Left For Dead

It’s been quiet for me on the writing front lately – having a completely separate business to run and all that. But I still get to do bits and pieces of work from time to time for magazines and radio.

Roisin from Outsider magazine  (They’re on Twitter too – @OutsiderMag) asked me to interview Nick Ward a few weeks back for their upcoming ‘Survival’ issue. Nick is a survivor of the 1979 Fastnet race – yacht racing’s most famous disaster. When he came to in the water, tethered in by his lifeline and with a broken leg, he realised the rest of his crew (those that were still alive) had abandoned ship, and spent 14 hours with his dead crewmate hoping for  a rescue before being spotted.

And when he was found – did his crewmates come visit him in hospital?  Nope. They didn’t even send flowers.

It’s an amazing story, and the Outsider guys have given it a great treatment in the pages of the mag, which you can pick up for FREE in many outlets, listed here. The entire article is below the fold.

Having written a book about the whole affair, Nick seems fairly zen about having been abandoned in one of the worst storms in living memory. Apart from entitling his book ‘Left for Dead‘, that is.

Below is a snippet from the interview we did, wherein he gives his views on the call his crew took to abandon their 30-foot Grimalkin, along with him and the dying Gerry Winks.

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Sailor Nick Ward survived yachting’s worst ever disaster, the 1979 Fastnet Race, after his crewmates abandoned him along with their boat. Thirty years on, he’s finally ready to talk about it. And he’s preparing to go round the rock again.

By Markham Nolan

“Journalists and all those people have always been trying to get another side to it. There is no other side, do you understand what I’m saying?” says Nick Ward rather forcefully down the phone from Hamble. This is not a line of questioning he wants to pursue.

The other side that journalists want to hear, the bitter juice they’re trying to squeeze from Ward is a morsel of resentment from a man left for dead by his crewmates, and barely acknowledged by them after being rescued.  In the middle of the worst yacht-race-turned-disaster in living memory, Ward’s crewmates abandoned him and dying crewman Gerry Winks on board the 30-foot yacht Grimalkin. They stepped off the boat and into the liferaft with the remaining safety gear, leaving two unconscious but very much alive individuals to an unknown fate.

The other side that Ward warns against uncovering is a bitter emotional swamp from which Ward has walked away.
By saying there is no other side, Ward means there is only survival, and there is only one side of survival worth talking about, the side on which you make it out alive. Nothing else really matters.

“Unless you’ve been at sea in a Force 10, 11 or 12 it’s very difficult to judge anybody if they think two of their crewmates are dead, which they thought I was and they thought Gerry was. Three lads, and when I say lads, the youngest was 17, the other two were below 20 years of age, they had a decision to make.  They had to make an instant decision. I can’t judge them. They made the right decision, as far as I’m concerned. They were picked up by helicopter an hour later.”

Ward, however, had thirteen solitary hours left to suffer, back on board Grimalkin. He would, eventually, be plucked from the mountainous, foam-streaked seas by a helicopter, having shown incredible mental strength to keep himself alive and the boat afloat. By the time he was rescued, helicopters and rescue vessels assumed there were only bodies to retrieve. He was the last man standing.

The events leading up to the rescue are, by now, well known. After near-becalmed conditions not long after the start of the 1979 Fastnet race, a fleet of 303 boats found themselves in an unpredicted force 10 storm off the south-east corner of Ireland. Just 85 boats finished the round trip to the rock, with five boats ending up in pieces on the sea bed, sunk, and a further 19 abandoned by their crews. Fifteen sailors never made it home.

Two of those deaths were among the six crew on Grimalkin, one of the smallest boats in the fleet, with its owner, David Sheahan the first fatality. Sheahan suffered a head wound in one of the first knock-downs the boat experienced, and was lost overboard when the boat subsequently turned over. Sheahan’s teenage son, Matt, assumed control as his father slid away and made the decision to abandon ship, leaving behind Ward and Wicks.

Ward had argued against using the liferaft before the final knockdown. Sailors often say that you should only ever step up into a liferaft, the theory being that a floating boat, even a dismasted one, is bigger and more visible than a dinghy. The bigger the boat, the easier it is to spot from a rescue helicopter, and as Ward’s father had told him, you do not become a survivor until you have been rescued.

