Vendée Globe: Rich Wilson Finishes 9th

American Rich Wilson crosses the finishing line off Les Sables d'Olonne. Image copyright Olivier Blanchet/DPPI/Vendée Globe.

by Vendée Globe media

Crossing the finish line off Les Sables d’Olonne at 12h 43 19s GMT Rich Wilson completed the 24,840 mile Vendée Globe solo non stop round the world race in ninth place, completing a highly creditable result which is testament to his excellent seamanship skills, deep determination, careful planning and prudent execution, staying the distance to finish this incredible edition of the race which has claimed the highest attrition rate yet. Wilson finished 121 days 00 hours, 41 minutes and 19 seconds after leaving Les Sables d’Olonne on Sunday November 9th. Wilson averaged 9.84 knots on the water covering 28,590 miles. He sailed the 24,840 theoretical miles at an average speed of 8.55 knots.

While nineteen of the 30 skippers who started from the Vendée start line on November 9th had to retire from the race, the most gruelling challenge in solo ocean racing, Wilson, the race’s senior skipper at 58 years old, has stuck rigidly to his watchwords of safety and conservatism, showing huge determination to complete the course as the pinnacle of a sailing career which already included three ocean passage records.

Sailing Great American III, which was built in 1999 to a design by Bernard Nivelt for Thierry Dubois, Wilson, of Marblehead, MASS, becomes only the second American ever to finish the Vendée Globe after Bruce Schwab finished ninth from 20 starters in the 2004-5 race on his Ocean Planet.

Wilson safely completed his boat’s third circumnavigation after Dubois sailed her in the 2000-1 Vendée Globe and then the 2002 Around Alone.

While his first race into the inhospitable wastes of the Southern Oceans proved the biggest physical challenge for Wilson, his weeks since rounding Cape Horn have tested his mental durability. In the South Atlantic he struggled with constant headwinds and occasional difficult low pressure systems which generated strong winds and confuses seas and the complex weather pattern in the North Atlantic meant he had to make detours of nearly 1000 miles to get west around successive high pressure systems.

At one point in the middle of the Atlantic he was nearly 500 miles closer to his home in Boston than he was to the finish. His race has been more limited to a test of stamina since the south of Australia and New Zealand when his nearest rivals, first Canadian Derek Hatfield (Algimouss Spirit of Canada) and then Jonny Malbon (Artemis) retired successively with rigging damage and with mainsail damage respectively. That left Wilson feeling more isolated with his next nearest rivals 1000 miles ahead and astern.

His finish is a great triumph for the amateur solo skipper whose career has progressed steadily, regularly proving that he has the steel and the skill to take on big challenges. In 1980 he was the youngest skipper to win overall in the Newport-Bermuda Race on Holger Danske. Between 1993 and 2003 on his 50 foot trimaran Great American II he set world records on clipper routes. In 1993 he set a record for San Francisco to Boston of 69 days 20 hours. In 2001 he sailed from New York to Melbourne in 68 days and 10 hours and in 2003 he sailed from Hong Kong to New York in 72 days and 21 hours before competing in the 2004 Transat in which he finished second in class 2. Since moving to the IMOCA Open 60 Great American III, Wilson completed two Transatlantic races, the two handed Transat Jacques Vabre in 2007 and the return solo race the BtoB from Brasil to France.

In a field which is mainly populated by die-hard professional solo skippers, Wilson stands out with a long academic, teaching, consultancy and investment career which has run successfully alongside his sailing programmes. He has three university and college degrees from Harvard, from MIT, and Harvard Business School. He was a policy adviser to the Democrat party, a popular maths teacher in his native Boston, a desalination consultant in Saudi Arabia as well as a successful private business investor. In 1990 he created the sitesAlive foundation and has since developed hugely popular learning programmes on the internet and in newspapers, engaging young people of all ages with his adventures. Along with a team of experts he enlightens with practical presentations of topics from simple science and geography to more complex topics. During the Vendée Globe he has had hundreds of syndicated articles and essays published in more than a dozen different newspapers.

