`As a young man Bruce’s considerable physical and mental talents would inevitably lead him to sailing since this is the sport that requires both, especially if one has the kind of ambition that burned inside him.
It must have been in London where his taste for adventure made him respond to a recruiting ad for the Hong Kong Police – a step up, in terms of danger and pay, from teaching mercenaries to parachute. After serving there for a while, he decided to sail home to South Africa. He had a local boat builder construct him a wooden sloop which, if it wasn’t a Folkboat it was that sort of thing – about 25 ft long and highly dependable. By then he had done some racing on several very good boats but I think he learned a lot about the sea, sailing and himself on that solo voyage. I first met him sitting in the cramped cabin of that little yacht in Durban bay, he had returned to University to study theology.
That voyage qualified Bruce for selection for the highly prestigious task of sailing ‘Voortrekker’, South Africa’s entry for the 1968 Observer Single Handed Transatlantic Race. This race was a big thing in the sixties, it had huge press coverage and the men involved became household names. ‘Voortrekker was 50ft long, and of Spartan specification with little of the gear that single-handers have nowadays to make things possible. You had to be a hard man to sail her fast – and determined, even to the point of being a little crazy. Dalling was chosen. He was ideally suited and, in his final push at the end of that race, he set the record for distance travelled in a day by a single-hander. He was, however, beaten over the line in New York by Geoffrey Williams but Geoff had infringed. Bruce declined to protest saying that he couldn’t win a race like that in that manner but a time penalty was awarded to Sir Thomas Lipton and Bruce was declared winner on corrected time. A massive achievement – all the more so considering he couldn’t tie a knot or at least not a knot that would pass a seaman’s test. There are several knots for use at sea and one feature of all of them is that they must be easy to untie even after bearing heavy loads. Brue never learned one of them. He just tied grannies – several of them if he wanted to be sure – and he always relied on a handy knife for ‘untying’.
Two years later I was in London when a letter arrived from Bruce saying the Bester brothers had provided the funds to build something really special for the first Cape to Rio Race in 1971 and would I care to join him for about a year’s sailing? I resigned my job and found myself back in Durban with the Allan boys being coached in seamanship by the redoubtable Warrant Officer ‘Dup’ du Ploit. Jakaranda was a beautiful Sparkman and Stevens 57 foot yawl, one of the most notable yachts built anywhere that year. She was constructed in Holland using a composite foam sandwich method, relatively new for a large yacht, and this was to prove the source of huge disappointment for Bruce.
No crew or boat was better prepared for a race than Jakaranda was for the Cape to Rio. The Bishop of Pretoria blessed us before we slipped our moorings and some divers met us out in the bay before the start to polish our undersides. Imagine how shattered we all were when about 500 miles out – the wind had got up and Mike was heaving on the helm – when the rudder post broke, she broached, lay on her side and one by one we came to realise our dream of winning what was then the worlds longest ocean race was over. Perhaps not Dalling; we turned around and set a course for Cape Town using the set of the sails to steer her. All the way back Bruce was on the radio making preparations for a new rudder to be flown out from Holland, for the boat to be lifted out and the repairs done in a round the clock effort that seemed to galvanise the whole of Cape Town. And so we restarted the race a week late – of course far too far behind to catch Robin Knox–Johnston and Les Williams who eventually won the race but Bruce’s determination in the face of adversity made our effort a victory for us.
Our racing programme that year was curtailed by the need to return to Holland for repairs. Just getting there involved several thousand miles and many weeks at sea and it was notable that the literature lying around the bunks upgraded progressively from Playboy to various books on philosophy that emerged from the skipper’s cabin. In Holland the hull construction had to be stiffened before the Admirals Cup in England in July. In those days the Admiral’s Cup was the pinnacle of ocean racing competition and the South African team, and Jakaranda in particular, acquitted itself well amongst the best in the world. It turned out to be the end of Bruce’s serious sailing career and he returned to South Africa with more serious challenges in mind, the application of the law in turbulent South African politics.
For me it was the beginning, in that year I had qualified to sail with the best and have done ever since but, more importantly, I know that Bruce, his inspiration and all I learned from him, equipped me to achieve far more in life than I would have done had I not known him. He raised our sights; perhaps now we could all do that again in his memory.
Richard Clothier
10th July 2008