Eight Bells — Sailor Ted Turner Passes at Age 87
We have great memories of the swashbuckling, larger-than-life character Ted Turner, who left his mark on sailing and so many other aspects of our lives. Turner Enterprises announced that the philanthropist and environmentalist died peacefully this morning, surrounded by his family.
We remember hearing him speak at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, CT, in the early ’70s, his winning the America’s Cup with Gary Jobson as tactician aboard Courageous in 1977, and his winning the tragic 1979 Fastnet race aboard Tenacious.
Yes, he went on to just a few other noteworthy things in life, but it’s the sailor we remember most. The rest of his “Time’s-1991-Man-of-the-Year” life has been and will be written elsewhere.
So, without writing all the stories of his epic life, we wanted to ask Latitude 38 readers, “What are your memories of the sailor, Ted Turner?” The America’s Cup? Courageous? Tenacious? Anything else?
Share your memories in our comments below.
Ted passed out drunk underneath dinner table at Newport R.I.Cup Victory dinner w/ Courageous crew..Epic
@The Candy Store? lol Or did they have to be formal @the White Horse Tavern (now the Fort Worth Yacht Club East Annex).
Turner had great compassion for the society ladies he met in Newport, Rhode Island who suffered from a lack of intimacy. He offered to help them.
Newport Rhode Island, 1976 Bermuda Race Week. Tenacious was moored near the Black Pearl just across from us at The Moorings. When she came in I helped tie her off and remember remember being impressed with his boat handling skills in very close quarters. He was the real deal.
I remember meeting him at a party after his disastrous loss in the qualifying round of an earlier cup race when he was skipper of Mariner, an aluminum 12. His comment was that the boat was the most “expensive Budweiser beer can I’d ever seen”!
Poignant moment as we docked Imp at the Plymouth docks after the 79 Fastnet, put the boat away and took our exhausted bodies up the hill to the inn, Ted emerged at my side and walked up with me and into the bar and bought me a pint with his and tugged on his stubble cigar. No words just mutual respect for weathering the storm. Tenacious won, but he didn’t count us out. A friend to many of us on Imp. Tremendous human being
Nice comment dear Bill. I never knew him, but he certainly left his mark on our sport !
I had a poster of him in my office that said as I recall, “Think different”. Loved it.
Ted and Jobson both came to an event at the Corinthian YC when my father was the commodore, could have been nicer and engaging.
I pulled out John Rousmaniere’s book “Fastnet – Force 10” about that tragic race (which Turner won on corrected time!) and read on pg. 230 : “…I remember telling the crew that 20 men would die that night..Tragically and propetically I was right…I was afraid of very little that night…only running down a smaller yacht in the dark and also having something on “Tenacious” breaking down and causing us ….”to lose the race”. ….says it all.
Ted was a true legend.
Someone who I looked up to
Someone I admired
Someone I learnt from
Someone with such vision & courage
Captain outrageous
The memory’s will live on!
You will be sorely missed.
I was riding my bike on the bike path in Santa Monica in 1991 when Ted and I saw each other, then stopped to say hi. At the time, I had fairly long hair and a moustache. His companion looked at me and said “you look like Jimmy Buffett….Are you?” and my reply to her was… “You look like Jane Fonda… Are you?” Ted and I both burst out laughing… He was a great guy and great sailor.
https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/general/sailing/hell-and-high-water-the-fastnet-disaster-1748093.html
NBC did a documentary on his America’s Cup. Courageous is the name. You can watch it on YouTube.
https://youtu.be/tr7-BwzceYI?si=LNK4u486Y9vKwl_u
H L38,
I just watched this documentary Courageous and it is fantastic. Please pass it along in the letters section of the June issue,
Ted and I sailed together in the 1960’s on the Flying Dutchman (one of the Olympic classes). He bought into our struggling little boat building company even though I urged him not to. Later we merged our boatbuilding company into Turner Enterprises in Atlanta. I learned a lot about how to manage a business from him. We wanted to go to the 1968 Olympics in Acapulco and did go down in 1967. We were selected however, after fouling out of 4 of the 8 qualifying races (hit starting mark (1), hit intermediate mark (2), hit finish mark (3), and hit another boat (4) they had to disqualify us. In those days you could not just do a 360 and continue. Ted was a great true friend. He had no secrets and he really earned his nicknames like, “The mouth from the South”.