In the early 1950s, Andy Cassell, a 9-year-old boy on the Isle of Wight in England, read about the Kon-Tiki expedition, the Norwegian explorer Thor Heyerdahl’s voyage across the Pacific Ocean on a primitive raft.
Andy began to dream of sailing, although it seemed an unlikely prospect: He had been born with malformed hips and no legs.
Still, he built a raft with pine logs he found on the beach, and his grandmother helped by fashioning a sail from a tablecloth and a mast from a clothesline pole. His mother allowed him on the raft, so long as he remained tied to the shore with a 60-foot rope. After a few weeks, he cut the rope.
Soon enough, he was racing a secondhand Albacore dinghy that his grandmother bought him. And at 18, Cassel (pronounced CAS-ul) won a national dinghy-sailing championship. He went on to become a skilled competitor in national and international races in various classes, including keelboats and yachts.
In August 1979, at the age of 37, he helmed a crew of six in the Fastnet Race, a roughly 700-mile yachting competition from southern England to Ireland and back, named for the Fastnet Rock, a rugged Irish islet in the middle of the course.
They set out in sunshine, but it wouldn’t last. A severe windstorm killed 15 sailors in what is now considered the deadliest race in modern yachting history.
During those perilous hours, Cassell discovered that his youthful sailing experience — the hardship of learning to sail without legs and the subtleties of piloting a rustic dinghy — had prepared him to survive.
After steering his boat to safety, he went on to lead the first crew to win a Paralympic gold medal in sailing. He later established a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping disabled sailors compete in races open to everyone.
Cassell died on March 18 at the age of 82, in a hospital on the Isle of Wight. The cause was sepsis following heart surgery, Matt Grier, the director of the Andrew Cassell Foundation, said.
It was about two days into the Fastnet Race when a fog descended, Cassell recalled in a 2018 post on his foundation’s website. The wind picked up, eventually reaching over 55 knots, and the waves soared to 60 feet high.
The boat’s engine and radio malfunctioned, and a critical piece connecting the mast to the boom broke. Cassell’s crew took down the mainsail to prevent the boat from capsizing.
One man suggested that they head into the wind. Cassell objected, saying their rudder would be ripped off. They tried going downwind, but then shot forward so fast that Cassell warned the boat was about to go under a wave and “disappear forever.”
Then he had an idea. He remembered a technique he had learned while sailing a dinghy: Frequently recalibrating the direction of a vessel at fine angles enabled smoother sailing. Trying that now, however, would require the finesse of handling his 30-foot sailboat as if it were just six feet long.
For hours throughout the night, without stopping to sleep, and rejecting a tow from a lifeboat — “they told us that we were mad, rather more strongly than that,” Cassell remembered — he steered the boat as he would have a dinghy, while his crew stayed below deck. His upper-body strength, gained from decades of moving around on crutches with prosthetic legs, was a matter of some lore; he was able to haul himself, hand grip by hand grip, up a mast to retrieve a rope.
More than 24 hours after the storm began, Cassell skippered his boat into port at the coastal Irish village of Dunmore East. Local residents were waiting and broke into applause.
Andrew Cassell was born on July 14, 1942, in East Sussex, England. His father, Clarence Cassell, was a farmer who moved the family to East Cowes on the Isle of Wight, where he had found work as an estate manager. His mother, Dulcie (Bull) Cassell, was a pianist.
At 14, Andy left school to work as an apprentice at Ratsey & Lapthorn, a sail-making company, where he remained employed for the rest of his career.
In the 1990s, he was convinced to join sailing races for people with disabilities. His crowning achievement came in the 1996 Atlanta Paralympic Games, where sailing was a trial event. Cassell won the gold and with it, growing acclaim. Local papers called him the “legless helmsman” and the “disabled yachting hero.”
Propelled by his Paralympic victory, Cassell created a foundation with the goal of training disabled sailors to compete with everyone else, on a “level playing field.”
Ian Wyllie, one of those sailors, had severely injured his spine during training with the Royal Navy. Until he took up competitive sailing, he thought he had lost the chance at a life on the sea. But thanks to the Cassell Foundation, he said, he discovered that he could zip around a boat wearing his leg braces, by sliding, gripping rails and other handholds, and relying on his savvy and strength.
“I owe him, and the foundation he began, my second go at life,” he wrote in a memorial for Cassell.
Cassell’s first marriage, to Chris Wimball, ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Sue Burgess, whom he married in 2001; a daughter from his first marriage, Zoe Barnes; three stepdaughters, Debbie Heryet, Vicki Lachlan and Lucie Banks; and several grandchildren and step-grandchildren.
Another sailor mentored by Cassell, Duncan Byatt, recalled that before they sailed together for the first time, Cassell mentioned that he had just broken his leg. Concerned, Byatt asked how long it would take to heal.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Cassell said. “I’ll get a new one in the post on Monday.”
Alex Traub is a reporter for The Times who writes obituaries.
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