He has also been an inspiration to asthma sufferers all over the globe. Afflicted since the age of one, he went on to run the Boston marathon in 1982 and has takes four daily medications to keep his asthma under control.

The American skipper suffered a cracked rib during the first storm when he was thrown across the cabin. The injury hampered him badly for the first two weeks of the race, and then even a week later the relentless pounding of his boat exacerbated the injury again. In the Pacific he had to climb the mast to un-snag his running backstays from the standing rigging. Wilson has fought extreme fatigue since the Southern Ocean. Since losing the wind direction input to his autopilot he has had to sail with his pilot set only to compass course which has limited to his rest periods to only very short naps. Approaching Cape Horn he sailed to within a few miles of the spot where he was capsized and rescued in 1990.

Rich’s Race


Rich Wilson finishes ninth in Great American III. Image copyright Olivier Blanchet/DPPI/Vendée Globe.

Wilson was all but overwhelmed at the start, admitting to being nervous about the magnitude of the adventure he was setting out on and, of course, the forecasted storm. He settled quickly to the task but was very sick within the first few hours of the race. During that first big storm he was thrown violently five or six feet across the cabin, smashing his back against a grab bar. At first the pain was so bad that he could not call his specialist doctor.

The injury improved in time but even in early December the pounding of the boat in tradewinds damaged it again and it was a long time until he could move freely. In twenty first place at Cape Finisterre, Wilson routed to the east, inshore and was in eighteenth place has he paced Raphael Dinelli who was just 22 miles behind him and 28 miles ahead of Unai Basurko. The Basque skipper stayed closer to the rhumb line to the Cape Verde islands while Rich stayed east of the islands. Dinelli, Basurko and Wilson had an enjoyable and friendly three way race going on and it continued right south through the Equator. The Sablais skipper and Rich were just 20 miles different when they crossed into the Southern Hemisphere.

Wilson’s course is methodical and conservative while Basurko is more extreme from the east to the west, gaining but then losing to Wilson. But as perhaps a first taste of the attrition which is to affect all parts of the fleet, first Dinelli heads west to the try and repair his halyards and then Basurko, on 4th December, reports his rudder cassette problem which ultimately lead to his retirement.

At the first security gate the Great American III is in 21st place as his race develops with a new set of rivals and running mates. British skipper Jonny Malbon, having suffered badly in the Doldrums compounding an earlier poor routing choice in the east, is just 151 miles ahead of him and by the Iles Crozet and then the Kerguelen Islands Canadian Derek Hatfield – who had to re-start – has caught up to within 300 miles of Rich who is now in 16th place as skippers ahead of him start to fall victim to luck and mechanical failures. Wilson routes comfortably and safely north of the Kerguelens

Rich’s race becomes mentally tougher after first, the retirement of Derek Hatfield who had to head for Hobart when he lost his upper spreaders, and then Jonny Malbon who retired to Auckland when he felt there was no point in continuing with his badly delaminated mainsail. At the East Australian gate Rich is already 14th, showing considerable determination, though always trying to stay one step ahead of the weather conditions. By the New Zealand gate he is 11th.

Cape Horn is an uplifting and emotional time for him. While he had intended to be well to the north, the prevailing winds brought him to within a few miles of where he had capsized in 1990 and had to be rescued. From there to Cape Horn his moods were mixed, but certainly when he had cleared the Island Los Estados there was some relief to be back into the Atlantic.

It may have been fairly kind on the outward leg south, but Wilson seemed to pay a price on the way back north to Les Sables d’Olonne. Some of his continued, consistent feeling of frustration was certainly a by product of his fatigue, but he was seemingly constantly on the wind or being pounded by contrary or confused seas in a series of stormy low pressure systems which seemingly singled him out from the South American coast.

But he toughed it out all the way. ‘Beyond frustration’ was how he ultimately described the weather conundrum which faced him in the North Atlantic. A long series of detours around two high pressure systems took him west in the Atlantic, closer to the home port of the Great Americans than the finish port.

