Alumni
Remembering Mike Birch '49 (Lake's)
The colourful life of a Shawnigan alumnus who had already experienced so much before he made his name as a yachtsman starting in his mid-40s came to an end in a town in northwestern France in late October.
Michael (Mike) Birch ’49 (Lake’s) was best known as the winner of the thrilling inaugural Route du Rhum solo transatlantic race in 1978, but that one moment offered a mere snapshot of Mr. Birch’s 90-plus years.
Thomas Coville, who sailed with Birch in the 1990s, described him as “a character from a novel.
“I discovered very late that he had had this life before and rode the great outdoors,” Coville said. “I read his book, one of the great seafaring books that I read to the end, as if I had read a story by Jack London.”
Between his graduation from Shawnigan in 1949 and his first transatlantic yacht race in 1976, at the age of 44, Mr. Birch pursued an extraordinary array of jobs, toiling in oilfields and gold mines, working as a cowboy and as a mechanic, among many others.
In 1978, Mr. Birch took part in the first Route du Rhum race between Saint-Malo, France and Pointe-à-Pitre in the French Caribbean colony of Guadeloupe. The journey of 3,542 nautical miles came down to a near-photo finish as Mr. Birch’s 12-metre trimaran, Olympus Photo, edged the much larger Kriter V, piloted by France’s Michel Malinovsky, by a mere 98 seconds.
“Anyone who has ever raced or dreamed of multihull ocean racing remembers the image of Mike Birch,” race organizers said after Mr. Birch’s death. “That of his Olympus Photo first, fighting against the trade winds in the Canal des Saintes to snatch victory from a monohull twice its size in the first edition of the Route du Rhum-Guadeloupe.”
Mr. Birch also finished third in the second edition of the race, held in 1982. In all, he took part in seven runnings of the Route du Rhum, the last in 2002, when he finished ninth out of 58 entries at the age of 71. He also won the Monaco-New York Yacht Race in 1985.
Mr. Birch died on October 26, 2022 at the age of 90 at his home in Brech, Brittany, six days shy of his 91st birthday.
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Shawnigan Lake School is an independent co-educational boarding school for ages 13 –18 on Canada’s beautiful West Coast. Our diverse, interdisciplinary and innovative programming helps shape the next generation of global leaders.
