Departures of note

Bill King, a retired Royal Navy commander, became the oldest entrant in the 1968 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, the first solo non-stop around-the-world yacht race. His boat, the 42-foot junk-rigged schooner Galway Blazer II, capsized in 50-foot waves northeast of Gough Island, breaking both masts, and he had to be towed to Cape Town. A second attempt in 1969 also failed. After departing Fremantle in December 1971, while about 400 miles southwest of the port, a large sea creature—a whale or shark—smashed the hull below the waterline. King heeled the boat to lift the hole above water, then hung over the side to make emergency repairs with rope, tape, copper sheet, and sponge rubber, allowing him to limp back to port. He finally completed the circumnavigation on 23 May 1973, for which the Cruising Club of America awarded him the Blue Water Medal in 1975.

Born in 1910, King entered the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth at age twelve and served on the battleship Resolution before joining the submarine service. During World War II, he commanded three submarines—Snapper, Trusty, and Telemachus—patrolling the North Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Far East. In July 1944, while commanding Telemachus, he sank the Japanese submarine I-166 in the Strait of Malacca, an action that earned him a bar to his Distinguished Service Order. He was the only person to command a British submarine on both the first and last days of the war, and he retired from the navy in 1948.

After the war, King and his wife, the writer Anita Leslie, lived at Oranmore Castle in County Galway, Ireland. He took up farming and developed an organic garden to help combat his wife's asthma. In 2004, Akira Tsurukame, whose father had died aboard I-166, sought out King, and together with Katja Boonstra-Blom, whose father died when I-166 sank the Dutch submarine K XVI, they planted a tree at the castle in a gesture of reconciliation. King died in September 2012 at the age of 102, the oldest surviving World War II submarine commander.