Sailing Solo Around the World Like It's 1968: The Golden Globe Race

The Art of Adventure - Arthur Beale

The Golden Globe Race recreates the 1968 solo circumnavigation with no modern tech, testing sailors' mental and physical limits. Don McIntyre, inspired by Robin Knox-Johnston, revived the race to honor human endurance ov

Key takeaways

• No GPS or electronics forces reliance on skill

Transcript preview

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It's the toughest mind game in the world. It's grueling, it's ugly, it's really quite demanding. Not to mention the fact that every inch that they move around the world is entirely because of their own effort. The Golden Globe Race is a solo non-stop, unassisted circumnavigation of the world. No GPS, no electronic instruments, and if something breaks in the middle of the ocean, you better know how to fix it yourself. from a Sunday Times sponsored sailing race in 1968, the GGR strips it all back to one person, one boat and roughly eight months alone at sea with nothing but your own skill, nerve and single mindliness to get you across the finish line. Fewer than one in five who start, ever finish it. I'm Hugh Taylor and you're listening to the art of adventure. A podcast brought to you by Arthur Bill, outfitters to sailors, adventurers, and explorers and vaguer. 500 years. Arthur Bill is a proud official partner of the Golden Globe race and as the next edition prepares to set off this September, we wanted to sit down with the man who has brought this extraordinary race back to life. Don McIntyre is a true adventure. From solo circumnavigation to Antarctic exploration, he really has done it all. And now, inspired by his boyhood hero, Sir Robin Knox Johnston, he is successfully recreated the Golden globe for a new generation and today we're asking what does it take to sail around the world like it's 1968. Hi Don, thank you very much for joining us. We're very excited to have you on the show particularly because the Golden Globe race is something that is very close to the heart and the ethos of Arthur Bill. But before we get onto it, I mean it be quite interesting to talk a bit about you and your sort of life of exploration and leading up to obviously how you, how you... sort of created the Golden Globe race and took on the legacy from the original Sunday Times race. Yeah, it's fun to be here here and we're sort of happy to have the connection as well, especially because I've got such a history in Antarctica. And that's the first time I heard about you and the gear, you know, with Shackleton and all the rest of the boys. But anyway, so for me, you know, yes, I suppose it's fair to say that I've had a life of adventure and for the last 40, 50 years, 50 years even, something, something, something, something new, four year cycle and it's a boy's own adventure classic where I don't think I've ever grown up you know my childhood was pretty normal you know middle class Australian family and who knows what drove me to always having this system where my mother used to complain she'd say you know when I was a teenager why don't you just stick with one thing you know one hobby or one interest and my answer to that was I've done that now you know I want to try something different and so I was always cycling these different adventures I did cubs and so I did and so I was always cycling these different surfing from the age of a 13 or something and you know I was into hunting and but I suppose overall the water was my one constant in life it always has been I treat that as just something in my makeup so as you grow up you get access and being an Australian huge amount of opportunity if you wanted to grab it and you know I was started building my first boat a replica of Shu Haley when I was 18 it was a concrete boat and eventually I sold that and was too big for me and I built a 29 foot a little boat and did three years cruising in the Pacific with my surfboard and all my dive gear and hunting gear and my name was for 15 years was jungle because I'd be out feeding the other cruising boats you know shooting pigs with an M1 carbine and at all the hunting bows and fishing gear and you name it was just a boy's own life I did that started for three years out in the Pacific and then I stumbled across a guy by the name when he was doing his first challenge at Sir Francis Chichester's record, which he beat by two days, sailing around the world. And then subsequently we became good friends and I helped him service the boat and then he did Sir Chay Blay's record. A couple years later and we got a bit closer. And the whole idea of the BOC challenge became very real. And so I raced solo around the world. I came second in my class and it was quite amazing. It was an eight year effort to get there. And that proved to me that really if you set your mind to it you can do anything and then things got a bit more serious. So the next dream was to head to Antarctica. I was inspired by a guy called Dr David Lewis and sailed to Antarctica with 200 teddy bears after the BOC. That was in 1993 and that started a whole new love affair with Antarctica. So two years later my then wife Margie and I sailed down to Commonwealth Bay. build a box there, 8 feet by 12 feet, chained it to the rocks because it was the windiest spot in Antarctica. And we were left alone there for a year of isolation, which was mind-blowing. It was unbelievable. It came out of there and then it rolled into all sorts of other adventures, including a world-first solo flight around Australia in a gyrocopter. Got into rally car racing, you know, I ended up in 2000, ended up buying a ship, 36 meter helicopter. It was an ice-breaking ship up in Finland. We had three amazing seasons in Antarctica and we did a big treasure hunting expedition up in the Philippines working with the government and so on. Now I got to go back to the point where when I was living in Antarctica for a year with my wife in a box in the depth of winter I'm thinking what's next. And I always wanted to recreate Robin Knox Johnson's voyage in Sioux Haley. So I thought, I know what I'll do. 30th anniversary coming up. I will build a replica of and sailed around the world. That idea faded because there was other things I wanted to do. So now cut to 2014,