Two old sailing friends who met up on their first great sailing   adventures nearly 20 years ago will be meeting again in Charleston,  South Carolina,  later this month as they prepare to compete against  each other in the Around Alone single handed around the world yacht  race.

Mike Garside was sailing round the world with his young family and  Robin Davie was sailing his home-built boat from Cornwall to Cape Town  and back when they met up in South Africa in 1980. Now sailing is  their profession. 

Robin Davie is a 46-year-old ex-Merchant Navy officer, now living in Charleston, and one of the world's most experienced single handed yachtsmen about to compete in his third Around Alone race. Mike Garside, 53,  a former SAS soldier, has recently sold a  successful publishing business to realise his long term ambition to  become a solo racing skipper. 

His new French-designed Open 50 yacht, Magellan Alpha, was launched in  November and he is sailing her across the Atlantic this month on a   maiden crossing to test both boat and skipper.   Robin will be waiting in Charleston to greet and help his old friend  before they both sail back to UK for the start of Atlantic Alone, the  feeder race for the round the world race which starts from Charleston  in mid September.

Robin is one of only 11 sailors to have successfully completed two  Around Alone races. Originally from Cornwall, England, Davie's very varied sea-going  career included two years in the Falkland Islands as part of the   British military task force during the Falkland conflict in 1982-84  and two years in the Persian Gulf manning salvage and firefighting  tugs during the Iran/Iraq Gulf war.

Mike also served in the Middle East in his Army days and went on to  run a desrt trucking company before returning to England in the early   80s.

Both men have been able to fund their racing campaigns from their commercial success and both have achieved their long term goals.Robin Davie's first successful completion of the 1990-91 BOC  Challenge-Around Alone was the realisation of an 11-year commitment to  do the race. He finished second in the unsponsored Corinthian Class, sailing the oldest and smallest boat in the race.

In 1994, Davie raced the same yacht, this time named Cornwall, and  Mike was on the Charleston start line to see him off ­ already   planning his race campaign for 1998.

Davie was dismasted in the Southern Ocean in the 1994 race, but was  able to jury rig his boat and sail 2500 miles around Cape Horn to the   Falkland Islands. A South Carolina based fundraising campaign organised by his Charleston host family raised enough funds for a  replacement mast to be airfreighted out to the Falklands, so he was  able to complete the race, arriving back in Charleston to finish 10th  of the 12 competitors to complete the race.

Since then Robin has made his home in Charleston and he will be sailing his new boat, a Windexpress 48, under the name of Sail South   Carolina.  Students all over the State will follow the race and in   particular the South Carolina yacht for the whole 1998-99 school year in a specially designed education program associated with the race. The yacht, designed by Lars Bergstrom and Sven Ridder at B+R Designs  in Sarasota comes from the successful team whose designs include Thursday's Child and Hunter's Child, both successful in the 1994-95   BOC and Robin Davie's previous boat, Cornwall. Lars Bergstrom was  killed in a gliding accident last year.

Mike Garside's Magellan Alpha was designed by Jean Marie Finot and  Pascal Conq, designers of Christophe Auguin's winning yacht, Sceta   Calberson, in the last BOC-Around Alone Race.  Renamed Geodis, Augin   also won the Vendee Gloobe non-stop round the world race, in the same boat.

The new 50 foot design incorporates a number of new safety features from the lessons learned from the dramatic capsizes and rescues of  that race. She has already proved to be as fast as the designers hoped  and has been described by the British magazine, Yachts and Yachting as simply "awesome"."

This transatlantic crossing will give me my first chance to really  see what the boat can do and give me time to really get to understand   her," Mike said before he set out from Portsmouth, England. "It will   be good to have Robin there to meet me after three weeks at sea. "We will be rivals in the race itself but we can still be good  friends. The single-handed racing community is fairly small and we're  all like-minded people so we do tend to get along with each other and help out when we can."