Commander Peter Bruce, naval engineer and racing yachtsman who sailed to win

Commander Peter Bruce, who has died aged 83, was a naval engineer, accomplished skier and a highly successful racing yachtsman.

He represented Britain on seven occasions. He competed four times with the British Admiral’s Cup team: in 1979 he was in the top individual boat, and in the winning team in 1977 and 1981, while in 1992 he was the sighted skipper of one of the British team’s blind sailing crews, winning a gold medal. He also sailed twice in the Southern Cross series in Australia.

Skippering his own boat, he won eight times during Cowes Week, and twice won Royal Ocean Racing Club races overall, as well as numerous other national titles. He was also twice runner-up in the Royal Lymington Cup International Match racing series. In 1978, in The Goodies, which he built himself, he won his class in the Round the Island Race.

As helmsman he won the coveted double of the Britannia Cup and the New York Yacht Club trophy in the same Cowes Week, while in 2012 he was the local-knowledge expert aboard the 203ft Athos when she won her class in the super yacht regatta at Cowes.

Bruce owned a succession of yachts, each named Owl, in which he cruised round the Scottish and Irish coasts, rounding Cape Wrath, reaching the Outer Hebrides, Orkney and Shetland, and rarely leaving the remotest harbours unvisited. He also motored through the Canal du Midi to the Mediterranean, and sailed to the Netherlands, Spain, the Baltic, the west coast of France, West Indies, the Turkish coast and Newfoundland.

Peter Bruce was born on September 26 1941 in Hove, East Sussex. His father Commander Errol Bruce, was a prolific author and publisher, whose career as a submariner ended on September 4 1939 when Sturgeon surfaced in a designated “safe” area off Dundee and was bombed by the RAF: Sturgeon survived but Cdr Bruce was seriously injured.

Later, Errol Bruce spent nearly three years of the war in the cruiser Glasgow in the Far East while his wife, Daphne Bradley, an artist and sculptress who had studied under Henry Moore, brought up their children in a pretty but ancient thatched cottage on a hill at Winterborne Whitechurch in Dorset.

She drew water from a 60ft well and cooked on a wood-fired range – which provided the only heat in winter – by the light of a Tilley lamp. After the war, Bruce’s father was resident naval officer at Lyness in Orkney, where during school holidays Peter and his siblings enjoyed expeditions to remote islands, learning to sail the 8ft pram dinghy his father had built, climbing the hills of Hoy and going on trips in the Longhope lifeboat.

Peter Bruce was educated at Sherborne School and followed his father into the Navy, joining Dartmouth in 1961. He trained in the carrier Hermes (1963) in the Far East and graduated from the Royal Naval Engineering College, Manadon, three years later.
He was flight deck engineer officer in the carrier Victorious and divisional officer at the engineer apprentice school HMS Caledonia, Rosyth, before serving as deputy marine engineer officer in the cruiser Blake (1970-71).

In 1972-73 he undertook training duties in the engineering school HMS Sultan at Gosport, and was then marine engineer officer in the frigate Danae (1974-76). There followed a year on the staff course at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, then research at the Admiralty Marine Engineering Establishment, Haslar, and service as marine engineer officer in the destroyer Norfolk. During the Falklands War he was the marine engineering branch drafting commander responsible for manning the ships deployed in the South Atlantic.

Bruce balanced his scholarly and engineering careers with sport, especially skiing and sailing. At school he had been good at rugby and running and was never beaten over a mile. At Dartmouth he skippered the new 43ft Morgan Giles sail-training yachts and won the Plymouth Command cross-country championship. In Hermes he was in the ship’s sailing team, while at Manadon he discovered skiing, as well as water-skiing, for which he built a motorboat.

At Rosyth, “Churchill”, his division of apprentices, soon emerged top of the other divisions, both academically and in sport, and he led a team which twice won the Scottish universities highland pentathlon. While at Greenwich he bought a small yacht, Genie, and at HMS Sultan in Gosport, during the three-day week and its attendant power shortages, he built his second boat, a small yacht, Scarlet Runner, rising at 4am to begin work when power came on. When locals objected to this use of electricity, he continued under the lights of his car headlamps.

At the Admiralty Marine Technology Establishment (AMTE) at Haslar in Hampshire, Bruce’s civilian boss was amused that his talented engineer had a parallel life in the Admiral’s Cup while also building another small yacht, The Goodies.

Bruce was promoted commander in 1979 and was nominated as skipper of the Navy’s entry in the 1981-82 Whitbread Round the World Race, but sponsorship money was never procured and the project was abandoned. About this time, Bruce began to suffer from an acute illness, which was only diagnosed as myalgic encephalomyelitis several years later. In 1983, fearing he might let someone down during a relapse, Bruce felt obliged to resign.

Sadly, he did not recover nor feel fit enough to apply for a job but, when not laid low, Bruce wrote and self-published Solent Hazards & Secrets (1985), which ran to several editions and was illustrated by aerial photographs taken at extreme low-water spring tide, revealing the hazards in explicit detail but also showing little-known creeks to anchor for lunch. Helped by reviews in The Daily Telegraph and other newspapers, it sold well.

More specialist books for racing yachtsmen followed from his publishing company, Boldre Marine: Wight Hazards (1987), Inshore Along the Dorset Coast (1989), Tidal Streams between Portland Bill and St Alban’s Head (1998) and Solent Tidal Streams (2020). Sharing his knowledge was a considerable act of altruism, since Bruce sailed to win, and some 65,000 copies were sold to his potential competitors.

Drawing on his father’s book This is Rough Weather Cruising (1980), Bruce edited and updated the bestseller, Heavy Weather Sailing, originally written by Adlard Coles in 1967. He saw it through many editions, the most recent in 2020, and it has been translated into several languages.

Peter Bruce's device on Owl's spinnaker — Peter Bruce’s device on Owl’s spinnaker

Bruce served on the committees of the Royal Naval Sailing Association, the Royal Ocean Racing Club, the Royal Lymington Yacht Club and the Royal Yacht Squadron. At the RYS in Cowes, Bruce became custodian of its many historic marine artefacts, including telescopes, binoculars, clocks, canons, tillers, wheels, bells, a figurehead, and 22 cannon from the Royal yacht Royal Adelaide of 1834. Bruce set about restoring and displaying these, and the cannon, which had become hazardous, were given stainless steel sleeves and another 200 years of life.

Bruce was also a successful ski racer, and finished sixth overall for England in the Commonwealth Winter Games at St Moritz in 1966. Later, he took the Ski Club of Great Britain’s “reps” course, and on his winter leaves from the Navy he led parties to the slopes, where his health would allow him to stay for three weeks at a time. After the Navy he was the SCGB’s “rep” at Klosters for 19 years, an experience he chronicled in his final book, Skiing Days (2024).

Peter Bruce was gentle, kind, warm, funny and meticulous, and in 2011 his heart was won by the yachtswoman Sandy Hiett, whom he met on a Royal Cruising Club skiing holiday: they settled in Lymington and shared one yacht. She survives him.

Commander Peter Bruce, born September 26 1941, died February 18 2025

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