OSTAR 60 & STILL GOING STRONG

Blondie Hasler’s biographer Ewen Southby-Tailyour looks at the origins of the Corinthian race and its enduring legacy

- Ewen Southby-Tailyour

No one, probably not even ‘Blondie’, could have guessed that ‘Hasler’s wonderful idea’, conceived in 1956, would still be going strong in 2020 – 60 years after the first event and 64 since the notion first took shape. During the intervening years the Observer SingleHanded Trans-Atlantic Race (OSTAR) has been through a number of iterations and titles and a few ups and downs, yet it continues to flourish.

In 1951 Blondie Hasler developed an ‘intensifying’ desire to design a ‘radical cruising boat’ that would, in his own words, ‘be my servant and not my master’. Eventually the junk-rigged Jester – ‘because she is such a bloody joke’ – with her self-steering gear and central, enclosed steering position to which all lines led and from which the skipper need not move, was built to ride out a storm, if not in comfort then at least in safety. A serious consideration was that she would need to keep a girlfriend keen in the early, impressionable stages of a romance, by not having to fight sodden canvas at 40° angle of heel in seven-eights of a gale.

BIRTH OF AN ICONIC RACE