that, on a good day. Have you ever found yourself watching a film or documentary and having to hold yourself back from screaming things like "No! DISGRACED yachtsman Donald Crowhurst planned to abandon his wife and family for secret love two years before he faked a solo round-the-world voyage and … Donald Crowhurst had four children to take care of and when business slowed, he needed a way to make money quickly. Then, two weeks after leaving Teignmouth, his generator broke down after being soaked with water from another leaking hatch.“This bloody boat is just falling to pieces due to lack of attention to engineering detail!!
It seemed a lucky coincidence, given that my book would inevitably feature the Crowhurst story, but I assumed the movie would come out long before my book was ready.Over the next couple of years, however, the release date for the film was repeatedly postponed – so much so that it became a running topic among Hollywood gossipmongers, who speculated that Crowhurst’s widow Clare had delayed progress, or that it was being held back to tie with the 50th anniversary of the events, or indeed that it might never be released in cinemas and go straight to DVD instead.Colin Firth stars as Donald Crowhurst in the 2018 film Of all the stories I researched, it’s the one that has caught the public imagination most. Born in India in 1932, he went to Loughborough College after the war, until family nances and the death of his father forced him to cut his education short. With Crowhurst and Tetley both out of the race, Knox-Johnston, on his slow wooden tortoise of a boat, was the only person to finish the race and was duly award both prizes – though he subsequently donated the £5,000 cash prize to Crowhurst’s widow.The Golden Globe race generated enormous public interest at the time, and the discovery of Crowhurst’s boat was front page news. As Crowhurst slowly worked his way down the Atlantic, his imaginary avatar was already rounding the Cape of Good Hope and heading into the Indian Ocean. Some 1,100 miles from home, the inevitable happened: Tetley’s boat broke up and sank, and he had to be rescued by a passing ship.Suddenly, the spotlight shifted to Crowhurst, the unlikely amateur who’d apparently come out of nowhere to beat the professionals. If he dropped out at this stage, not only would his reputation be destroyed but his business would go bankrupt and, perhaps worse of all, he and his family would lose their home. 14-year-old Laura Dekker sets out on a two-year voyage in pursuit of her dream to become the youngest person ever to sail around the world alone.
Despite being greeted and logged by local officials, this rule-breaking stop remained undetected.On 29 March he reached his most southerly point, hovering a few miles off the Falklands, 8,000 miles from home, before starting his ascent up the Atlantic.Finally, on 9 April, he broke radio silence and exploded back into the race with a telegram containing the infamous line: “HEADING DIGGER RAMREZ” – suggesting he was approaching Diego Ramirez, a small island southwest of Cape Horn (in reality, he was just off Buenos Aires).By this time Moitessier had had his ‘moment of madness’ and had dropped out of the race and was sailing to Tahiti ‘to save his soul’. It was as if all his previous failures had caught up with him in this one grand, final failure.And this time there was no way out, no way of reinventing himself.