MERVYN WHEATLEY ONE LAST ADVENTURE

Toby Heppell speaks to Mervyn Wheatley as he looks ahead to his sixth OSTAR, now re-scheduled to take place in 2021, and ponders the changes in sailing through his decades-long career

- Toby Heppell

As with much sport during the pandemic, the Original Single-Handed TransAtlantic Race (OSTAR), due to set off from Plymouth in May, has been postponed until 2021. The event was expected to be a major celebration, marking 60 years since the first race, and although it will now take place a year later, the plan is still to celebrate the achievement.

One man for whom the event was set to be his swan song, racing for a sixth and final time, is Mervyn Wheatley. In a remarkable offshore sailing career that has made him a hero among Corinthian ocean sailors, he has competed both singlehanded and with crews, as well as cruising extensively across oceans and in coastal waters. We caught up with him during lockdown as he reflected on how sailing has changed in the last five decades, what it takes to sail solo, and why the next OSTAR is going to be his last.

While Wheatley ‘sailed dinghies a bit as a youth’, it was during his 33-year career in the Royal Marines that really got him into sailing, racing in dinghies owned by the service for a few years and also sailing some of their keelboats. With sailing becoming an increasingly significant part of his life, Wheatley was offered the chance to sail his first ocean passage by a close friend. ‘My friend Michael was doing the 1972 OSTAR but he’d bought another boat to be picked up over there – a cutting edge trimaran – so he asked me to go out and sail back his Contessa 32,’ explained Wheatley.

‘It was a pretty interesting introduction to ocean sailing, as everything was still being done on astronavigation back then, which I had not really done before.