Derek
Lundy’s book, Godforsaken Sea, is a
wonderfully detailed record of the misadventures that plagued that particular
race. Pete Goss was 160 miles downwind of
Raphael Dinelli when Dinelli’s boat capsized in Force 11 winds. The mast smashed a hole in the cabintop and
soon the deck was awash. Dinelli lashed himself to the deck and awaited rescue.
Goss himself
was in trouble enough himself in those enormous seas. He had been knocked down
three times and almost pitchpoled a couple of times. In hurricane winds of 70 knots he hoisted a
tiny storm jib and tried to beat back to Dinelli. He was knocked flat
immediately but he nursed his boat upright and found he could sail at five or
six knots about 80 degrees off the wind.
Every half hour or so he was knocked down again and the boat sustained
severe damage but he carried on. Once he was thrown across the cabin and landed
on an elbow that had become infected early in the race.
Just before
Dinelli’s boat sank, the Australian Air Force found him and dropped him two
life rafts. Goss eventually came across
him after two days of bashing to windward and maneuvered under that little jib
in enormous seas to pick him up. Dinelli, in a typically Gallic gesture, handed
Goss a bottle of champagne from his survival suit and then fell flat on his
face in the cockpit. He was thoroughly chilled, as stiff as a board, and unable
to move.
Goss nursed
him back to health and dropped him off in Hobart, Tasmania, 10 days later. Goss continued the race, but when he was
about 1,000 miles west of Cape Horn, he decided to do something about that infected
elbow of his. For a month he hadn’t been able to bend it at all and he had lost
the use of his arm completely. Now the big, crimson swelling ruptured and there
were protruding hernias of soft tissue and
copious secretions.
With the
boat running and rolling in 15-foot seas, Goss strapped a flashlight to his
head and a mirror to his thigh. He picked up a scalpel and began to slice open
his elbow. He ran into trouble straight away.
Blood dripped all over the mirror so he couldn’t see what he was doing.
“Shit,” he thought, “I’m going to cut a tendon or cut my arm off in a minute,” So he put the scalpel in his teeth, mopped up
the blood with a cloth, and started to fax the race doctor back in France for
instructions.
But the
doctor’s fax machine had broken down. So Goss faxed race headquarters and asked
for instructions. While he waited, the
wind picked up, the boat heeled, and all his medical equipment fell off the
table. In considerable pain, Goss,
swallowed two “bloody great” tablets he found in his medical kit, but the
instructions were in French, which he couldn’t read. He began foaming at the mouth. The tablets
should have been dissolved in water first.
“It was quite funny, really,” he said.
For six
hours Goss worked on his elbow, finally receiving the advice he needed. He experienced immediate relief and the
infection was cured. For months
afterward the elbow was still painful if he used his arm a lot, but it
maintained steady improvement.
He and
Dinelli subsequently became great friends, and President Jacques Chirac awarded
Goss the highest civilian honor the French nation has to offer, the Légion d’honneur, for saving Dinelli’s
life. Queen Elizabeth of Great Britain invested Goss as an MBE.
It’s almost
impossible to imagine the physical conditions in the Southern Ocean while all
this was going on, if you haven’t been there yourself. All I can say is that
the Vendée Globe sailors are a special breed, and Pete Goss is one of the
toughest of the bunch.
Today’s
Thought
He hath
borne himself beyond the promise of his age, doing, in the figure of a lamb,
the feats of a lion.— Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing
Tailpiece
“Waiter, there’s a fly in my soup.” (27) “Yes, sir, he likes to practice high diving from the ceiling.”
(Drop by
every Monday, Wednesday, Friday for a new Mainly about Boats column.)
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