How Briton sailed a junk single-handed from Hong Kong to US, three years before the Japanese sailor credited with solo record

Setting sailing records requires people who are a little out of the ordinary, and while Hong Kong might be the last place one would expect to find such records being made, or the eccentric oddballs making them, this coastal city – in matters maritime, at least – often throws up wonderful surprises and characters.

From most lists of sailing records, you’ll learn that the first person to journey west to east across the North Pacific Ocean single-handed was Japanese sailor Kenichi Horie, who voyaged from Kobe to San Francisco over 94 days in 1962.

Horie also made two circumnavigations of the globe and two additional transpacific voyages – both in yachts built from recycled materials. Now 78 years old, he is undoubtedly a great sailor, a dedicated environmentalist and, by all accounts, a charming chap. But the claim that Horie was the first to sail single-handedly west to east across the North Pacific doesn’t give due credit to a fascinating forerunner. The honour should, in fact, go to a determined Hong Kong-born sailor who – bar a few miles motor sailing to save his skin – made the voyage in a locally built junk as early as 1959.

Briton Brian Platt was born in Hong Kong in 1930. His father worked for the Asiatic Petroleum Company (a joint venture between oil companies Shell and Royal Dutch) and was based on Shamian Island, in Canton (now Guangzhou). Mrs Platt had come to Hong Kong to give birth to Brian.

Later, the whole family (by this time there were three boys) moved to the British territory as the Japanese military threat to the region grew. We know that they lived at 373 The Peak because, in January 1938, Mrs Platt placed a notice in the South China Morning Postinquiring if anyone had seen one of their pet kangaroos, which had gone walkabout.

It wasn’t long before the family moved on to Argentina, where Platt Snr had been sent by his company, and where they spent most of the second world war. After school and reading history at Oxford University, Brian Platt joined the Malay Civil Service in 1952, but found himself out of a job when the country gained its independence, on August 31, 1957.

And so Platt decided to emigrate to Canada – by sailing there, solo. He bought a 27-foot cutter-rigged yacht called the Chempaka, built in Hong Kong in 1945, and on June 6, 1958, he set off from Singapore for points north and east towards Vancouver.