50 years ago: Fogar in history!

In 1974 Ambrogio Fogar made history for his incredible solo round-the-world voyage.
On a 12-meter boat he sailed 37,000 miles from east to west against prevailing winds and currents, braving storms, whales, and polar cold.
We look back over his 345 days at sea and remember “the man” with those who knew him up close.
There were 20,000 maybe more in the marina of Castiglione della Pescaia, the sea of Grosseto.
School children with tricolor flags, the band, the mayor, onlookers and friends.
They waited for a sailboat with a once-white hull that, like the sails, showed all the fatigue of long sailing.
A boat born in Castiglione della Pescaia and, years earlier, bought by a guy from Milan.
“I want to go around the world,” he had said.
“This is crazy,” they thought in Castiglione.
Instead, he had succeeded.
It was December 7, 1974, and everyone was waiting for Ambrogio Fogar, who was about to finish his round-the-world voyage that had begun from that port on November 1, 1973.
A November day.
Few people.
Friends.
The boat leaving the harbor in tow.
The cable let go.
The sails go up.
Noon and a nice breeze.
Heading for 220°: Bocche di Bonifacio.
On board with Ambrogio Fogar, his wife Maria Teresa.
He went down to Porto Torres and left him alone with his somewhat crazy project, not his first, to sail around the world.
Sailing he had recently discovered.
The sea had not.
He had known it as a child, in his father’s city: Trieste.
A sea from which, “I let myself be enveloped by it and began to dream….”
And Ambrogio Fogar, born in 1941, a son of the Milanese upper middle class, to dream and seek adventure had begun early, always focusing only on himself.
Ski-mountaineering, ski-marathon, then skydiving.
One had opened badly.
He had switched to sailing.
And the idea of solo round-the-world sailing had taken root, growing until that day in November.
He had bought the boat used from Nicolò Puccinelli, owner of the CN71 shipyard in Castiglione della Pescaia.
The designer was Guy Thompson, a peculiar one.
For his designs he would build a model and compare it in the water with a design whose performance he knew.

Fogar, surprise, adventure

Puccinelli liked a design by Thompson: a racing sloop 11 feet 76 inches long and 3.14 feet wide.
He built a prototype with a strip planked hull: strips of mahogany glued next to each other with epoxy resins and reinforced it with a few ordinates.
The result is a monolithic structure, an elegant and sturdy hull.
Surprise.
It was 1969 and Surprise was born, which Puccinelli took to regattas until a Milanese appeared.
Fogar, self-taught, wasted no time.
With Surprise, in 1972, he was at the start of the Ostar, the solo transatlantic from Plymouth to Newport.
Of the 55 starters, 40 arrive including Fogar who, having broken the rudder, concludes by steering with the sails.
With skipper Franco Faggioni and his Sagittario they were the first Italians to finish the transatlantic.
Then, on another boat he participated in the Cape2Rio, from South Africa to Brazil.

The world tour

It is early ’73 and Giorgio Falck proposes to him to do on the Guia the first Whitbread, the round-the-world voyage in stages and by crew.
Departure in September.
Fogar says no: it is time to make his own tour.
Better, that journey “to look for me” as he writes in “400 Days Around the World.”
A journey, without electronics, GPS and satellites, but with charts, sextant and a transceiver.
A voyage that would not be that of Francis Chichester, who between 1967 and 1968, with a stop in Sydney, had set out and arrived in Plymouth, England, sailing east and passing Cape of Good Hope, Cape Leeuwin and Cape Horn. No. Fogar enters into a “charter contract of myself” and will make the round-the-world voyage going west, against prevailing winds and currents.
First buoy: Cape Horn.
In Italy, Fogar leaves Austerity and restrictions on rising oil prices after the reduction in crude supplies from Arab countries following the October Kippur War between Israel, Egypt and Syria.
In Italy, on Dec. 1, ’73, with oil skyrocketing, bars and restaurants closing at midnight, TV at 11 p.m. and reduced heaters, a decision was made to block private cars on Sundays.
Then, in spring, switch to alternate license plates.
Habits revolutionized, everything slowed down, more time at home.
Perhaps this, too, helped direct the public to the reports that spoke of an Italian who, alone, was sailing around the world.
And who was taking a big risk when in the middle of the Atlantic an increasingly loud noise had interrupted his Christmas lunch.
“On the bow, too close, is another bow, much, much bigger: that of a liner with all its pretty lights.”
Surprise slams into the side of the ship.
Damage to the boom and stop in Rio de Janeiro.
She repairs and repairs to Horn.
Going down south, the wind strengthens.
It reaches 70 knots and tears the jib.
Going to lower it is a feat with albatrosses that “now look like waiting vultures to me.”
It drops in latitude and toward “a wave I would have liked to have seen.”
The Surprise puts the tree underwater.
Inside, “everything not secured rolls for the boat…the pots and pans play with each other…a moment of apparent silence and it’s back to the other side.”
When Surprise comes straight back into the cabin it is floating chaos.
Two bent spreaders out, but they can be repaired.
Surprise doubles Cape Horn on January 27, 1974.
“The sea is always the same, and the sky is the same. But you seem to come back when you pass the longitude of the Cape…. It is still the same cold as a meter before, but the heart is warmer…. Go, Surprise, that the first milestone is past.”
Not the toughest test.
300 miles off the Chilean coast and at 56° south latitude Surprise runs dry of canvas and with 200 meters of cable spun aft to hold on to the sea.
Fogar, after 20 hours at the helm, slipped into the cabin.
“The top of the waves landslide from a front of a hundred and fifty meters…. A huge bellow that grows and grows and grows…. Surprise rises aft, more and more…. I have feet on the ceiling, so we capsized.”
The boat goes back upright.
In the cabin it is much worse than the first capsize.
The radio underwater.
Outside no stanchions and one forestay is broken, windward rudder in pieces.
He empties the boat, repairs what he can, and continues.

