16. Landlessness, Loneliness, Death Wish
After weeks without seeing any land or any other people, the mental and physical fatigue begins to wear. All told, I have spent well over two full years of my life out at sea before this trip, so I feel comfortable within 360 degrees of water and sky, even crave this when ashore, but I have never been out on the open ocean by myself or even with any real final responsibility on a boat before. So for this crossing aboard Fox, daily anxiety is my struggle.
One day I hear a creaking from the joint where the tiller meets the rudder stock. The rudder stock is a long bronze bar that runs from the tiller down through the floor of the cockpit, then when underwater is strapped and fiberglassed to the forward edge of the rudder and connected by bronze hinges to the hull. I put my ear to the tiller, to the cockpit, and it sounds like something might be seriously wrong down there. The rudder on Fox is tucked far underneath the boat, so I can’t lean over the rail to look. Over the winter before I left, a friend of a friend fiberglassed over the wood rudder for me, but I don’t know for sure how good a job she did, and I had hemmed and hawed over whether I should replace it. I had thought, too, about having the metal-shop guy cut and bend me a brand-new rudder stock. One expert thought I should, but it was so expensive, and I was running out of time. When another guy thought the old one should be fine, I just reinstalled it all with new hinges and plenty of underwater adhesive. Because I had done the work myself for the first time, I don’t trust it.
As the hours go by, it seems that the creaking sound increases. When I try to sleep I can hear it even louder in the cabin. Is the bronze stock itself cracked? Is it going to snap? Maybe the rudder is separating from the stock. I spend a lot of time, somewhat academically, wondering if the rudder pulls off, will it float or sink? I begin to make plans as to how to rig my harness so I can dive down and look at the rudder underwater, but I worry about sharks. I’m no Robin Knox-Johnston. I read up on emergency rudder systems, how I might use Sandy for emergency steering. The hours wear on. This goes on for two days. I am certain that the creaking is getting louder. When I tack, change course, it feels that the boat is not responding quite as well as before. Or is that my imagination? I check the bilges for rising water. If the screws for the hinges pull out, will the hull leak? I try to remember the length of the screws, the thickness of the fiberglass at the back edge.
It’s the dawn of the third day of this, a hot sweaty light-air morning.
I cannot sleep.
I’m lying there listening to the deathly creaking, when inspired out of nowhere, by what I’m not sure, a small idea flickers: I grab a little container of all-purpose A-1 oil. I clip in, step up into the cockpit, and drip the red nozzle into the bolts of the joint where the stock meets the tiller. The creaking stops almost immediately. Everything is fine.
These sorts of moments are funny in retrospect, but I don’t recall laughing then. I was too worried. I found something else to stress about immediately after my initial sigh of relief. If I discovered anything about myself on this passage, it was that I can emit truly animal-like sounds of frustration: mental strain that desperately wanted to find an exclamation point of breaking something—but I knew even at the heights of this that I had to hold my fist. Smashing something or a part of myself so far away from shore could only create a much larger problem. Above my portable potty was a cupboard door that didn’t yet have a method to latch open, so when I needed to get something inside that cupboard during heavy weather, when I didn’t have a free hand with the hull rocking steeply, this wooden door would swing and slam against the bulkhead in such an ear-splitting manner that I once held the little varnished thing with both hands and screamed, raged, so angry that I wanted to rip it off at the hinges, bite it, bash it over my knee, throw it overboard. I shrieked at its wood slat face. It was not a quick flash of profanity, either, but a fist-clenched deranged Jack Nicholson horror-movie red-faced harangue.
It was after spells like this that I empathized with Donald Crowhurst and wondered if stress can indeed induce psychosis. Experts have since explained to me that, yes, of course, this can happen. Consider victims of torture or wartime trauma. My trials, of course, were nothing compared to those. For starters, I had chosen to do this.
Over the five weeks of my Atlantic crossing, at least as I remember it, I was fortunate to never have been truly afraid in any dramatic way, even in the gales and rough weather. I mean, I never had any major gear failure, personal injury, dismasting, rogue wave, knockdown, or flooding, or any sort of I’m about to die moment. In truth, aside from what happened the day before arriving in Portugal, my trip was rather uneventful. This was certainly how I wanted it. My daily anxiety was more a nagging, constant concern, the stress of hyper-vigilance—checking every part of the boat, lubricating, planning for emergency scenarios—perpetual paranoia for too long a period of time and all darkened by deepening sleep deprivation since I rarely slept for more than one or two hours at a time. In retrospect, I totally mismanaged my sleep. This resulted in poor decision-making, dramatic emotional swings, and a fluid dream-like state unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before or since. On this trans-Atlantic passage I never felt truly suicidal, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to occasionally fantasizing a final, intentional step over the side at a few points during my crossing—although, to be honest, I do so every time I’m at sea whether I’m alone or not. Sharon Sites Adams admitted in Pacific Lady that she felt this, too.
