Jeff Lamb

You think you’ve met some tough sailors? Let me introduce you to one of the most badass sailors ever Commander Bill King, Royal Navy. This absolute BADASS survived SIX YEARS of submarine warfare during WWII. No significant breaks. As other submarine captains were getting slaughtered by Germans, he kept returning to even the odds. The he decided the best way to recover from the experience was to sail ALONE around the world in a 42-foot sailboat. And somehow, that’s not even the craziest part of his story. King was born in 1910. His father was killed fighting in WWI. At just 12 years old, he entered the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. By the outbreak of WWII, he was commanding British submarines. Think about what that meant. No nuclear propulsion. No modern sonar. No satellite intelligence. No helicopter rescue waiting overhead. Just diesel engines, batteries, torpedoes, and a steel pressure hull separating you from a horrible death. He fought through the Battle of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean campaigns before taking command of HMS Telemachus in the Pacific. In July 1944, King hunted down and sank the Japanese submarine I-166 in the Strait of Malacca. He was awarded the Distinguished Service Order TWICE, along with the Distinguished Service Cross. He was reportedly the ONLY British submarine commander to remain in submarine command from the beginning of WWII to its end. SIX YEARS. Imagine the accumulated stress of six years hunting enemy warships while knowing that one depth charge could send you and your entire crew to the bottom. The war ended, but it never really left him. King later admitted that the experience had reduced him to a nervous wreck. So what did he do? He bought a ruined castle in Ireland, took up farming, and eventually decided he needed to get away from EVERYTHING. In 1968, at the age of 58, he entered the inaugural Sunday Times Golden Globe Race. The mission? Race 9 other competitors to be the first to sail alone, nonstop, around the entire planet. He built the 42-foot junk-rigged schooner named Galway Blazer II. No GPS. No Starlink. No weather routing. No EPIRB. Just celestial navigation, seamanship, and a lifetime of experience surviving in places where mistakes get people killed. He sailed south into the Atlantic. Then the Southern Ocean came looking for him. A monstrous storm capsized his boat, destroying his masts. King survived, rigged emergency sails, and eventually made it to South Africa. Race over. Worse? He lost the race to a young Merchant Navy officer. You laugh but the other Royal Navy commander whose boat sunk in that race, was so embarrassed by being shamed by other naval officers that he hung himself. Most men would have called it quits. Not Bill King. He tried again. And again. On a subsequent attempt, something enormous, possibly a shark or whale, slammed into his boat off Australia, punching a hole in the hull. He spent DAYS making emergency repairs at sea. Again, he survived. Finally, in 1973, at the age of 62, SIXTY TWO, he completed his solo circumnavigation. He had survived two world wars’ worth of family tragedy, six years of submarine combat, a dismasting, a capsizing, and a terrifying collision at sea. And he was STILL sailing. In 1975, the Cruising Club of America awarded him its prestigious Blue Water Medal. But there’s one more part of his story I find extraordinary. Decades after King sank the Japanese submarine I-166, the son of one of the Japanese sailors killed aboard that submarine visited him in Ireland. Instead of hatred, the two families developed a friendship. They planted trees together as symbols of peace. Think about that. A submarine commander who had spent years trying to kill the enemy ultimately found friendship with the family of a man he’d killed in battle. Bill King lived to be 102 YEARS OLD. He simply refused to die. Fair winds Commander 🫡