Shards of ill-fated Electron return home after 58 years

THREE shards from the ill-fated trimaran Teignmouth Electron are back in the town after 58 years.

The pieces of Donald Crowhurst’s infamous 41ft sailing boat have come from an island in the Caribbean where it is now rotting having been abandoned after being found floating in 1969.

The boat was discovered on Cayman Brac island by dentist Felicity Tucker who brought three shards back with her.

She handed them to a friend, Teignmouth artist Darrel Jones who passed them on to local historian Viv Wilson.

She then presented the remains from the boat to Rosemary Booth, archivist at Teign Heritage Centre.

Rosemary explained: ‘So the Teignmouth Electron did, in a funny sort of way, eventually return to port where the museum has had the shards beautifully mounted, and they are now on display with other memorabilia of the late Donald Crowhurst.’

Crowhurst set off from Teignmouth in 1968 as one of the contestants in the Sunday Times Golden Globe, single handed, non-stop round the world yacht race.

He was one of the last to set sail, with his trimaran already taking on water.

When he realised his chances of making it to the finish were extremely slim, he devised a plan, using a false log, to make it appear he had successfully completed the course.

This was impossible as his fraud would have been discovered as soon as his logs were scrutinised.

News then came through that his empty trimaran had been found drifting unmanned off the Azores.

Felicity knew nothing of the boat’s history when she came across it quite accidentally while visiting Cayman Brac in 2007.

Seeing the name Teignmouth still clearly painted on one of the hulls, she picked up the fragments which are now on display in the museum’s Sea Gallery.

She revisited Cayman Brac earlier this year and took photographs of the remains of the boat which will soon disappear completely.