I learned last week that we lost Brad, at the age of 88.
Along with Peter Johnson, Brad was key to the development of my sailing career in the late 1970s and 1980s. As a committee member at the Royal Ocean Racing Club, he was instrumental in the Club reviving the Griffin program which started in 1945, when the Club accepted the donation of a boat to be used for the training of young sailors.
In the spring of 1979, a Doug Peterson designed Offshore One Design 34 was delivered to the Club as the new platform for developing the ocean racers of the future.
I was one of the first students on the new Griffin’s “Crewing for Offshore Racing” course in April 1979. It was a one-week intensive programme that ended with the Thursday evening start of the annual Hamble to Cherbourg Race.
That overnight dash of 100 miles or so across the English Channel to the grimy French port did it for me.
I was completely sold, and the rest is history.
Who would have thought that being cold, wet, hungry and terrified on the windward rail of a sailboat, doused with icy seawater all night, could be enjoyable?
And then, after no sleep at all, stepping off the boat into the land of baguettes, assiette de fruits de mer and coquilles Saint-Jacques was simply heavenly.
My skipper that week was a young Aussie, Neil Graham. Over the years we kept bumping into each other in bars after races, he as a professional sailor and I as a keen Corinthian with a day job in London. The last time we met was at a Round the World Race stopover in Miami. He was project-managing an entry in that 30,000-plus-mile sprint around the globe. After racing in FOUR of them, he said, he felt his skills were best applied to team management.
In Miami, we laughed again about that Hamble to Cherbourg race. In the dead of night, Neil was helming and I was sitting beside him on the high side, trimming the mainsail. A wave hit the starboard quarter, the boat shuddered, and Neil went flying across the cockpit to the leeward side.
That first-day drill on safety harnesses and the importance of clipping on was time well spent.
Brad was a towering figure at the RORC through the years. He was often seen in the St James’s clubhouse and on board race boats in the Solent. Through his friendship with what I called the royalty of Lymington’s yacht racing community (Jeremy Rogers, Jonathan Rogers and Bill Green), he became a regular crew member on many of their winning boats, all of which had moon-related names.
New Moon was the prototype OOD34, built at the Rogers yard using what were then innovative injection-moulding techniques. Her win in the 1978 Lymington to Bayonne Race across the Bay of Biscay proved both the construction method and the talent of her star-studded crew, which included Peter Johnson. Peter bought the first production boat, sail number K-9101, and named her Innovation. She was my ride in the fateful 1979 Fastnet Race.
Eclipse was the next new design out of the Rogers yard. She breezed into the 1979 British Admiral’s Cup team and was the top individual boat in the storm-battered fleet.
That ‘79 Fastnet was not my last memory of Brad, but the most enduring.
He will be missed.