Wilson only second American ever to finish Vendee Globe

by Vendee Globe on 11 Mar 2009
Crossing the finish line off Les Sables d’Olonne at 12h43min19sec GMT, Rich Wilson completed the 28 590.2, miles 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.

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.

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 wh