I first met Jim as an impressionable 18 year old.
I was serving an apprenticeship at Lewmar, Jim was working at North Sails UK while rebuilding a classic Hilliard double ender at a run down marina in Fareham creek.
To afford this project on a sailmakers salary, he was living in the toilet at the marina.
To Jim, this was a perfectly practical solution. Although I’d been sailing dinghies as long as I could remember, Jim had already done a lot of offshore racing by then, and his stories of pushing big boats hard and attitude that anything is possible if you try hard enough was great inspiration to me.
Before I knew it, I was an honary member of the “North Sails Formation Drinking Team”, the Hilliard was sailing, and we amused ourselves betting local boats that we could beat them to Cowes: loser buys drinks.
Jim also got me involved with the IOR 50 “Jamarella”, a very professional program which cleaned up at the 1989 Admiral’s cup.
The hook was set, and my interest in a career designing winch parts was replaced with dreams of sailing serious yachts in exotic places.
Soon after the Admirals Cup, Jim left to sail his first Whitbread round the world race, and I started racing bigger boats.
On Jim’s return to the UK, he took over Bounder, and after winning Cowes Week, with the brand new Beneteau 45f5, to complete an Atlantic Circuit.
Jim told me I was coming along, and foolishly, my boss as Lewmar agreed to the time off.
These were pre-internet days, so although we had a weatherfax which occasionally spat out a blurry piece of thermal paper, we left Southampton bound for the Canaries on a random day in November, ignoring the gale and driving rain.
By the next morning the floorboards were floating, so we pulled into Alderney to dry out. After some liberal use of 5200 to fix the offending anchor locker, we continued to the Canaries and made it there more or less intact, despite seeing wind speeds over 50 knots and lightning strikes all around us on one memorable night off the coast of Africa.
Jim was unfazed by any of this, so I assumed it was normal.
Still trying to complete my apprenticeship, I missed the ARC race (which they won by a week with Jim at the reigns), but I rejoined Bounder in Antigua for race week and the eastbound Atlantic crossing.
This crossing also proved to be quite spirited, and with the weatherfax now having died completely, our strategy of heading north to catch a downwind ride on the bottom of the Atlantic low pressure systems turned out to be a little flawed and we went directly through the middle of them: multiple systems with 50-60 knots and still the biggest seas I have ever seen.
At one point I was alone on the helm in a full gale under main and a poled out headsail while the crew was below eating dinner.
With little experience driving in giant Atlantic rollers, I got the boat sideways into a full knockdown as the wave broke behind me.
Everything went green and when I surfaced I was dragging by my harness, my face on the transom.
I still have no idea how I got back onboard, but by the time I clawed my way back to the wheel, Jim was stood in the companionway wearing a knitted hat he had lifted from some poor Rastafarian in Antigua.
His shit eating grin and the line “Don’t worry Dave, it’s only wind” is a memory that has calmed me down in many stressful situations since, at sea and ashore.
Jim’s insistence to keep pushing the boat would have been well placed on a carbon Maxi, but our youthful enthusiasm proved to be beyond the limits of a Beneteau of that era, and we sustained (inflicted) structural damage which had us bailing with buckets for several days before we made landfall in the UK.
Once hauled out, the boat was declared a total loss by insurance. Oh well.
A few days later, I left for San Diego to join the French Americas Cup team, and Jim arrived there soon after, sailing for Australia and thinking up new ways to get his mates in trouble.
“We should get an old Chevy and drive to Mexico City”… What could possibly go wrong?
Dave is a marine engineer, accomplished yachtsman, and one of my best friends.
