A PASSAGE TO GREENLAND
When a former winner of the Whitbread Round the World Race invites you to sail the Northwest Passage, there is only one sensible answer. No.
More adventurous types might disagree, but they weren’t the ones facing frostbite of the lungs or the possibility of having the yacht’s hull ripped apart by an iceberg, or being part of a polar bear’s picnic.
In the course of 40 years of ocean racing, New Zealander Ross Field not only crewed on Peter Blake’s Steinlager 2 when she won the 1989-90 Whitbread, he won the race’s Whitbread 60 class as skipper of Yamaha four years later and helped campaign the Volvo 60 News Corp in the 2001-02 Volvo Ocean Race. He also campaigned any number of maxis in Europe as Ross Field Yachting, his victories including the Fastnet Race, for which he held the record for 10 years.
In 2012 Ross and his son, Campbell, were leading the Global Ocean Race when the boat crashed off a wave. Ross was at the nav station and landed hard, breaking his back in two places. It ended his professional sailing career and prompted him to take up something a little easier—high-latitude cruising. Now in his late 60s, he assured me we wouldn’t be sailing upwind or heeling over at more
