Great Canadian
It took a determined Canadian in a British-registered vessel named Great American to smash the New York-San Francisco passage record via Cape Horn
By Doug Hunter, Canadian Yachting, October 1989
“Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly interesting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, “When I grow up I will go there.”
—Marlow, in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
As a 12-year-old Latvian immigrant living in northern Ontario, Georgs Kolesnikovs made up his mind to sail around the world. Kolesnikovs carefully planned his route on a world map in an issue of issue of National Geographic. He doesn’t remember for sure, but the map could have been in a story about sail-training skipper Irving Johnson and Yankee. Kolesnikovs laid out a carefully considered route, which had plenty of ports of call for rest stops. He didn’t know you could sail at night.
That was in 1954. Another 14 years would pass before Kolesnikovs actually had his first taste of sailing, in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, in 1968. And another two decades would pass before Kolesnikovs managed a passage that would vault him onto the world sailing stage.
Georgs Kolesnikovs came out of nowhere, sailing a third-hand trimaran whose name only served to further disguise his identity. “Here I am,” he admits, “a Canadian sailing a British registered vessel called Great American.” And a real great American, Warren Luhrs, had scarcely begun to bask in the glory of breaking the New York-San Francisco passage record when Kolesnikovs and crew Steve Pettengill steamed up from the dark reaches of the south Atlantic to clip almost four days off Luhrs’ time. Yacht-racing keeners far and wide set down the glasses of champagne hoisted in honour of Luhrs to ask: Who is this guy, anyway?
Kolesnikovs was not a brand-name offshore sailor. Even during his passage, he didn’t seem worthy of public scrutiny. When I suggest to him that he was an underdog, he suggests to me that I’m overrating him. He derives a last-laughs sort of pleasure from the fact the New York Times, in reporting Luhrs’ triumph, failed to even recognize that Kolesnikovs was out there on the sea, in the process of smashing the passage time of Luhrs’ radical monohull Thursday’s Child.
The New York-Frisco record was one of the last great challenges for ambitious passagemakers. Its ingredients were irresistible, pitting modern technology against the romance of history clipper ships and the perils of Cape Horn. The 89-day record, set by Flying Cloud, had remained unscathed since 1864. In the six years preceding the efforts of Luhrs and Kolesnikovs, three intrepid adventurers, including Britain’s round-the-world veteran Chay Blyth, took stabs at the record. Not only did they fail to better Flying Cloud’s time—they failed to complete the passage. All three sailors lost their boats while rounding the turbulent Horn. American Mike Kaine was dismasted after rounding the Horn and was forced to abandon his 55-foot trimaran. Blyth capsized his trimaran on his third attempt to make the Horn rounding, and Guy Bernardin had to abandon his 60-foot monohull after the mast punched through the bottom of the hull.
Luhrs and Kolesnikovs are an unlikely pair of duelists. The 44-year-old Luhrs is chairman of the Florida sailboat manufacturer Hunter Marine Corp., and Thursday’s Child is an extension of that company’s promotion and R&D programs. Thursday’s Child, launched for the 1984 singlehanded transatlantic race, is one of the most sophisticated monohulls afloat. The water-ballasted 60-footer holds the east-west Atlantic monohull passage record (less than 17 days), but gear failures frustrated Luhrs’ effort in the 1986-87 BOC singlehanded round-the-world race.
For the New York-Frisco run, Luhrs signed on 51-year-old Lars Bergstrom, a Florida-based aeronautical engineer who designed Child’s mast, internal aluminum space frame and cantilever rudder. Also in his crew was 31-year-old Courtney Hazelton, Hunter Marine’s offshore research captain who sailed a Hunter Legend 45 to class victory in the 1988 Carlsberg singlehanded transatlantic race. Despite having to put into the Falkland Islands for hull repairs while clock ticked, Luhrs made a superb passage knocking eight days off Flying Cloud’s pace.
But there was still Kolesnikovs to come.
The 47-year-old Kolesnikovs was in nearly every respect Luhrs’ opposite. He was not a marine industry professional, he was poorly financed and he had no racing resume to speak of. Kolesnikovs was the founding publisher/editor of Cycle Canada magazine; in 1981 he moved to California to establish Great American Media, an event-promotion company that was an offshoot of the magazine’s motorcycle activities. He stayed eight years south of the border before moving back to Niagara Falls, Ontario. He had sold his interest in Cycle Canada and Great American Media but maintained Great American International in Toronto. He had also bought a boat.
A latecomer to sailing, Kolesnikovs had been registered to compete in the 1988-87 BOC in a monohull when he was seduced by multihulls and changed his plans. [By chance, he heard that a tired trimaran, that had been raced twice in the OSTAR singlehanded transatlantic and other European races, was for sale as a fixer-upper. It was a 60-footer launched by Peter Phillips in 1982 as Livery Dole, now named Travacrest Seaway.] A slightly newer sistership was also available: Fleury Michon VI, in which Philippe Poupon had been first-to-finish in the 1984 OSTAR. Kolesnikovs consulted designer John Shuttleworth who advised him to buy Travacrest. Despite being an older boat, Travacrest had been on the cutting edge of construction techniques, using carbon fibre and an Airex core. “Shuttleworth told me not to change anything,” Kolesnikovs remembers. “ ‘Just don’t lose the rig,’ he told me.” In the spirit of self-sponsorship, Travacrest Seaway became Great American. [Kolesnikovs bought the trimaran sight unseen and sailed her across the Atlantic to Newport, Rhode Island, with one crew, blowing out a tired mainsail halfway across.]
