Remembering Peter Blake, "Seafarer with a Conscience"

Christopher Clarey
International Herald Tribune

December 12, 2001

As a competitive sailor, Sir Peter Blake navigated the world's most
dangerous oceans: competing in seven round-the-world races and
fearing for his and his crew's lives in 1994 when they found
themselves amid icebergs, 70-knot winds, and huge waves.

He
survived that harrowing experience and others during his exemplary
offshore racing career. He also survived and thrived in the Byzantine
subculture and spymaster mentality of the America's Cup, leading New
Zealand to its first victories in yachting's most prestigious
competition in 1995 and 2000.

But the tall, mustachioed, and often-rumpled Aucklander did not survive a straightforward journey down the Amazon River on an environmental research vessel that was in no particular hurry; that was running no great risks; that was moored peacefully for the night off the small Brazilian town of Balneario da Fazendhina.

A week ago, at approximately 10 p.m., a small band of robbers pulled up alongside Blake's 120-foot (37-meter) sailboat Seamaster in a dugout canoe. They boarded it with guns drawn. According to initial police reports, the charismatic 53-year-old yachtsman was shot twice and killed after he charged up from below decks to confront the assailants and protect his 10-member crew. Two crew members were wounded in the assault.

"Such a shock and such a waste of an important life," said Tom Schnackenberg, who was part of Blake's triumphant America's Cup teams and replaced him as head of the New Zealand syndicate that will defend the Cup in 2003.

On Friday, the Brazilian police arrested seven men suspected of killing Blake. The men, all Brazilian, were detained in a dawn raid in the town of Macapa, about 20 kilometers (12 miles) from the site of the attack near the mouth of the Amazon. According to news agencies, a police spokesman said, "For the time being, we call them 'suspects,' but they have confessed to the crime." The police said that the robbers were unaware of who they were attacking, thinking they were boarding a tourist vessel.

"The tragedy is that they ran away after taking a 15-horsepower Yamaha motor and watches, and this man's life was wiped out for that," said Prime Minister Helen Clark of New Zealand, who visited Blake and his crew in Brazil last month.

Trademark Red Socks

Flags were flown at half-staff in New Zealand last Friday and many New Zealanders donned Blake's trademark red socks in a posthumous tribute. The socks—a new pair was given to Blake by his wife, Pippa, before every major regatta—became the symbol of New Zealand's America's Cup campaign. Hundreds of thousands of pairs were purchased to help fund sail design and mast construction in a country where sailing borders on obsession and where even taxi drivers sometimes enjoy debating windward leg tactics.

"He was our Hillary of the seas," said Clark, a reference to another New Zealander, Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mount Everest.

Blake broke through barriers as well. He began sailing at age five in Auckland's vast and inviting harbor. His first boat was an abandoned dinghy that washed up onshore: His mother made him a squaresail on her sewing machine.

When he was eight, his parents bought him a P-class dinghy and Blake began racing and sailing with his three siblings to Rangitoto Island off Auckland to climb the volcanic crater. There would later be family cruises to Tonga and Fiji.

His appetite for adventure had been whetted, and in 1973 he competed in his first Whitbread, the multiple-leg round-the-world event now called the Volvo Ocean Race. After finally winning aboard Steinlager II in his fifth and final attempt in 1990, he turned his attention on the Jules Verne Trophy, the extreme challenge, conceived by the French, in which competitors race nonstop around the planet.

His first attempt in 1993 was cut short when his 92-foot (28-meter) catamaran Enza struck a submerged object in the southern ocean. But in 1994, he tried again with co-skipper Robin Knox-Johnston. Despite the icebergs and the building-size waves, they established a new mark of 74 days, 22 hours, and 17 minutes, which has since been bettered by a Frenchman, Olivier de Kersauson.

Weary yet fulfilled, Blake abandoned long-distance racing and turned his attentions to the America's Cup. The Kiwis' 5-0 victory over Dennis Conner and the United States in San Diego in 1995 was one of the most remarkable performances in the Cup's long history.

Blake was one of the first to realize what a tremendous economic opportunity hosting the event would be for New Zealand. Despite resistance and cost concerns, he pushed for Auckland's port to be overhauled and refurbished at a cost of approximately $40 million to house the challenger syndicates.

The result was an unqualified success off and on the water, as Team New Zealand, with Blake in a purely administrative role, swept the Italian team Prada, 5-0, last year to defend the biggest prize in yachting.

New Passion

Blake's death is a huge blow to his small country and to the global sailing community. It also represents a missed opportunity for the global environmental movement.

After spending the first three decades of his sailing career obsessively chasing trophies, he was intent on spending his final years promoting awareness of ecological causes, with an emphasis on the precarious state of the world's bodies of water.

With his long experience in attracting and satisfying sponsors to his competitive sailing projects, Blake had access to sources of funding that most start-up ecologists did not.

"Defending the Cup is nothing compared to defending the environment," he said last year.

After stepping down from his post as syndicate chief for Team New Zealand last year, he assumed leadership of the Cousteau Society. Frustrated by administrative obstacles, he soon left to form his own organization, Blakexpeditions, backed by the United Nations. The group's main objective was to produce films and television shows targeted primarily at the young.

"If you can reach the young, you can reach the people who will be making the decisions about the environment in the years ahead," Blake said. "But we've got to do it in a way that keeps them from reaching for the remote control."

He planned to spend five years in the world's most important and fragile aquatic environments, filming and absorbing.

Blake and his crew spent two months in Antarctica this year, and they had just completed a two-month stay in the Amazon region, monitoring global warming and pollution, when his lifetime of seafaring abruptly and tragically came to an end.

Copyright 2001 International Herald Tribune