LITTLE BOATS,
"The main bones in both my arms had 90-degree breaks and were attached to my body by little more than skin." years ago when a couple riding their slow dinghy into the harbor at Gustavia, St. Barth, to celebrate their just-completed circumnavigation, were overtaken by the Kiwi skipper of a megayacht operating a big inflatable at high speed. If memory serves us, the man in the smaller dinghy was killed and his wife lost her leg. While he wasn’t in his own dinghy when the accident happened, Max de Ram, a Swiss sailor for whom a Northern California friend often crewed in the South Pacific, was severely injured in another dinghy accident. De Ram was swimming near his just shaken down Gunboat 66 cat at an anchorage off Corsica when he was almost hit by some Italians in a dinghy. When the dinghy operator threw the engine into reverse to get farther away, it sucked de Ram’s arms into the spinning prop. De Ram suffered such severe damage to his arms
and other parts of his body that he was in the hospital for months. The 70 yearold lifelong sailor is still alive, but he’s a shadow of his once-vibrant self, and had to sell his catamaran.
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he victim of the most recent dinghy tragedy we have to report is 59-yearold Giles Finlayson of Encinitas, who was severely injured and nearly killed off Langkawi, the popular island stop for cruisers off the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia. The terrible accident happened in late December, in the fourth year of Finlayson’s sailing/surfing safari aboard his Newport 41 Petrel. The son of prolific actor, director and writer Robert Douglas — who dropped his last name for professional pur poses at the urging of studio chief Jack Warner — Giles remembers Elizabeth Taylor coming over to swim nude in their pool every week, and was pushed into surfing by Rex Harrison in front of the actor’s Malibu home. But instead of ‘going Hollywood’, Finlayson became a Southern California all-around waterman, enjoying surfing, sailing, diving and paddleboarding along the coast and out at the Channel Islands. He not only paddleboarded from Catalina to Manhattan Beach 10 times in the Catalina Classic, but also four times from the Isthmus to Point Vicente in another competition, and yet another three times on his own. His best time in the Classic was 5 hours and 59 minutes. “I’ve been in tune with the ocean my whole life,” he says. Finlayson worked as a contractor on a lot of big custom homes in Malibu
By coincidence, the Wanderer was in Langkawai two weeks after 'Finlayson' was run down. He took this photo of a typical Malaysian fishing boat in the same spot where Finlayson and a fellow cruiser were run over and left for dead, apparently to the dismay of none of the local law enforcement.
and Los Angeles, and eventually bought a Newport 41. While he’s owned his Newport 41 for 20 years, he didn’t catch the cruising bug until ‘03. He got the bug at a most unusual time — while doing a Baja Bash aboard Dennis Conner’s R/P 47 Stars & Stripes following the ‘03 Puerto Vallarta Race. As a result of seeing the light on the Bash, Finlayson committed himself to going on a long sailing/surfing safari.
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ALL PHOTOS LATITUDE/RICHARD
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or many years we at Latitude have been trying to pound home the importance of being ultra safety conscious when riding in a dinghy. We were initially motivated by something like six people being killed in a horrific two-dinghy accident in the Caribbean in the ‘80s. Then, about 15 years ago, the owner of a Long Beach-based Bowman 57 was killed by a panga in a hit and run accident at Punta Mita, Mexico. Our concern grew a few
o quickly summarize Finlayson’s sailing adventures to date, almost all of which have been singlehanded, he departed for Mexico in the fall of ‘05, and in the spring of ‘06 started his 27-day passage to the Marquesas. He spent Christmas of ‘07 in Tahiti and Christmas of ‘08 in Australia — where he’d been thinking about immigrating until he found out more about all the dangers lurking in the waters of northern Queensland. After doing the Sail Indonesia Rally, followed by the Sail Malaysia Rally in ‘09, he spent Christmas of ‘09 at Langkawi, Malaysia. In one of the strangest coincidences we’ve heard of, as part of the Sail Malaysia Rally, Finlayson, who isn’t the biggest group kind of guy, joined a tour of the LohGuanLye Specialist Centre, which is a hospital in the Malaysian megalopolis of Penang. He and other rally members were given a tour of the upper floor Presidential Suite of the hospital. “If I ever need treatment,” Finlayson jokingly told one of the members of the group, ”this is where I’m going to come.” It was harrowingly prescient, for three weeks later, on December 27, Finlayson was the victim of a terrible accident that would result in his spending close to four weeks recuperating in that very Presidential Suite.