Ward pleaded with the panicky Sheahan, but another knockdown interrupted the discussion, and when Ward next came to, he was in the water, tethered to the boat by his lifeline. Scrambling back on board with a broken leg, he was alone. The liferaft was gone, an empty cavity left under the cockpit floor. The other  lifelines were eerily still attached inside the cockpit, left behind in the scramble to abandon. Noticing that Gerry Winks was also in the water, Ward hauled him on deck and revived him, but only for a matter of minutes. Ward cradled his crewmate as he breathed his last, leaving him alone with a dead body, a broken leg, and a half-flooded boat with no food, water means of contacting the outside world. All he had was his own will to overcome.

“A state of half-madness came in,” said Ward,  “where I knew I was in a situation on my own, with a dead man, and I knew that If I didn’t do something within a few hours the boat was going to sink. I had no means of communication, so it was very difficult to fight that feeling. I fought it by hearing music in my head, hearing my father’s voice, that sort of thing.”

Ward decided to go below decks and begin bailing out the knee-deep water in the cabin, bucket by bucket. All along he talked to and screamed at his dead crewmate, who lolled lifeless in the cockpit. He counted buckets, measured progress by a notch on the companionway, and kept in mind his sailing heroes and what they would do to keep his focus squarely on survival.
“My heroes were people like [Eric] Tabarly, Joshua Slocum and Sir Robin Knox-Johnson, who used self-reliance – they were true seamen.
“When I was lying on the bunk between bouts of bailing. I was thinking about what they would do. If I had the physical strength, and perhaps had Gerry survived, perhaps we could have made a jury rig and sailed the boat back.”

Ward was no stranger to survival. Although only 23, Ward had cheated death eight years before, when a brain haemorrage left him unable to walk, let alone sail. Recovering from that gave Ward a benchmark of inner strength to draw from.
“I was fortunate, which is probably the not the right word, but I was fortunate in that at age 15 I had a pretty traumatic physical event which meant I had to learn to walk again, and learn to sail again.
“Now, I used the same willpower and tenacity back in 1971 that I did with Gerry for those 14 hours.
“What I’d advise people is to use the inner depth that we all possess. It’s just tapping in deep into the human psyche. I’ve learnt that by bad experience, but it works and it can be done by anyone.”

Bad experiences, though, have a tendency to linger.
“Psychologically, mentally, it’s something I woke up with for years. And like anything so traumatic, I still wake up with it.
“I was traumatized. That’s why it took so long to talk about it, to get it out.”
Compounding the trauma was the reaction of his crewmates, who refused to contact Ward once he was rescued, citing a pact of silence around the events, to which Ward was not a party.
None of them came to the bedside of the man they thought dead. None expressed delight that he survived, called or wrote. The only contact made was by Matt Sheahan to organise a trip to Ireland to check over the retrieved shell of Grimalkin, and then a call to his publisher 27 years later to question the facts in Ward’s book, ‘Left for Dead’.

Thirty years on, Ward plans to do the Fastnet race again for the first time. He’ll join a well-trained crew on board a boat twice Grimalkin’s size, but says he understands why so many veterans of the 1979 race never want to hear mention of it. It is a ghost few want to confront.
“I know five or six guys who were on boats, and they’ve never gone offshore again.
“I bumped into two guys who are brothers and they saw a local newspaper article that said I was doing the Fastnet Race again.
“They’d just come out of the pub and the first thing they said was ‘you bloody idiot, Nick’.”

Left for Dead, written by Nick Ward and Sinead O’Brien and published by A&C Black, is available in bookstores and online.

Nick Ward on….
….1979 sailing gear:
“If you go to the oilskins, there was no Goretex, there was no breathable clothing, no three-layer system, it was cotton-backed PVC.”

…Grimalkin’s electronics:
“David had a 57-channel dual watch VHF, which was quite radical at that time. He had a two-way call buoy, an SAR radio, and an FM/AM radio, so you had three radios aboard.”

…the crew:
“When we did the qualifying races we had no trouble. We dealt with Force eights. We worked together well. The boat was strong, well found. I had no problem with the quality of the safety gear at the time.”

… taking risks:
“I always admire anyone that takes a risk, but that risk has to be qualified. And qualified by the best safety equipment.”

…modern offshore sailing:
“The trouble is that you get a combination of new materials and people pushing the boat too hard. Kevlar can snap, carbon can snap and keels can fall off, so you get a loss of life through damage, not through lack of seamanship”

…doing the Fastnet again:
“It’s going to be a very emotional thing when I get into the Irish Sea.”