I like to think that if I had stuck with single-handing and gathered the experience of multiple solo passages over the years with Fox I would have reduced the anxiety. At the dock in Portugal I met this lovely young couple, English sailors who had been fixing up traditional wooden boats and sailing around Europe. The boats they refurbished were their homes and their business. They invited me to sail in tandem with them up to Cornwall. They said they would help me find a place to store the boat, fix the engine, and so on. I often wonder, sometimes wistfully, even longingly, where I’d be now if I’d taken them up on that. Would I have kept on sailing alone around the world from there?
“Sailing is a compromise between distance covered and mounting fatigue, for both crew and boat,” Bernard Moitessier wrote in The Long Way, “and fatigue can snowball fast.”
The single-hander must relentlessly make decisions about how or whether to fix something that has broken or when to alter course based on weather predictions, how to prioritize what to worry about. For an example of poorly executed planning, as I began to recognize that I was having trouble with my Atomic 4 engine, I thought it would be prudent to head south and stop in the Azores to fix it. So I turned the boat southeast. But I began to read over and again in my books about the Azores High, an enormous high-pressure system where there can be no wind for hundreds of miles. That got me worried, ironically, about being stuck becalmed with no engine, so then the next day I changed my mind abruptly and sailed northeasterly again. I had no one with whom to talk through these things. I often did not think clearly and made illogical decisions.
I did know then and realize now even more since I’ve been conducting this study, that compared to solo trans-Atlantic passages like Ann Davison’s, I could whine about nothing in terms of isolation from human contact.
First of all, I was comfortable in knowing where I was in the world. I had had some experience with celestial navigation beforehand, but I hadn’t realized how difficult it is with the motion on a tiny boat. I’m embarrassed to admit that I really only took sextant sights on a few calm days. I have a beautiful sextant that was a generous surprise gift from a group of friends years earlier, but mostly on this trip it lived wedged on a shelf in its lovely varnished box with the little brass dedication plaque near the handle. I did a lot of looking at the GPS. I found that I was staring at this too much, actually—monitoring my distance covered, speed over the ground, and distance still to go—so I made rules with myself about checking only every four hours or so. When I lost engine power and was trying to conserve my batteries, I turned my main GPS off entirely and simply navigated with my handheld GPS, which in 2007 was a pixelated black and white device the size of a boxy phone in a yellow case. Since the 1990s, the technologies of GPS and satellite communications have enabled far more single-handers to go to sea and do so more safely, but the technologies have also encouraged a larger portion of mariners to avoid learning or practicing celestial navigation and wayfinding, which surely reduces their spiritual connections and their deeper awareness of the sea, the clouds, and the movement of the solar system. I used a paper chart, kept track of my dead reckoning, but I relied on that little electronic box far more than I would have liked. Bernard Moitessier would have been disappointed in me.
Second, my perception of helplessness and isolation was greatly reduced because of my ability to hear and contact people ashore. I had a working VHF radio to talk to ships if they came within twenty miles or so and to get weather forecasts when I was in range of the coast. On my portable multi-band radio I listened to long-range weather forecasts when I could dial them in, and on that radio I listened to international stations. Once I could no longer listen to a women’s book-club radio show from Nova Scotia, I was able to pick up an English-language news hour from China, even in the very middle of the North Atlantic. As I approached Europe and was standing watch at night, I was thrilled to be able to dial in the BBC, including their coastal weather report, as well as a terrific classique rock ‘n’ roll station from Paris. Because my supply of AA batteries was not bottomless, I couldn’t listen to this radio all the time, but the voices provided a great deal of information and companionship, not to mention some necessary perspective. When I was having trouble with things on the boat, they paled in comparison to the deaths of the unlucky victims of the Minneapolis bridge collapse or the lives of HIV/AIDS orphans in Tanzania, two of the major stories on the radio during the summer of my crossing.
