Brac’s land wreck makes it to TV fame

The Teignmouth Electron has rotted beyond repair

The boat slowly rots on the southwest shore of
Cayman Brac

Friday,  June  17, 2005

A wreck of a 35 year old yacht on Cayman Brac is to be featured in a documentary by APT Films in London.

The Teignmouth Electron, a rotting trimaran on the southwest shore of the Island has been the subject of books, magazine articles, and artwork in London’s Tate Gallery. It even has its own website, which is visited regularly by people drawn into its strange tale.

Cayman Net News has been contacted by APT films, which is in the middle of producing a feature documentary about the 1968/9 Golden Globe race, in which the Electron played a famous role.

The London-based film company may be visiting the Brac to shoot footage of the Electron to include in their documentary film, “Deep Water”, which is being financed by Pathe, Film Four, and The UKFC.

APT have so far produced two feature films – “Wondrous Oblivion”, which was recently released across the UK, and “Solomon and Gaenor”, which was nominated for an Oscar in the year 2000.

The Teignmouth Electron was designed and sailed by Donald Crowhurst, a British electronics engineer and amateur sailor. It was one of ten boats in the Golden Globe race, which was the first non-stop single-handed sailing race around the world.

Realizing that neither he nor the yacht was prepared for the ordeal, Crowhurst kept a fraudulent track of his global voyage for more than eight months, without ever leaving the Atlantic, before slipping into a state of schizophrenic paranoia and finally committing suicide.

The story was made legendary in the sailors’ classic, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, which was first published in 1970 and reprinted in 2001.

It was described by the Washington Post as “one of the most extraordinary stories of the sea ever to be published”, while the first man to sail single-handed round the world, Sir Francis Chichester, called it “the sea drama of the century”.

A seven-minute 16mm colour film of the Teignmouth Electron by the British artist Tacita Dean was featured in an exhibition at the Tate in 2000. Dean also produced a book featuring images of the boat, taken on Cayman Brac in 1998.

After Crowhurst’s suicide, the Electron was taken by salvagers to Jamaica and bought from auction in 1969 by Kingston hotelier and businessman Larry Wirth.

The Electron stayed in the Wirth family until 1973, when she was purchased by Bunnie Francis, a charter operator based at Trelawny Beach Hotel, near Montego Bay. Francis adapted and operated it as a tourist boat.

By 1978, the Jamaican tourist trade had been hit by political unrest and the boat lay in dry dock up for sale. It was purchased by George McDermot, who was living in Jamaica at the time, in 1975. He later sold her to his brother Winston.

The boat was used as a dive boat, first on Grand Cayman and then, in March 1979, she was sailed to Cayman Brac to be used in Mr McDermot’s dive operation, Brac Aquatics.

Although Ms Dean saw the story of the Electron as a classic example of failure, author and clinical psychologist Geoff Powter was more sympathetic.

Mr Powter, who devoted a chapter in his new book, Lost Souls: Journeys along the fine line between risk, adventure and madness, to the Electron, argues that the perceived difference between madness and adventure is whether or not they are successful.

“Justly or not, when the summit or the pole is reached, when the ocean or desert is crossed, or when the flag is planted on the moon, whatever madness went before seems to be forgiven — even the unequivocal madness of death.

“Lit by the favourable spotlight of success, ragefully obsessed sailors become ‘driven’, suicidal climbers are reinvented as ‘committed’ and the arguable immorality of extreme risk gets re-spun as heroism.

“But when the climber falls, the sailor disappears or the desert explorer perishes of dehydration, then the verdict is obvious: the person was mad for having the dream in the first place or was foolish for having pursued it the way she did.

“So often, madness is defined, both by the lay person and the clinician as any action that goes against safety and self-preservation or disconnects a person from the ‘normal’ world of society. By that definition, almost any step outside into the riskier bigger world is madness to some degree, but that narrowing definition limits the great value that has come from the people who have been willing to risk madness for the sake of a pilgrimage.”

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