The sea in the veins
Herbert Blondie Hasler was born in Ireland on 27 February 1914, to a father who was a medical officer and drowned when the "Transylvania" troop transport was torpedoed in 1917. Raised in Portsmouth, the Mecca of sailing in Great Britain, he built his own canoe at the age of 8 to sail around Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight.
Enlisted in the Navy
Never opposed to a bit of action, he joined the "Royal Marines" in 1932, the equivalent of our Fusiliers Marins Commandos, where he let grow a superb pair of blond bacchantes that earned him the nickname "Blondie" until today, as well as many female successes.
A hero of the Great War
Of a solitary and modest character, he is very talented in fields as varied as naval architecture, piano, mechanics and writing. Sporty, very hard to hurt, he is also an excellent officer who is 26 years old at the beginning of the Second World War.
Deployed in 1940 in Norway at Narvik, his love of the seaside made him cover, one late afternoon, with a machine gun, the reembarkation of a company of French legionnaires under fire from Nazi point elements. He won the Order of British Empire and the French Croix de Guerre.
The kayak as a weapon of war
Back in Great Britain, he imagined a strategy of daring commandos raids, carried out by kayak, in the heart of port facilities in occupied France.
The British general staff, immediately informed, accepted the idea and scheduled Operation Frankton for December 1942. The idea was to approach the French coast by submarine, launch the kayaks and then paddle for 3 days (100 NM!) to reach the heart of the military port of Bordeaux, to mine as many ships as possible with rocket-propelled grenades and then to escape before the explosions..
Hasler gladly accepted this mission, whose chances of coming back alive were all the less likely as the amiable Hitler had already ordered the execution of the captured commandos, whether they were in uniform or in civilian clothes..
A very high-risk mission
On the evening of 7 December 1942, the submarine HMS Tuna launched 5 two-seater kayaks off Montalivet-Soulac. This fleet of kayaks sails canned at night, taking advantage of favourable tides. The crew of one of the 5 kayaks sinks with its crew in the eddy at the mouth of the Gironde on the first evening. A second crew was taken by the Germans at the Pointe du Grave while a third was lost the next evening. The four men will be tortured and shot. These captures have set off the alarm!
The two remaining crews camped on the shore in deserted and inaccessible areas without fire or blankets.
The four men entered the port of Bordeaux at night on 11 December and divided up the objectives. They mined five heavy ships under German surveillance and left the port together in the middle of the night, starting the descent of the Gironde with the ebb tide. The delayed detonators of the mines go off six hours later and they have the pleasure of hearing the explosions and seeing the glow of the fires from their kayaks, under the falling snow!
They set foot ashore in Saint-Genès-de-Blaye the same night, sank their kayaks and then split up to reach Spain on foot. Only Hasler and his crewman managed to return to London, the other crew was taken prisoner and executed in 1943.
Back in London, Hasler is assigned to the development of nautical means of discreet approaches. There he will invent a large unsinkable canoe..
He will end the war assigned, at his request, to active commandos' service in the Middle East.
From sabotage to the organisation of the English transat
Having replaced his sabotage activities with the more peaceful activities of sailing races, Hasler matured the idea of a single-handed transatlantic race from Plymouth to New York in 1956, so that he could relax at sea.
His search for sponsors was only successful several years later with the agreement of the newspaper l'Observer to finance the race. In 1960, despite more than 100 letters of intent reaching the race office, only 5 were followed up with 4 boats at the start!
During this first occurrence of the transatlantic race, the competitors had neither radio nor beacons, and set off with the weather without the possibility of getting any news during the race.
Jester and his junk rigging
Hasler hired "Jester", a 7.60m folk boat whose deck he had modified by removing the cockpit and adding two manholes allowing him to manoeuvre his junk sail from inside. This deck plan was very similar to the one of the big Kayak developed for the Royal Navy after the raid on Bordeaux
Hasler claimed to be able to cross the Atlantic without even setting foot on the bridge!
Hasler installed a windvane gear of his own design, an operation that has been adopted by the governors on the market ever since, allowing him to sleep relatively undisturbed when it comes to course deviations.
A second-place finish
Hasler chose the northern route, and reached New York in 47 days. However, he finished the race in second place, behind Francis Chichester on Gipsy Moth III, a boat of more than 12 m which reached New York in 40 days.
Hasler entered Jester in the second OSTAR race in 1964. He finished this second edition in 37 days, 10 days less than 4 years earlier, but far behind the new rising star, Eric Tabarly, who finished in only 27 days on Pen Duick II.
Following this race, Hassler, weary of the media noise far removed from the discretion to which his activities with the Royal Marines had accustomed him, retired from sea racing and finally sunk some peaceful days!
He died on 5 May 1987 in Glasgow (Great Britain).
