Sailor Nick Ward survived yachting’s worst ever disaster, the 1979 Fastnet Race, after his crewmates abandoned him along with their boat Grimalkin. Thirty years on, he opens up and talks to Markham Nolan about the experience. And he’s preparing to go round the rock again.
“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 life raft 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 13 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 Gerry Wicks.
Knockdowns and knockouts
Ward had argued against using the life raft before the final knockdown. Sailors often say that you should only ever step up into a life raft, 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 life raft 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 or 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.”
Born survivor
Ward was no stranger to survival. Although only 23, Ward had cheated death eight years before when a brain haemorrhage 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.
Photos:
Courtesy of Adlard Coles Nautical