Close encounters

In the Pacific it is a day of barely rippling seas.
“I see the dark rump of a baleen whale come alongside my Surprise as if to challenge it to a race.”
The baleen whale pulls away.
The mother arrives.
She dives.
It seems to pass under Surprise.
Everything shakes from the blow.
Fogar goes down to the cabin.
“The water keeps rising, already covering my ankle.”
Rags and sweaters to close the breach.
A dive to see where the wound is with “the sea that seems to have all entered my house.”
The repair holds but the idea that it could have sunk hurts “an unfair fact, which I accept only because at sea you learn to accept everything, without explanation.”
He steers over New Zealand, over Auckland.
Boat in dock and then off to Australia and Bass Strait and into the Indian Ocean.
It is May 25, 1974, when off the coast of Australia one of the most violent storms recorded up to that time occurs.
Fogar is in the cockpit when a breaker lays the boat down and throws him overboard.
Fortunately, he is tied up.
“When I get afloat again I see the black fin of my beautiful boat pointed skyward,” he says.
“I think I was perhaps the only spectator-crew member who can say they saw their boat capsized.”
Slowly Surprise comes back up.
He climbs aboard and heads for Sydney.
It will be the last stop.
Then a long tour passing north of Australia, through the Coral Sea to reach the Indian and Cape of Good Hope.
“From here the road is marked: Ascension, St. Helena….”
It is Oct. 20, 160 days from Sydney when he is able to recount that he fell on his back in the cabin, being virtually paralyzed for two days.
“I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t do anything.”
He gets back on his feet.
It’s the last few miles, but everything is tiring.
Azores, Gibraltar, the Gulf of Lion, the Straits of Bonifacio.
“Surprise is creaking, complaining about the many blows it has taken…. I’ll be home in the morning and, strange to say, I don’t know what to do. I suddenly miss the struggle and the trial, the fatigue, the fasting, the dampness in my bones….”

Fogar in history

Then to the east, toward Castiglione della Pescaia, it brightens.
“My new dawn, the one sought and found and lost in these four hundred days, but now at last it is only found again…. My soul feels right now,” is December 7, 1974.
Fifty years ago.
It had been 402 days since his departure; he had sailed for 345 days, covering 37,000 miles.
Waiting for him were 20,000 people, maybe more.
Impossible to count the Italians who, following him, had discovered that the great navigators of our house were not just the ones in schoolbooks.
That there was also one among them.
Able to become like Ambrogio Fogar the fifth man in the world to have rounded, alone and on a sailboat, Cape Horn sailing from east and west against prevailing winds and currents.
Contromano, as we used to hear then in the Bar Sport.

We asked two great sailors who knew Ambrogio Fogar, Ida Castiglioni (first Italian woman to cross the Atlantic in 1976) and Corrado Di Majo (two career Whitbreads, in 1978/79 and 89/90), to sketch a memory of the sailor.

