DIY BOAT BUILD
What’s it like to build your own plywood 19-footer to race solo across the Atlantic? David Harding sailed with Keith Oliver to find out
Unless you’ve had a very large paper bag over your head for the past five years, you can hardly fail to have heard of Don McIntyre and his growing number of round-the-world and trans-oceanic yacht races.
McIntyre’s events are recreations of races from the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s, when most of the competitors were amateurs and the boats were often standard production cruisers or, on occasions, home-built. Those were the days before heavily sponsored, full-time professional sailors, GPS navigation with pin-point accuracy, shore-based routing teams, software that tells you whether you’re sailing the boat to within 1% of its optimum, and foil-borne, carbon fibre racing machines costing astronomical amounts of money.
The first of McIntyre’s events to capture the public’s imagination was the Golden Globe Race in 2018, held to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race that made Robin Knox-Johnston a household name.
More recently we saw the start of the first Ocean Globe Race, a fully-crewed event ‘in the spirit of the original 1973 Whitbread Race’. The Ocean Globe is under way as this article goes to press.
On a smaller scale in terms of both size of boat and distance sailed is the Globe 5.80 Transat. This is a race from the Canaries to Antigua, along the same trade wind route as Bob Salmon’s inaugural Mini Transat in 1977. Salmon’s idea was to allow people who didn’t have the budget for the ‘big’ single-handed transatlantic races (as they had become by then) to compete in their own event in small boats–in this case up to 6.5m (21ft 4in) in length.
Anyone who follows today’s Mini Transat will know that, although the boats are still limited to 6.5m, they’re now scow-bowed foilers typically costing upwards of £250,000. They’re a world apart from boats like Bob Salmon’s Anderson 22 and other production cruisers such as the E Boat that also took part in the first race.
Return of the mini
To make solo transatlantic racing once again achievable for part-time sailors on a budget, Don McIntyre created the Globe 5.80 Transat. This is not just a race, however. It’s a race in which all boats are of the same design. The Globe 5.80, as its name suggests, is 5.80m (19ft) long. It’s built in plywood: competitors buy a set of p