In addition to buying the GPS and the radio, I rented at absurd expense in a blur of credit-card delusion a satellite phone on which I got daily forecast texts from a weather service. I could speak to someone at this service with this phone every three to five days if I wanted. On this satellite phone I talked to my partner Lisa nearly every day for around two minutes. We knew that the phone breaking or any kind of missed call could set off unnecessary concerns on either side, but we decided it was worth the risk and the expense. Lisa has never said this, but I know those daily phone calls were a burden on her, both emotionally and logistically. The satellite phone was also there for a real emergency. I could make a call for help.
Beginning in the 1960s, solo-sailing narratives began to include anecdotes recounting difficult or failed attempts to make a radio or phone call while at sea. Francis Chichester is constantly lamenting time, energy, and ship’s power wasted trying to make a call, causing anxiety both for him and those ashore. Robin Lee Graham in the late 1960s, deeply in love and regularly torn apart from his new wife, was often crushed under still more intense loneliness while at sea when a radio contact with her failed or was too faint. In 1979, Naomi James wrote a description of trying to reach her new husband from her boat in the distant Southern Ocean. The connection was terrible, she had to shout to be heard, so they agreed to try again in twenty-four hours. “I was frustrated at not being able to say more than a simple hello and good-bye, and for the rest of the day remained restless and worried in case something prevented me from speaking to him the next day.” In so many of these stories the single-hander details the technological failures, the timing, and the stress for them and those on land when the connections get dropped or missed. This usually makes for droll reading, but most sailor-writers cannot resist recounting these failed communications for good reason: they often involve their safety, and these calls anchor their mental health. Once anticipated, it can feel crucial to the solo sailor to make contact. The satellite phone and now the internet, both still exceptionally expensive out at sea, provide emotional comfort, safety, weather, anchorage information, and gear assistance. But they also reduce the sailor’s focus on the sea and their self-reliant endeavor, which was supposedly why so many went out there in the first place.
Neal Petersen, a solo circumnavigator in the 1990s, put it succinctly: “Modern technology had put an end to the isolation of solo sailing. No longer was I truly alone, and, with no desperate drama to survive, the highlight of every day became my five- to ten-minute telephone chat with [my girlfriend] Gwen.”
Every evening after I finished the call with Lisa, I placed the satellite phone back in its black foam, clicking it shut in the yellow waterproof case that I kept beside my red “ditch bag,” to grab them both if Fox was suddenly sinking. I normally then went back on deck and did dinner dishes, sloshing the single pot over the side. I tried to relax and watch the sunset, the licks of color on the trough of each wave. Once the sun went under the horizon, I would toast the night with two sips of whiskey, one splashed over the side for Neptune and one pull from the bottle for me. I had read somewhere (incorrectly as I learned later) that Robin Knox-Johnston did this, which seemed a reasonable way to take the edge off. I kept up that tradition all the way across. Yet whenever that sun went down I still felt the most lonely and nervous, preparing to stay up for most or all of the night to look for ships, bad weather, floating debris, and to make appropriate sail changes. On calm nights while Sandy steered I sat in the cabin hatch, looking forward, watching the stars, and listening for hours to almost anything I could find on the long-range radio.
Over the course of my trans-Atlantic crossing alone, despite having many more technological and physical comforts than previous generations of single-handers, I still experienced all manner of intensities, facets and feelings of loneliness, helplessness, inadequacy, and missing others, such as when I saw something beautiful and wished that I might be able to share it with someone. I also had a common type of loneliness regarding the regular reminder of being so minuscule in the middle of an indifferent ocean under low dark clouds, a landlessness where I might disappear and no one ashore would know how or why or even when exactly. These thoughts all mixed at different moments with the recognition of just how little my, anyone’s, existence matters to anything in the scale of the larger forces of space and time as I watched carefully the relative rotation of the sun, the moon, and each night the counter-clockwise movement of the stars around Polaris, all glimmering over the ancient sea horizon.
In the end, though, I had less time than I expected for such thoughts, since my mind was so occupied with real or perceived problems and safety concerns. When I first left Maine I had contacted nearly every ship or boat that I saw to check in on my visibility on their radar and, I think, just to make contact. As I moved beyond the Grand Banks, I saw a ship only every other day or so.