At first, Kolesnikovs tried to organize a multihull round-the-world race. When that failed, he became involved in promoting professional multihull races in the U.S. [under the banner of Speedsailing Grand Prix.] At last he took a leading role in promoting the New York-Frisco record as a passage worthy of international attention, and tossed his hat into the ring as a contestant.
The mono-multi war that had made a farce of the 1988 America’s Cup was going offshore. Or was it? The New York-Frisco record was about passagemaking, not about around-the-cans speed. Great American might enjoy a theoretical straight-line speed advantage over Thursday’s Child, but on a brutal marathon passage like the one around the Horn, the safe, smart money was on the monohull. Multis were fine for transatlantic sprints, but fears over their seaworthiness in the southern latitudes had barred them from major events like the BOC and Whitbread round-the-world races. Merely completing the New York-Frisco passage in a multi while striving to maintain a blistering pace was an enormous challenge, as Kane and Blyth had already proven.
Kolesnikovs set a US$250,000 budget for overhauling Great American for the record attempt, then proceeded to overshoot it by $50,000. Her attracted product support, but no cash sponsors. At one point he ran out of money and had to borrow some to finish the job. Great American was stripped to the deck platform and completely rebuilt. Only some deck hardware, a few winches and the spar were spared.
The basic Cape Horn strategy called for record-chasers to depart New York in the teeth of the northern-hemisphere winter to take advantage of the slightly more benign weather the southern hemisphere experiences at that time. But with no major sponsor, readying Great American dragged on. Kolesnikovs was still at dockside well into February. The window of opportunity for 1989 seemed to have passed him and Pettengill, his crew, by. “I guess the rumour was that I wasn’t really going to go. But in my heart I knew I was going to go. My own support people tried to talk me out of it. They said I was leaving too late.”
Kolesnikovs and Pettengill did finally go, but it did not go well. Their sail down the Atlantic was a virtual shakedown cruise. The gooseneck fractured. The mainsheet pulled out of the boom. “We kept having to stop the boat and work for eight hours.”
Then everything clicked and Great American began piling up mileage. At the Horn, Kolesnikovs was several days ahead of Luhrs. It was the critical point in Kolesnikovs’ race. The Horn had been the undoing of two previous trimaran attempts, and now a third. Frenchman Philippe Monnet had acquired Great American’s sistership Fleury Michon VI and relaunched her as Elle et Vire for a run at the passage record. Monnet actually got to the Horn quicker than Kolesnikovs, but ice damage forced him to put in for repairs. Elle et Vire resumed racing and missed breaking Thursday Child’s record by nine hours. Kolesnikovs and Great American were all that stood between Luhrs and at least one year in the limelight before the passage attempts begin anew in 1990.
Rather than making a sharp right-hand turn at the Horn, Kolesnikovs continued to work his way south and west, at one point reaching as low as Latitude 59S, about 300 statute miles south of the Horn’s latitude. Finally he was able to line up a rule-straight run north with accommodating winds on the beam. For five days the miles rolled past at better than 200 a day. At this point in his passage, Luhrs, who had rounded 60 miles south of the Horn, was fighting 50-knot headwinds to stay clear of the coast of Chile and was managing only about 100 miles per day toward San Francisco. Great American was soon a week ahead of Thursday Child’s pace.
Kolesnikovs and Pettengill lost a day in the Doldrums, then nearly lost it all when the forestay parted at the deck. Lucky for them Great American is a cutter rig. The inboard stay bought them precious time while Pettengill rushed forward to make repairs. “The same thing happened to Steve in the CSTAR in ’88,” says Kolesnikovs. “He just reacted instinctively. I don’t think it took five minutes to have five spare halyards led forward.” They cut off the the bottom three feet of the stay, replaced it with a piece of anchor chain, and hoisted a staysail in lieu of the 120-per-cent genoa to complete the passage.
While he bettered Luhrs’ effort with several days to spare, the most remarkable aspect of Kolesnikovs’ passage was its seamanlike completion, as best evidenced the way disaster was avoided when the forestay parted. The idea that one should carry five rigged spare halyards might seem foreign to the barn-burning style associated with multihull racing and the offshore speed game in general. “Multihulls are pushed too hard,” Kolesnikovs believes. “This race is not a sprint. You have to finish.” In approaching the New York-Frisco passage like a self-sufficient cruiser, Kolesnikovs showed the world how a performance-minded multihull could be—should be—successfully sailed offshore.
“I decided that a key tactic was not to have to put into port,” says Kolesnikovs. “I handicapped myself by carrying well over 2,000 pounds of additional gear that Warren Luhrs would not have dreamed of bringing along. Chay Blyth desperately could have used some of the storm gear we had.
“I was able to get this record by sailing conservatively,” he concludes. “We sailed the multihull like a monohull. Sixteen knots was the fastest we saw the speedo read. If we had been able to shake the boat down before leaving, we could have been in San Francisco five days earlier.”
As a result, Kolesnikovs does not expect the record to stand for long. “While I own the boat I think I will defend,” he says. “But I’m kind of looking at my options. In December, January or February, I might go back the other way. I think the record from San Francisco to Boston is 76 days, set by the clipper Northern Light. It would be neat to hold the record both ways. But there are other clipper-ship records still standing. I’m looking at San Francisco to Shanghai, or Osaka, or Hong Kong.”
Kolesnikovs is the first to admit he is a relative latecomer to sailing. But perhaps he isn’t late at all, at least when it comes to breakneck passagemaking. “Maybe it takes someone 46, 47 to do this,” he decides. Thirty-five years after plotting his course around the world, Georgs Kolesnikovs made it around Cape Horn.
—END—CY