Danger just part of the territory for Blake

The thrill of adventure drove every facet of Sir Peter's life, from his first P Class to his final expedition, writes SUZANNE McFADDEN.

Sir Peter Blake was wary of pirates for more than 20 years.

In fact, he spent the first days of his honeymoon on a rifle range learning to shoot, in case he and his new wife Pippa were attacked by buccaneers while they delivered a yacht through the Red Sea in 1979.

Sir Peter pondered the dangers of sailing in foreign waters in a tragically prophetic interview in the New Zealand Herald with sports journalist Sir Terry McLean in 1984.

"Piracy, eh? You tend to laugh about it. In certain areas - the Red Sea, in the Caribbean down toward Venezuela - you don't.

"As we sailed through the Red Sea, we had the armoury spread out." Pippa even kept a loaded .38 revolver in her bedside drawer on the boat.

It was pirates - not icebergs or mountainous seas - that ended Sir Peter's life on Thursday.

He had been shot at before. In August 1975, during the Lebanese civil war, he evaded a shower of machinegun bullets in the Beirut marina while driving a motor launch for a wealthy Arab owner. Two men were killed that day aboard other boats.

"I slept with a knife under my pillow," Sir Peter recalled. "I wasn't quite sure if I should be there, but it was a bit of an adventure."

The thrill of adventure drove Sir Peter through every facet of his life - from circumnavigating the globe six times, to trying to wrest the America's Cup from the Americans against the odds, to his final, and favourite, passion, to try to save the world's waterways.

He was always destined to conquer the sea. He sailed his first P-class yacht - christened Pee Bee - when he was 8, from the bottom of the family's backyard in Auckland's Bayswater. His father, Brian, built the little dinghy in the garage and it flew a blue sail.

The Blakes were a sea-going family. Brian served on Royal Navy gunboats during the Second World War and Sir Peter's mother, Joyce, was a keen sailor. The family kept an old ketch, the Ladybird, moored off their property.

Sir Peter showed an early passion for boat design. He once cooked up a bathtub of molten lead to build the keel of one of his early boats, but the bath split and the lead ruined his mother's garden. He would annoy the neighbours by using a sanding machine through the night to build junior offshore yachts in the back shed.

"I have done so much racing, my entire life. I was brought up sailing before I could walk, had my own P-class, been passionate ever since," he once said.

He also found out early just how cut-throat the yachting world was.

"The competition was as fierce then as it is now, or so it seemed. During one championship series I was doing the usual morning check of my P and found a number of holes - probably from a six-inch nail - had been hammered into the bottom of the boat in the watertight compartments. I was aghast," he said in a Metro article about P-class yachting.

"Who would do such a thing? This wasn't yachting. But I never did find out and had to realise that some people would go to any lengths to win. I don't think the world has changed since in that respect."

When he left Takapuna Grammar he studied at the Auckland Technical Institute to became a mechanical engineer - his vision was to become a yacht designer. He got a job with an Auckland design and engineering office, but the lure of the sea was too great.

Yet when he got out on the blue water, he was almost put off for life. His first ocean voyage was at age 16 from Auckland to Suva and he was seasick for all eight days. When he got there he asked "can I go again"?

When he ventured out on his first round-the-world race on Burton Cutter, the trip almost put him off ocean sailing. When he came home he declared he didn't want to "know anything about boats at all".

The boat's hull had cracked open, and it was only the beginning of a run of bad luck for Sir Peter. In his second Whitbread, on board Condor, the mast snapped.

Four years later, he was back for another shot, this time with his own boat, Ceramco. The campaign was all-New Zealand, backed by Sir Tom Clark, the boat designed by Bruce Farr.

When Ceramco lost its mast, three weeks into the race, it was "the supreme disaster - it was like having a road accident".

Yet every year on the anniversary, Sir Peter and his faithful crew get together for a re-enactment of the moment the rig crashed down.

"My lasting memory of Peter will be of the party that we have every year on September 19, the mast-falling-down party," recalls Grant Dalton, watch captain on Ceramco and later one of Sir Peter's great sailing rivals.

"Once a year we all come together at one of the crew's houses, put up a mast, drink too much Steinlager and tell each other how much faster and better-looking we were in those days.

"Then at 11.30 pm we chop the mast down. Peter was always there and laughing - it was an environment that he was comfortable in, and it was the Peter Blake that not many people saw.

"One of his great strengths was being able to move quite freely between that world and the world of business. He pioneered sponsorship in New Zealand - he wrote the book we're all following."

Fate played a hand again in his next round-the-world venture, on board his big maxi Lion New Zealand. The boat hit two whales on its way around the globe, the first time smashing the rudder on New Year's Eve 1985 on the way to Auckland. He still managed to get Lion New Zealand around the world in one piece - the second-fastest yacht in the race.