I remember distinctly one morning, right at sunrise. Underneath the main boom, on the horizon ahead of me, just to starboard, the rising sun, a blade of orange, emerged within the dawn. I reached below to grab my sunglasses from their hook. Fox was moving well, but with no spray over the bow. When I looked back up I saw the hull of a merchant ship several miles off to port, steaming in the opposite direction, westbound. I picked up my radio to call them but found myself setting the mic back in the bracket, uninterested in any conversation. This was a turning point, a new level of comfort with my aloneness. I recognized this even in the moment.
I never got drunk at sea, whiskey sips aside, although I know others have done so as a way to celebrate, relax, or cope with the anxiety. Moitessier drank full bottles of champagne at Christmas and to mark each passing of the big capes. Horie, after reeling sleepless in an early gale while crossing the North Pacific on his first voyage, decided to get drunk one day to break the strain. In one sitting he alternated “doses” of whisky, red wine, and sake, which forced him to vomit aggressively and then shut his body down to sleep: “The drunkenness tortured me, but it also relieved some of that awful strain on my mind. For a while the loneliness was gone.”
Mealtime is a big deal to sailors, and eating well can do a lot to cure boredom and loneliness along with maintaining physical health. On my passage, though, I did not spend a lot of time preparing food, eating mostly cereal with UHT milk and gobbling up snack bars. I made pasta, ramen, and rice that I ate out of a little pot, or I ate canned foods directly out of the can. For cooking I used a simple one-burner stove that was gimballed and that I powered with a little camping propane tank. Although I stored the tanks in the cockpit in a pvc tube, I remained terrified that I was going to blow myself up every time I lit the stove, perhaps igniting any residual gasoline engine fumes trapped below. I’ve read a story of this happening—a single-hander who severely burned his face and torso and had to jump over the side to extinguish the flames burning his flesh. In other words, food and cooking did little to deter loneliness for me.
Ann Davison in 1956 seems to be the first single-handed author to open up honestly in her narrative about her true daily anxieties. Her reasons for writing in this way surely were wrapped up in the time period, her personality, her being more of an amateur sailor, and perhaps also cultural formations of gender. Less than a decade later, though, Kenichi Horie too was surprisingly candid about his fears and loneliness, as was Sharon Sites Adams. She took Ritalin pills occasionally to help her stay awake and focused, which a psychiatrist friend explained to me might have unintentionally helped with her anxiety. Adams told me that she played the radio all the time—kept it on always—to keep her company.
Writers, on shore and at sea, have often spoken of how the loneliness among crowds in cities is far more acute than when alone in a more natural setting. Tristan Jones, a single-hander from Ireland, wrote: “Being alone is not the same thing as being lonely. I can feel more alone on the New York streets than I ever would in mid-Atlantic.” He explained that his connections to friends and family were not always based on vicinity. He had “felt closer to them, alone in mid-ocean, than I sometimes have while being in the same room with them.”
Moitessier wrote in The Long Way of a companionship with the sea and marine life as a genuinely felt spiritual connection, a feeling of being within, being a part of a watery universe that welcomed him and kept him company. Moitessier is more the exception than the rule, however, and even among Western single-handers he is unique because of his cultural background, his skill as a sailor, and because he voyaged within a narrow technological slot of human history to which he clung. Moitessier’s Joshua had a steel hull and a self-steering wind vane that worked well, allowing him to spend so many months offshore safely, yet at the start of the Golden Globe race he and another sailor deliberately declined the use of a radio transmitter because of the cumbersome and heavy gear, the drain on electricity, and the distraction. “Our peace of mind, and thereby our safety, was more important,” he wrote. Imagine how different might have been Crowhurst’s experience if he had had no radio, could not report false positions, and never heard about the progress of the others.
To cope with landlessness and loneliness, Joshua Slocum and Howard Blackburn, for example, wrote about how they gave orders to themselves on deck to keep their voices active. I can’t imagine there are many single-handers who haven’t regularly talked out loud to themselves, whether that was to shout a chantey about Mother Carey’s chickens or simply to discuss whether or not to set a sail. While Moitessier was fixing his broken bowsprit after his slow-motion collision with the freighter, he imagined a long-time friend of his working beside him on deck, figuring out the problem together. Adams spoke into her tape recorder for her journal, as did Robin Lee Graham, recording entries regularly, more so than on paper. Horie explained that sometimes he talked with himself as if he were two people, one who was lazy and another who was motivated and responsible; the latter would berate the lazy one.