The memory of Ida Castiglioni

In June ’72 I was in Plymouth to get a better understanding of the Ostar I would do in ’76.
Two unforgettable weeks.
Long hours on the Chichester boat, with Franco Faggioni on the Sagittario, I saw Erik Pascoli start out of the race with the Rondetto.
Fogar with the Surprise arrived just in time to start.
He was really very busy, the boat all upside down.
We exchanged a few words.
In 1975 I was looking for the boat for the Ostar, and I went with him to Nicolò Puccinelli, who had built the Surprise.
In Livorno there was for sale the Miranda, an Impala 35, which Puccinelli had built in fiberglass.
A really fast racing boat.
A Sparkman & Stephens design.
It cost 37 million liras.
Ambrogio and Nicolò vouched for me with the owner and I bought the boat with a down payment of ten million.
We were with Ambrogio’s car and on the way back to Milan we ran out of gas: a walk of miles and at night to get to a gas station.
Ambrogio was like that: not very careful about trivial things, like checking for gas.
I had first crossed paths with him, I think in 1971, at a regatta, I think a Chiavari-Porto Maurizio.
He was on his first experience.
A Mistral beat came, he couldn’t gybe, and with the Surprise he ended up in Corsica.
For us sailors and fanatical readers of sacred texts, instructors at the Caprera sailing school, there was no way that someone would take an eleven-meter boat and, without ever having sailed, without knowing how to chart, without any experience at sea, set out to sail.
Then he learned well.
We hung out, but my world was made up of Caprera, sailing friends, people who were passionate about racing.
He had many passions, like the mountains, always a hundred things going on.
Us, just sailing.
When he left to go around the world, I was working in Switzerland, in Valais.
Getting news was not easy.
Those were other times.
He was definitely organized, no sense of risk, had many resources, tireless, always running, chasing new goals.
Confident in himself, absolutely focused on his project.
An unforgettable image?
Ostar 1976.
On the morning of departure, at dawn, he came to ask me if I had a coffee maker to give him for the camping stove of his small lake catamaran, low on the water and fragile.
It scared me just to look at him: you had to be a contortionist to get into the hulls.
I remember him in a white waterproof suit, standing on a hull holding on to a rigging while being towed to the starting line.
An image that haunted me throughout the crossing when the weather was bad.
I would think of him and say to myself, “See don’t complain, he’s worse off!”

The memory of Corrado di Majo

I met and got to know Ambrogio a long time ago, precisely in the spring of 1976 when, with a group of Italian sailors out of their minds, we were preparing to participate in the Ostar, the historic solo transatlantic race from Plymouth to Newport, Rhode Island.
Ambrogio, already a veteran of the solo round-the-world race, was of course the most well-known and beloved character, not only in our sailing circles, but generally well known in Italy at a time when the “adventure” aspect definitely prevailed over the “competition” one.
Even then, of course, no one would have minded winning … but the focus was all on “getting it done,” on the fascination of challenges not so much against opponents but well before in confrontation with oceans, natural phenomena, and luck.
Unforgettable in this regard is what the great Peter Blake said as he was receiving the prize for one of his victories: “to finish first … you first have to finish.”
Ambrose was truly the best interpreter of this trend.
He had succeeded, and always will succeed in his myriad adventures, to amaze with the imagination and innovation of his designs.
In fact, when I saw him mooring at the dock in Plymouth next to me, a week before the Ostar started, I could not believe my eyes.
I, 22 years old, was preparing to cross the North Atlantic, 3,000 miles solo, against the Gulf Stream, whales off the Azores, fog on the Newfoundland shoals, a few icebergs lowering along the Labrador Current, with a small, but very safe, Swan 37 that got me safely to Newport in 44 days.
He was happy to do the same, but with a microscopic catamaran, similar to those used for racing on Sunday on Lake Garda, 6 or 7 meters long by the eye, lacking any internal shelter.
And because, having sailed around the world behind him, he remembered that it is sometimes wet and cold in those parts, he disappeared on the morning of departure.
He returned aboard at the last moment after having been greased from head to toe before putting on a watertight oilskin that he had evidently planned to keep on for the entire crossing!
Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, the catamaran soon broke down and Ambrose somehow managed to pull out and bring home the skin…still greasy.
But who cares about the outcome?
What will really remain an unforgettable memory for me is the thought of this friend who bravely and cheerfully imagined and attempted something unique!

By Emilio Martinelli with contributions by Ida Castiglioni and Corrado Di Majo