The Dame Commander: She will try a little bit harder

Press, 3 June 1981, Page 21

The Dame Commander: She will try a little bit harder

Kriter Lady 11, the massive Freedom 70 yacht, had been pounding round the Isle of Wight the other day and now her skipper, Dame Naomi James, sat over coffee at the Hamble marina in Hampshire. Mrs James is a handsome woman, tall and slim in her jeans, with heavy blonde hair, wind-burnished skin and steady eyes as slate-blue as the sea. “If this was just a sail across the ocean I wouldn’t even go.” she said. “Damn that lark! This is a race, like any other race, and the only satisfaction I’ll get is being out front.” The race Naomi spoke of is the Observer-Europe 1 Transatlantic two-hander which starts from Plymouth on Saturday. By “being out front” she meant that she and her crew, Laurel Holland, have set two race targets. First, to beat the seven other all-women boats, whatever the class; and second to beat all the mono-hulls into Newport. Rhode Island. “On paper, we’ll lose” she said of the 115-yacht race. “Our only chance is to jog along while up ahead an enormous depression, Force 10 or 11, comes through and wipes out the multi-hull chaps.” At the thought of severe weather, Naomi swallowed hard, suddenly girlish: “I’ll be sick, I know it. I don’t enjoy sailing the way other people do, the sunshine and the wind and the waves, until I’ve been out on the water and sick for three days. Then its a great lifestyle, especially long-distance sailing. Your world is confined to a small set of rules.” KL It also is uncomplir cated,. The only one of her kind, she measures 68Vz ft in length, bellies out to 17¥z ft, weighs 40 tons, and carries as many as five suits of sails on her three black, unstayed, carbon-fibre masts. Yet, unencumbered by jibs and booms, she’s handy.: ‘‘When you tack,” said 'Naomi, “you just turn the wheel and she comes round.” Unless the self-steering apparatus is. in operation, James and Holland will take turns at the wheel, two hours on and two off. While “off,” they’ll be sleeping, cooking, navigating, studying radioed weather reports, plotting KL H’s whereabouts on a satellite screen (“The printout

finds us within fifty yards"), looking out for icebergs and ships in the - fog. And, in Naomi's case, catching up on the novels of Thomas Mann and Jane Austen. The crossing, they reckon, will take 21 days. Would two men, one wondered, do it much quicker? Naomi's husband, the yachtsman Rob James, who ’will himself sail in the race in a trimaran with Chay Blyth, joined the discussion. "Our brute strength won’t matter much,” he said, “but we’d be quicker lowering gear. We’d make it maybe two per cent quicker.” He scribbled some figures, then said: “Ten hours.” Naomi wouldn’t have it. “It would balance out,” she said sharply, “because people don’t think we’ll be quite as tenacious as men, but we’ll be more so. When things go wrong and we want to sleep, Laurel and I will try that little bit harder.” Rob's shoulders dropped, and he grinned. “Naomi beats me at chess,” he said, “and as a result I've given up the game.” His wife laughed. “And I'm giving, up riding horses because we .can't share in it.” KL Il’s is a well-orches-trated crew-. Mrs Holland, American wife of the New Zealand yacht designer, Ron Holland, ’is a veteran dinghy racer. She knows her tactics and tides. “The only way we’ll do well is to keep up as many sails as possible and sail the boat hard. This is where Laurel will be good — she’s mentally tougher than

me,” said Naomi, graciously sharing the limelight. “She’ll want to push the boat harder and harder, keep.slamming on, when I’m chickening out.” As for Naomi, she's a durable yachtsman in her own right: her claim to a Dame followed her celebrated round-the-world solo ocean voyage, the first ever by a woman by the Cape Horn route. She’s the boss of Kriter Lady 11, and one of the keenest and most articulate of yachtsmen. And one of the most -unlikely. . Naomi Powers, daughter of an Irish immigrant “with no sympathy with the sea,” was born and reared on a remote dairy farm in New Zealand. Her one toy boat, handmade, sank in a farm pond. At 13 she did battle with a sister’s fractious hand-me-down horse. “She would throw me and, having done so, would let me ride her.” Naomi writes in her book, “At One With the Sea”: “I discovered within myself an obstinate streak.” Obstinate, adventurous, rather bookish but bored with school, Naomi at 18 set out with her sister for the •Old World. She bummed and bicycled round the Continent, working at ski chalets and teaching English' to Austrians. At 23, she learned to swim off a Yugoslavian beach. After five footloose years, and in hopes of an outdoor zoo job in Britain, she ambled down a quay at St Malo. There she met Rob

James charter-skippering Chay Blyth's British Steel. Her life took a new tack. Soon hooked on both James and yachting, she married the man and his sport and in June, 1978, completed her 272-day world-circling trip in Express Crusader. Three years later, Naomi can reflect on her famous feat. *Td never sail round the world on my own again,” she said, her hair falling resolutely forward. “There would absolutely be no point, even if somebody offered me a hundred thousand quid. I’d hate it, be bored out of my mind and probably fall overboard.” She had made the harrowing journey in order to triumph over herself: “It takes a very strong motive, and the right reasons, to do such a thing. There have been people who went for the wrong reasons and came to grief.” A close couple, Naomi- and Rob James plan to sail the Kriter Lady II in the next Round Britain Race, and Naomi will join him late this year for half of his round-the-world trip. But at 32 she has nothing more to prove on the water. After this year; she said, she would “tag along with Rob” and work on their waterside house in Ireland, near Cork. “We may start a family,” she said, and suddenly stopped. “Or cycle together across Australia, from coast to coast.”

For nearly three decades, he has been “managing director” of what he describes as “the family firm.” Now, as he reaches his sixtieth birthday, on June 10, rumours are rife that Prince Philip will .go into semiretirement in the coming months, handing over many of his duties to his two eldest sons. Indeed, the Prince himself recently went on record as saying: “I propose to work downhill gradually, and grow old gracefully.” Nobody in the royal circle took it seriously. Indeed, as he moves into his sixties, the Prince Consort is working harder than ever. He travels further and accepts more engagements than anyone in the royal family, including the Queen. The truth is that no-one knows if he intends to retire because no-one, including the Queen, dare ask him! There is every indication that he has no intention of easing up on his seven-day-a-week duties for a long while yet. It was certainly a very unretiring Prince who, only a few weeks ago, took to .the air to keep up his flying hours. A mail contemplating reaching - for his slippers would surely not bother to spend a complete day flying an Andover of the Queen’s Flight at R.A.F. Benson, Oxfordshire, returning the next for a similar stint at the controls of a Wessex helicopter.

’ A pilot who flew with the Prince said: “To retain vour licence, you have to clock up a minimum number of hours over a period. A lot of men coming up to 60 would be very tempted to chuck it in.” But not Prince Philip, who plainly means to stick at the controls a lot longer. And not just of aircraft. Recent utterances have been as characteristically outspoken as ever. In March, at an Industrial Society Conference, he lambasted British bosses for being “in some respects 100 years behind the times.” There were times when it was obvious that “Alexander the Great knew more about management,” he declared. More recently he was observing, at' the first International Conference on Human Values, that academic education was in severe danger of being a waste of time “unless young people can be given a positive motive to behave with tolerance and consideration.” A close friend of the Prince says: “Philip will be on duty until his dying breath, stressing qualities like manliness, self-reliance, and efficiency. His loyalty to the royal family is total. He believes he owes it so much.” Phillipos Schleswig - Holstein - Sonderburg Glucksburg — Philip of Greece — was only 15 months old when he was smuggled into exile in a padded orange box after his