Several single-handers have reported that sickness, sleeplessness, or stress led to full hallucinations. The most famous vision like this among single-handers is the pilot aboard Spray. Early on in his circumnavigation, after leaving the Azores, Slocum was ill and doubled over with cramps from eating cheese and plums. Lying in his cabin in heavy weather he wrote that he looked up and saw a piratical Spanish sailor that was the pilot of Columbus’ Pinta. This man in historical dress steered the boat all night while Slocum slept off the food poisoning. Letters from the voyage reveal that at the time Slocum had been reading Washington Irving’s biography of Columbus. Occasionally throughout Sailing Alone Around the World, Slocum refers to this pilot helping out on board Spray. This was likely in part a literary device and a fun yarn, but I don’t doubt that Slocum did indeed hallucinate a flesh and blood figure on deck that night as he clutched his stomach and fell back asleep, nor that he imagined this pilot over the course of his voyage as a sort of personal mascot, a guardian angel at the helm.
“The Apparition at the Wheel,” original illustration for Sailing Alone Around the World, depicting Joshua Slocum’s hallucination of the pilot of the Pinta, by Thomas Fogarty (1900).
Hallucinations at sea seem to inevitably involve the mind conjuring human company or a setting surrounded by people. On his first solo ocean crossing in 1931, Vito Dumas, only recently departed from France and struggling in a storm in the Bay of Biscay, hallucinated about hearing two men in the bow of his little boat for three full days. In hot weather off Gibraltar two decades later, having not slept for about forty-eight hours, Davison imagined two people aboard her boat, too, except in her case one of them took the tiller, sending her down to the cabin: “Obediently I went below and slept till morning.” At one point during foul weather, two weeks into the trip, Kenichi Horie imagined a shipmate on board taking the watch while he dozed below one night. Sharon Sites Adams woke up to a soothing voice saying her name during her first single-handed crossing to Hawai‘i. Moitessier once hallucinated, likely induced by fatigue and a celebratory bottle of champagne, a clear vision of a giddy man standing at the stern, mocking the Cape of Good Hope as Joshua cleared the region. As he was pumping for his life and severely sleep-deprived in the North Atlantic, Neal Petersen, the South African single-handed racer, clearly saw a dead sailor-friend at the helm.
Aboard his tiny Tinkerbelle in the North Atlantic in 1965, Robert Manry reported the longest, most extensive hallucinations of anyone I have read. He endured days of confusion that seemed to have been induced by fatigue, anxiety as to his position, and the “stay-awake” or “pep” pills that he swallowed. Once early in the trip he was awake for over forty-eight hours, trying to stay alert in the shipping lanes, when he fantasized a hitchhiker aboard his boat who demanded that he be put ashore on an island of low, blue rocks, which “they” then spent all day zig-zagging around to find. Manry eventually did locate the imaginary rocks and put the hitchhiker ashore with his waiting family and their blue rock house. Manry had read his Slocum and knew of the account of the pilot of the Pinta, but his hallucinations were far more ornate and threatening. Another time, for hours in heavy weather as he was trying to get to an imagined place to help his daughter, a Scottish king and a band of “evil-faced, surplice-clad cutthroats” were trying to knock Manry off Tinkerbelle with singing that increased the size of the waves. This led further to a lengthy, fantastical journey, a live-dreaming that involved him falling overboard and quickly hurling himself back into the cockpit. Afterwards he had difficulty parsing out what had actually happened: “No MacGregor, [no] sinister choir . . . But what about those duckings? Were they hallucinatory, too? Had I or hadn’t I been washed overboard four times?”
For my small part, I sometimes had nightmares, vivid acid-trip dreams in which I was conscious enough to try to reach myself inside the dream, if that makes sense, to tear myself out of the scene with an eye-clenching shout to burst out into consciousness. I’ve had nightmares like that on land before—perhaps you have, too—but I had never before or since had them as developed or as intense. Once during my crossing I dreamt that Fox was on fire and that a Satanic man demanded that I flip the switch of the EPIRB then jump overboard. The EPIRB, which stands for Emergency Position-Indicating Radio Beacon, is a device that can be activated manually or will flip itself on when submerged under a certain amount of water, notifying the Coast Guard of a vessel’s distress with a boat-specific satellite signal. If I’d flipped that switch a whole set of emergencies would have been set in motion (or at least I operated on the assumption that they would).