Sir Peter was determined that the round-the-world race would not beat him, and 16 years after his first attempt, he signed up for an unprecedented fifth circumnavigation - this time on Steinlager II.

A meticulous planner, he spent three years preparing the boat and two years training his crew. When they finally went to sea, Steinlager II's domination was total, winning every leg of the race. He had finally fulfilled a dream, but it was only one of many to come.

His navigator Mike Quilter described what set Sir Peter apart from his contemporaries: "He doesn't have fantastic sailing skills or fantastic technical skills - Blakey has fantastic people skills. Blakey's a giant among men. If you've got a strong charismatic leader it binds the whole thing together."

He and Quilter had blasted around Australia in record pace on board trimaran Steinlager I, sparking a passion in Sir Peter for big, fast multihulls.

He had not finished with the globe - in 1993 he and English skipper Robin Knox-Johnston set off on a Jules Verne odyssey, a non-stop circumnavigation on board the monster Enza catamaran. Once again the sea got the better of "Blakey", and the assault on the 79-day record was abandoned when one of the hulls was holed.

Determined as ever, he headed off again the following year and sliced more than four days off the world record.

Sir Peter's first foray into the torrid world of the America's Cup did not hold pleasant memories for him. He was called in by Sir Michael Fay to help run the 1992 New Zealand Challenge in San Diego, which was hampered by protests and crew splits.

But he had already proved he was not one to give up on a project. In 1995, he turned around the philosophy of New Zealand cup challenges. As friend and colleague Scott Chapman said yesterday: "He put the word 'team' in Team New Zealand.

"He always believed in getting the best people around him - that's the philosophy he always had. To Peter, the team is more important than anything."

Although Sir Peter was head of the syndicate in San Diego, he also tried to be "just one of the guys".

On board the boat, he controlled the mainsheet traveller, but did not interfere with the on-the-water calls of skipper Russell Coutts.

When he wore the same pair of red socks every day it began a nationwide phenomenon, which stretched out over two America's Cup campaigns and became a nice little fundraiser for Team New Zealand. The only day he was not on board was Team New Zealand's only loss on the water in the whole regatta.

When New Zealand tore the cup from Dennis Conner, few journalists will ever forget his introduction at the press conference afterwards. A tipsy Sir Peter declared he was "not really fit" to say anything.

A few months later, he was made a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, but he did not want to take all the credit for the cup victory.

"Every single person in Team New Zealand - those in the limelight and those not - should be recognised for what they have done," he said.

He was determined to stage an America's Cup in Auckland, bigger and better than any the world had ever seen. One of his goals was to turn the rundown port into a multimillion-dollar marina, a home for all the cup syndicates. The $125 million Viaduct Harbour is a lasting legacy to the man who convinced bureaucracy to build his dream.

He successfully headed the defence in 2000, but not without enduring rifts that threatened to split the team.

He was rocked by the defections that hit Team New Zealand in the following winter of discontent, and offered his services as an adviser to the team, even though he swore his America's Cup days were over.

But his dreams had moved on - he wanted to save the world's oceans and waterways. During his decades at sea, he had noticed the decline in seabirds circling his boats, and that the oceans were increasingly becoming rubbish dumps.

When the dying Jacques Cousteau hand-picked Sir Peter to replace him as the new captain of the Cousteau Society, he did not hesitate.

"We have to teach the world how to look after the water. The world doesn't realise that there are more refugees through poor water than through war," he said.

After one voyage with the Cousteau Society, through the Black Sea, Sir Peter "handed back the red cap" - deciding to save the world's waters on his own, with his own project, blakexpeditions.

His right-hand man through countless sailing projects and then blakexpeditions, Alan Sefton, described his environmental project as "the big one".

"What always impressed you about Peter was his passion. And this was it - this was the big one for him," Sefton said yesterday.

"He brought the same passion and commitment, the same leadership skills and people skills, the same integrity, to everything he did. It never changed. It was a magical brew.

"Contrary to some people's belief that he was aloof and stern, it was all a bit of a facade. He was quite shy, really.

"And he had a great sense of humour. They didn't make too many like Sir Peter, and now the mould has been lost."

Another passion was his family. His teenage children, Sarah-Jane and James, have been schooled in England, but spent their holidays on board the Seamaster yacht in Antarctica and on the Amazon. Pippa had spent the last month on the boat before returning to their beloved cottage in Emsworth.

During the America's Cup, the family were often split between two hemispheres, but Pippa and the children understood the importance of Sir Peter's passions. "My wife goes backwards and forwards to keep an eye on both sides," he said. "It makes it tough and you've got to have pretty understanding family members, I can tell you."

Full coverage:

Peter Blake, 1948-2001

America's Cup news

Blakexpeditions