Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford · Pushkin Industries

Flight of the Fantasist: The Race Around the World - Part 2

February 27, 2026·41 min·2 clips

Crowhurst writes 25,000 words of logbook philosophy and says, “I am the only man on Earth who realizes what this means.”

1. Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford focuses on Donald Crowhurst’s attempt to race a trimaran around the world in the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe race. 2. Tim Harford narrates the story, while Simon Crowhurst, Claire Crowhurst, Nigel Tetley, Robin Knox Johnston, and journalist Chris Eakin matter because their accounts reconstruct the voyage and its aftermath. 3. The episode asks how Crowhurst’s need to perform success, avoid financial ruin, and keep up appearances changed the meaning of the race. 4. Crowhurst ran a small electronics company that made sailor equipment, including a device called the Navicator. 5. The Sunday Times offered a £5,000 prize for the fastest round-trip from a British port, a sum Tim Harford compares to about a quarter of a million dollars today. 6. Crowhurst’s investor agreed to back a trimaran using a mortgage on Crowhurst’s house, even though the investor’s wife warned he would be mad to risk another penny. 7. The trimaran design was fast and stable in theory, but the Southern Ocean could leave it upside down because it would not right itself like a simpler boat. 8. Crowhurst proposed an electronic buoyancy system with a pressurised gas canister to flip the boat if it capsized. 9. The boatyard struggled with details such as watertight hatches, the right rubber seal, and a reinforced hose for pumping out water. 10. The boat took 13 days to travel a journey Crowhurst expected to take 3, leaving him only 2 weeks before the departure deadline. 11. Crowhurst’s logbook later lists leaks, missing fuel, a missing pump hose, and screws falling out of the steering mechanism. 12. He calculates that if he entered the Southern Ocean his chances of survival might be no better than 50-50. 13. Nigel Tetley, another trimaran sailor, begins the race with his family boat after failing to attract sponsor money. 14. Tetley’s diary records ordinary details like weather, lunch, and a cooked meal of spaghetti, peas, and curried prawns. 15. Simon Crowhurst’s school-library discovery of The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst becomes a turning point because it gives the family story a title and a source. 16. The Sunday Times journalists later argue that Crowhurst had two voices, a private voice of fear and a public voice for the BBC recorder. 17. Tim Harford connects those two voices to Irving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, where social life works like a stage. 18. The episode’s tone mixes documentary narration, diary quotations, and careful explanation of sailing technology rather than fast-paced spectacle. 19. People interested in sailing races, social performance, and psychological pressure would likely follow this episode. 20. People wanting light sports coverage or a simple happy ending would probably skip it.

As heard by us

A maritime cautionary tale about ambition, fragility, and the cost of pretending a boat is still sound.

Donald Crowhurst's attempt to sail around the world reads as a slow slide into bad judgment, with each practical setback making the next one harder to ignore.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

A doomed solo circumnavigation, pieced together from logbooks, tape recordings, and one family’s long memory, as reporters try to reconstruct what really happened after Donald Crowhurst’s boat was found abandoned in the Atlantic.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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