Clipper Race Closes the Circle

The 2015-16 Clipper Round the World Race has come full circle, returning to its port of departure on the Thames in London after its 40,000-mile, 11-month odyssey. Claiming the podium positions in the 12-boat fleet of Clipper 70 one-design monohulls were LMAX Exchange, Derry~Londonderry~Doire, and Great Britain, in that order. Visit Seattle finished eighth.

Beating out those awards for ‘wow factor’ was the announcement of the Henri Lloyd Clipper Race Seamanship Award. The public voted to honor Mission Performance crew member Gavin Reid and his team after they went to the assistance of a yacht in distress during Race 6, the Henri Lloyd Hobart to Whitsundays Race, in early January. 

"We suspended racing, turned around and motored south for a couple hours to their position," said San Franciscan Mike Moore, a crewmember aboard Mission Performance. The team discovered M3, an Australian TP52, with a line wrapped around the propeller, a damaged mainsail, and a sailor stuck at the top of the mast.

"Gavin volunteered to transfer boats and go up their mast to help get the stuck crewman down," Moore wrote in his blog at the time. "Rather than a complicated boat-to-boat transfer, we got a line across to them, tied it to Gavin, and he jumped in and was pulled to the other boat — good thing he was in his drysuit!"

Reid climbed M3’s mast and worked for two hours to free the yacht’s crewman, who had been trapped aloft for nine hours, while the boat was buffeted by a heavy sea state. "The secured yacht would later lose their steering as well and ended up on a reef, but all crew were safely retrieved," added Moore.

Receiving the award, Reid, who was born deaf, said: “It was just something I felt I had to do and am honoured to have been recognised for it. I can’t believe I have completed my circumnavigation; it’s a bit of a whirlwind.” 

If you’re like us, your phones are strangely silent when it comes to calls to crew on Volvo Ocean Race teams, but recruitment is already underway for pay-to-play amateur crew in the Clipper Race 2017-18 edition. For your chance to be a hero, or simply to dip deep into your bucket list, see www.clipperroundtheworld.com.