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This article is more than 1 year old

It was the summer storm that roared without warning into the Celtic Sea, unleashing monster waves that ambushed a fleet of 303 boats competing in the Fastnet race.

Instead of skimming along the south coast of the UK to the Fastnet Rock off south-west Ireland, sailors found themselves battling for life against howling winds and walls of water. Dozens of yachts capsized, trapping crews in their cabins and tossing others into the foam.

British, Irish and Dutch naval vessels responded along with jets, helicopters, tugs, trawlers, and tankers in one of the UK’s largest peacetime rescue operations.

By the time it was all over 15 sailors were dead and hundreds more battered and shaken. The 1979 Fastnet race, which started in balmy conditions on 11 August and ended three tumultuous days later, entered the annals as one of sailing’s greatest disasters.

This week, 40 years later, survivors will gather for a series of commemorations in Ireland and the UK that will reunite rescuers and rescued. Vigils, poetry and portrait paintings will form part of the ceremonies.

The night the sea showed sailors just how small we really are Read more

“Engaging with a painful and horrific event of this kind is rarely easy, but nonetheless requires reflection as well as remembrance,” Ireland’s president, Michael D Higgins, wrote in the foreword to Fastnet: A Portrait, a booklet to be distributed at a ceremony on 18 August in Cape Clear on County Cork’s western tip.

It features portraits by Dan Llywelyn Hall, a Welsh artist known for painting the Queen, and of Gerald Butler, who operated the lighthouse on Fastnet Rock and helped save countless lives.

A ceremony was held last week at Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, where the 600-mile biennial race starts and ends.

The US crew of the VO70 Wizard won last week the overall prize for the 2019 Rolex Fastnet race, which enjoyed benign conditions plus a panoply of safety regulations and technology ushered in after 1979.

Weather forecasting 40 years ago was primitive compared to today and many vessels lacked radios.

Few if any sensed danger when the race began, said Butler. “It started off as a very fine event. The sea was flat calm. The forecasting at the time was unable to see what was coming.”

The Southampton weather centre had forecast a gale but no one anticipated a wave pattern from south-westerly winds meeting a wave train from the north-west, a meteorological freak verging on hurricane force that created waves seven-storeys high.

“From tea time onwards the ugliness came into it,” said Butler. “By midnight it was up to force 10. The sea was mountainous.”

From his stone and steel Victorian-era eyrie at Fastnet, an islet that marks Ireland’s most southern point, the lighthouse keeper watched the ocean smash the boats below.

“They sailed into a nightmare. They couldn’t get out of it no matter what they did. A wave would break up under the balcony. And we would lose sight of everything beneath us.”

Butler had once nearly drowned and empathised with the sailors battling to survive. “It was like being in the middle of a fast flowing river. The people were getting an unmerciful battering.”

Butler used his beam and radio to monitor the stricken vessels and to help coordinate the sprawling, improvised rescue effort, eventually documenting the night in his memoir The Lightkeeper. The courage and skill of those who responded saved many lives.

A chance visit to the Cape Clear museum inspired Llywelyn Hall to join the commemorations by doing portraits of Fastnet Rock and the former lighthouse keeper.

“What drew me was the acts of human endurance and how all these people all came together from all these fractious organisations … I found the whole thing to be a remarkable feat. When you consider the number of boats out there the rescue operation was a great success.”

The portraits and sketches will be exhibited at the Royal Ocean Racing Club in London next month.

Remarkably, the 1979 race was not abandoned. The handicap winner was the 61ft yacht Tenacious, owned and skippered by CNN founder Ted Turner.