More often, though, I had more benign dreams and semi-delusions, what psychologists refer to as “savior”-type dreams rather than the “destroyer”-type described above. I often have odd dreams at sea; many report this, perhaps because of the wave motion, but more often because when you’re working at sea, you are woken at odd hours and awake in the middle of your normal cycles. Aboard Fox I often dreamed that I was ashore but needed to get back to my boat because I was in the middle of the Atlantic. In my dreams, friends ashore asked what I was doing there, because I was supposed to be on this trip. Once I dreamt that Fox was tied up to a parking meter in New York City; I was going to visit my brother. At least twice I dreamed that an experienced captain with whom I had often sailed in previous years was on board to give me advice.
Sandy Van Zandt, the elderly man who helped me set up the self-steering device, appeared most regularly in my dreams. Sandy, slightly stooped and nobby, could weld, do electrics, anything and everything to do with boats. He was also kind, humble, and generous with his knowledge. In one of the few real journal entries I wrote while at sea, I described the following, transcribed verbatim:
People ask me what I’m doing, I mean I’m in the dream, conscious that I am in the middle of cruising in the Atlantic, so inevitably at some point in the dream, I think “Wait, how can I be in Maine if I’m trying to cross the Atlantic—have made no progress at all” which leads to me waking up, actually relieved that I’m here, on the boat, indeed very very far far from Maine . . . These things aren’t clear in my head just as the dreams have been more open-ended, not quite hallucinations, but with more dialogue with my conscious self. I’m often explaining to people in my dream, “I’m here, I’m doing this, but you should know I’m actually only half-here because I’m in the middle of sailing across the Atlantic right now.” I was trying to explain this to Sandy in the dream. I figured he would understand.
A few people have attempted careful studies of single-handed sailors and their psychological states. Just as Alain Bombard sent himself into a raft to study castaway diet at sea in 1952, so military- and space-exploration researchers have been interested in solo sailors as test subjects, for survival tactics and to examine their emotional swings. Before the first OSTAR race in 1960, Dr. David Lewis organized with fellow physicians and researchers ashore a set of daily forms for the five entrants to record their food intake, sleep, and emotional state in as quantitative a way as possible. “The idea of doing some research during the voyage first came to me as a possible excuse for such a long absence,” he wrote, speaking in part to his why-go. “But before long the prospect of breaking fresh ground in a field that had long interested me became an exciting prospect in its own right.” The daily log for each solo sailor included a section titled “How do you feel?” The form had rows with tick-boxes that ranged from “my normal self” to “seeing things”; “lonely” to “completely self-sufficient”; “a new confident mood” to “wish it were all over”; and even “sexy” to “not sexy” and “happy without feminine company” to “would enjoy company of other sex.”
Dr. Lewis wrote about how during his crossing, chronic exhaustion forced him to make serious mistakes. Referencing Slocum’s pilot, though, he thought that the wind-vane self-steering systems reduced hallucinations, since the fatigue was not mixed with relentless hours at the helm. Observations he made at the time, he found, were the only ones scientifically valid, because he realized, looking back at his notes about being afraid during a gale, that his mind had quickly created memories that saw things more favorably in retrospect than how he really felt them at the time. (Note to self.) All the sailors agreed that solitude and loneliness are not the same thing; Lewis wrote that he certainly never felt lonely. Overall, “A relaxed confidence, a sense of being ‘at one’ with the ocean and its winds, was our main emotional state, after the period of adjustment had passed.”
In 1971, Nicolette Milnes Walker, who had been trained as a laboratory psychologist before her solo Atlantic crossing, monitored her mental state, too. She reported dreams of being ashore and needing to get back to her boat at sea, much as I would.
John C. Lilly, the scientist famous for mind experimentation with LSD and dolphins, was also a sailor. Although he never did a single-handed passage himself, in one of his earlier studies in the 1950s, Lilly and his team used water-submersion tanks to examine the effects on people who experienced reduced stimuli. Lilly tried to learn from single-handers in this same vein, such as analyzing Slocum’s report of his pilot hallucination and the accounts by Dr. Alain Bombard from his trans-Atlantic crossing in an inflatable boat. Lilly laid these self-reports beside those of polar explorers and shipwreck survivors. He found that “persons in isolation experience many, if not all, of the symptoms of the mentally ill,” but “The symptoms can be reversible. How easily reversible, we do not know. Most survivors report a new inner security and a new integration of themselves on a deep and basic level.”
