I never had any moments of extrasensory perception on my trip across the Atlantic—although it would have proved useful, to put it mildly, considering what happened to me in the end. But I had not earned anything like this. Several single-handed sailors, however, have written of moments when they woke up suddenly—had a sixth sense, a Spiderman tingling, that alerted them that something was off. It was an intuition that shook their shoulder, waking them up or alerting them to look around.
For example, in 1931 a Latvian man who had changed his name to Fred Rebell sailed in a tiny boat alone from Australia to Los Angeles. At one point he hallucinated that he levitated, floated above his boat, during which he spotted a ship perhaps over a hundred miles away. Later when he returned to his rational senses, Rebell actually saw the ship nearby. In 1946 a man named Hans de Meiss-Teuffen was crossing the Atlantic alone and woke up inexplicably at 0300 “with the urge to have a quick look on deck, and there, only 300 yards off, a fishing motor vessel.” Perhaps in his sleep he heard the boat, smelled the diesel, or felt the vibrations? The sailor-writer H. E. Ross, a veteran of the US Marines and a historian of Black mariners and Caribbean turtlers, told me how once he was sailing alone off San Pedro, California, soon after sunset, when he just felt something odd while he was down below cooking. He came on deck and saw the stern of an unlit vessel in front of him. Something in the dusky early evening told him to get out of there. He wasn’t sure why. “Pure luck or dumb luck,” he said. As he tacked the boat away he saw that he had been only eight or nine yards from the tow line of the barge that the vessel was towing—this cable would have cut him down and sunk his boat. English solo sailor Michael Richey, a World War II veteran who crossed the Atlantic alone thirteen times up until he was eighty years old, once said that “the experience of waking up mysteriously at the right time seems to be a common one.”
Solo circumnavigator Bill King wrote in the early 1970s of developing “some sort of ESP” during his years as a submarine commander in World War II. It was on his second attempt to circumnavigate the world that the great white shark holed his boat off southwestern Australia. One of the notable details about this event was that he remembered staring a split second before at the exact spot inside his boat that the animal hit. A couple of years later Bill King was sailing with author Stuart Woods from England to the Azores as Woods was preparing for a solo trans-Atlantic crossing. The two were napping below while they were underway, when King suddenly woke up, knowing he had to get on deck. He tacked the boat because it was on a collision course with a merchant ship. As Woods saw the large ship steaming too closely astern, he reflected, “I wondered if I would ever become that attuned to what was happening around the boat.”
In Sailing Alone Around the World, Joshua Slocum wrote of a similar intuition. Once as he was entering the Strait of Magellan he was down below napping when “the very air I breathed seemed to warn me of danger. My senses heard ‘Spray ahoy!’ shouted in warning.” He jumped on to the deck and was just able to take in sail and lash everything in place before a white squall exploded across the water and attacked the Spray.
When I asked Kenichi Horie if he had ever experienced extrasensory perception, any special warning in all his years of solo sailing, he said, “No. But that sure would be nice.”