Wilson has regularly been fulsome in his praise for other Vendée Globe skippers, entranced and inspired by the race of Michel Desjoyeaux, who regularly gave advice to Rich before the start and visited his family at home in Boston, but also admiring the performances of Sam Davies, of Dee Caffari, Steve White. But as he completes his own Vendée Globe, Rich Wilson is fully deserving of enormous credit for the completing his race in an excellent ninth place.

Rich's times

Les Sables-Equator 15 days, 14 h and 28 mins
Les Sables-Cape of Good Hope 30 days 16h 58 mins
Les Sables-Cape Leeuwin 46 days 20 h 13 mins
Les Sables-Cape Horn 78 days 1 h 48 mins
Les Sables-Equator 98 days 12 h 8 mins
Les Sables-Les Sables 121 days 0 h 41 mins

Rich Wilson shrugged off extreme fatigue and seemed visibly lifted by the huge and warm welcome he received today when he finished in ninth place, here is a summary of what he said:


Rich Wilson. Image copyright Olivier Blanchet/DPPI/Vendée Globe.

“For me I knew about the Vendée Globe but I never considered it because it was too hard, too difficult, too long, too everything but really the motivating idea was the school programme. To try to make the global school programme. And when the internet came along and we could develop our school programme, and we had the encouragement of some newspapers, that is when we started to think we might do it.”

“Satisfaction will come. At the moment it is relief from the stress. Twenty fur hours a day, every minute of the day, every minute, every minute waiting for something to go wrong. Like when we are off Argentina or Brasil and the pilots stopped, and I was there in the dark and hand steering and wondering: ‘ now what do I do?’ and so having the stress of that finish now, is very, very good.”

On the new American President:

“I voted here in France on a paper ballot before the election and I was happy that Senator Obama was the winner, and I think that because I was approaching Cape Horn when he took office, I celebrated for five minutes and that was about it, there was just no time.”

On contact with the outside world, and his school programme:

“I was very disciplined and strict about that schedule (the education programme), but I did get a chance to call friends, a few friends in particular who helped in the Atlantic, where it was so long. They helped a lot.”

And when were the good days he recalls:

“ There were good days. It was a good day when I climbed the mast and got down safely. That was a good day when I got down safely. Across the Indian Ocean I became friends with Jonny Malbon who was near to me in Artemis, it seemed like we had gale after gale after gale, and we talked through them and that was very good, and so it was very disappointing when he had to retire. I had to face the Pacific alone. It was good in the Atlantic when we were sailing with Raphael (Dinelli) who is doing an incredible project with his solar panels, and with Unai Basurko. In the south Atlantic I made a good weather decision and was able to catch up a little bit, but then everyone went faster than I did.”

“I guess also I am very conservative. I grew up sailing heavier boats which were not so fast, and the potential speed of these boats, I am not accustomed to that speed,. I think you have to sail that fast a lot, to get accustomed to it.

I think that the French sailors have done such a good job with their training. In Port La Foret you see six or seven boats go out and race and train for three days and I have never seen that anywhere else.”

“It is very good that four British sailors, Sam Davies, Brian Thompson, Dee Caffari and Steve White finished where they did but still that front pack of boats which went down the Atlantic and across the Indian Ocean, they were all French except for Mike Golding, they were all French. But it was great to see that group of English sailors as well.”

“ It is very difficult to describe the abuse the boat takes. It is like a constant car crash all the time. But Thierry Dubois built and incredibly strong boat. So often I could not believe that the boat could survive. But it did .”

On what he learned about himself, perseverance and determination:
“ I think after I broke my rib there was never a question of stopping. For me I have had asthma since I was one year old, and it has been very severe. For the first twenty years of my life there were not any medications. In a strange way that was useful, because when you go out to play a sport, then you can’t stop. It is hard to breathe but you can’t stop. And so there is some level of perseverance and tenacity that came from that.”

Vendée Globe