Preface

My own solo crossing was not an exceptional feat of seamanship. This is not false modesty. I’m quite proud of the voyage in terms of endurance and my will and energy to make the whole adventure happen, but the passage across the Atlantic took longer than projected, I did not sail efficiently, and the skills that I lacked the most were exposed in embarrassing fashion. By the time I arrived off Cascais my engine was dead. I navigated at that point with only a torn-out cruising guide map of the Portuguese coast, since I never expected to end up this far south. That final morning, after one of the hardest nights of the trip, I saw mountain peaks above the haze. Elated, I shouted to escorts of surfing dolphins and careening brown seabirds. Even as I sailed beside a string of puzzling yellow buoys, conjuring dangerous possibilities of getting tangled in fishing gear or drifting into a military testing zone, I still knew it was over: I had completed my single-handed passage across the Atlantic Ocean. Without a working engine, though, I had to short-tack up to the marina where two men who zoomed out in an inflatable boat tolerated my few words of Spanish (since I knew no Portuguese) before briskly towing me inside the high walls and around to a berth at the dock, after five weeks at sea by myself.

I was physically exhausted, emotionally spent, and paralytically rattled from the entire experience. I rationalized that I had to get back home to my job. I did not have any difficulty going out on the ocean again, even within a year, but I returned only to larger ships. I have not been on the water sailing by myself since. I sold my boat.

Now over fifteen years later, either at sea or ashore, there is sometimes a particular level of wind, a decibel or tone of wind, a specific sound and volume of angry, grasping, howling, relentless wind through a boat’s rigging, or through trees or even across the clapboards of my house, that sends me back to being aboard my twenty-eight-foot sloop in one of those gales in the North Atlantic. When I hear that particular level of wind, I am again looking out of my porthole aboard Fox. I feel afraid again. I start going over scenarios again: what to do if x breaks or y happens. I think of that tiny black storm-petrel veering sidelong across my wake, either in its element or also entirely terrified and out of control—I couldn’t tell which. It takes several hours for my fear of that certain sound of wind to fade. I’ve never talked out loud about this fear of wind, never mentioned this lingering emotion to anyone, even to my family.

In other words, this book is not the story of individual excellence, nor is it a compendium of sailing records or a practical manual on how to do it if you’re considering a solo voyage yourself.

Sailing Alone is the exploration, firstly, of why go. I wanted to find out why other people have committed, exiled themselves into small boats alone on the surface of the open ocean. Among those of Western backgrounds, single-handed ocean sailing began in the late 1800s. Individual and collective motivations to cross an ocean alone have shifted over time as solo sailors responded to social, political, and environmental movements; and telling the history of human reasoning for doing this sort of thing requires a parade of wonderfully compelling and surprisingly different characters, who inevitably raise universal questions for all of us ashore about the choice of an adventure of any kind, about legacy, individualism, and the choice of solitude.

Secondly, Sailing Alone is the story of what they saw. I wanted to know what other solo sailors observed out there in their small slow boats so close to the surface, tracing their transects across the sea. Although their observations are inevitably anecdotal, and they as witnesses are not always reliable, single-handed sailors have provided useful glimpses into the changing global ocean: the most inaccessible, most unknown, yet most influential set of ecosystems on our planet. Sailors alone at single locations and times have recorded snapshots of the sea, for example, from under the shadow of a blue iceberg or while skimming over a coral reef or when gazing over the rail at night upon milky seas of bioluminescence. Solo sailors have described at different locations and times sailing through schools of flying squid, watching ribbons of thousands of shearwaters, or feeling the bumps of great white sharks rubbing their backs on the bottoms of their boats. The motivations of single-handed sailors and their previous reading shaped what they saw, felt, what they heard, what they smelled, tasted, and how they decided to write about the open ocean environment when they came home. The observations of these sailors—of seabirds, sharks, fish, turtles, and whales—have in turn influenced our cultural perceptions of groups of these animals, as well as more broadly in terms of our relationship with the ocean. Meanwhile, technological developments, such as the marine engine, self-steering, photography, and GPS, have in turn influenced the single-handed mariner’s observations. Solo sailors stand as channel markers for our larger marine conservation movements, although their shift to environmental activism happened later than you might expect.

Thirdly, this study, this history titled Sailing Alone, is about my own relatively minor voyage within those two terms of enquiry, the why-go and the what-they-saw, which leads directly—physically, chronologically, and metaphorically—back to that singular moment when I rolled out of my bunk and climbed into the cockpit to the greatest shock of my life. I’m trying here to parse the facts and the meanings from what exactly happened on that windy overcast afternoon in the Canary Current at approximately 16:05 local time: when I stared up at that rumbling wall of red.