My friend Jon and I pulled into Portland, Maine, aboard Fox the day before my thirty-seventh birthday. Jon was the last remaining of my three friends who had joined me on the shakedown trip; the other two had had to peel away earlier to get back to work and family. Jon had built a new hatch cover for me in the cockpit and helped me with a dozen other things. He understood my situation, how to be supportive. We had gone through drills together on the shakedown, trying to sail the boat as aggressively and roughly as possible to test the self-steering and the safety of the rig. He spent hours down below to help me get used to managing the boat by myself, watching me climb the mast in rolling conditions.
“You’ve already accomplished more than all of us by getting to this point,” Jon said. “So if we see you sooner rather than later, I’ll be the first to buy the beer.”
“Maybe I won’t even make it back. Something could happen. A rogue wave or I might go all Donald Crowhurst crazy by myself.”
“Maybe. If it happens, it happens.”
“And even if something does happen, I mean, it would be hard on my parents, on Lisa, but I, it’s not that I feel suicidal, it’s just that—”
“—I know, I know, I feel the same. We’ve had a good life already.”
“Exactly. I’m just not that important. I don’t see my single life as that important.”
“That’s the advantage to going alone,” he said.
“Exactly.”
What I think I’m driving at here is that, like I presume nearly all single-handers, I was not afraid of death itself as a concept. I had no children at the time and was confident Lisa would be fine without me. My parents, however, would be the ones who would be crushed. I did not tell them what I was doing, to spare them the worry—and my own selfish guilt. Certainly, human society did not need me. I did not see my venture as suicidal, but a couple of people I told about it joked that this trip was “a death wish.”
In Portland, Maine, that day, having survived on Earth for that long, I was more afraid of being unprepared. And I was afraid of the shame of failure. I was unreasonably afraid, too, of the judgment of the men in the boatyard on the Mystic River, who I did not even know but who I believed were laughing at me behind my back as I was preparing Fox and talking with Sandy Van Zandt and quietly planning to attempt something like this. Isn’t it astounding the lengths to which we will go to earn the respect of complete strangers, most of whom have not considered us at all? I was afraid of rough weather, yes, but I was more afraid, at least at a distance, that I would in a selfish moment of panic click on that EPIRB and require another person to risk their life to come save me.
Yet perhaps I was most afraid, above all, like Ann Davison, that I had been living “a life going spare.” Like her, the planning and this crossing attempt felt as if it were the right thing to give my little life a jumpstart while my physical self was still up for the challenge. I had been raised in a culture that places great value on youth and individual accomplishment, “finding what you’re good at.” I was approaching forty. I believed my body would soon start to decay. (This has proven to be valid, although it’s been slower than I had thought.) In short, oh, the cliché, my crossing was a midlife crisis. Again, it is surely no coincidence that most of the early single-handers, Slocum and Pidgeon and Dumas, were in their forties and fifties when they set sail, with Davison being one of the youngest sailing pioneers at thirty-eight. The adventure also, as for Davison and so many others, gave me something to write about—since I had been making a middling career reading, writing, and teaching about the literature of the ocean. I was in the middle of getting a PhD, and I used money from my scholarship and my part-time illustration job to buy a used boat, emptying my savings to fit out the little craft for the crossing.
How many other people sailed alone across the Atlantic that summer? Ten? A hundred? I just have no idea. I’ve tried to research this from a few different angles, but have been unsuccessful. I asked Herb McCormick, a long-time editor at Cruising World. “No clue there,” he said. “I wouldn’t hazard a guess, it would be wildly speculative.” Most of the people he knew who have done solo crossings were either racing or qualifying for a race. McCormick added: “It [is] such a rare and esoteric quest.”
I’ll tell you something that I have never said out loud or written to anyone, but has borne out to be true as I grow older and my trans-Atlantic sail fades further away: I like having this ocean crossing in my pocket. It’s like when you touch your wallet or phone now and again just to make sure it’s there. I did not plan for this to be the impact of the passage, but it has remained an ego crutch for me, even though I almost never bring it out. I just put my fingers on it when I’m speaking with someone who I think is a condescending jerk.
My solo ocean-crossing was not pretty, but it is mine. Mostly, anyway. I couldn’t have done it without my parents, without Jon and other friends, or without Lisa or Sandy or the self-steering gear, and without luck, or an angel or God or an attentive watch officer, or whatever you want to call it.