One day at sea, at about the longitude of Iceland, I was doing dishes after dinner and forgot to take a fork out of a pot before I washed the contents over the side. In a moment of graveyard humor, I wrote in my logbook about “the loss of Fork, he was a good utensil, and that after last rites, tomorrow Knife and Spoon would begin dividing up his stuff.”
Probably true in every workplace to some extent, but on every ship I’ve been on the community has named inanimate objects. This has a function to help with the specificity of language and tasks in a small environment with so many working parts, but also for fun. And among isolated people under stress, companionship and security is not only gleaned from intentional pets or relationships with animals over the rail, but they infuse the physical inanimate objects around them with personalities, feelings, and intentionality, what scholars call “animism.”
I talked to, cajoled, bickered with, and regularly thanked Sandy while aboard Fox. The self-steering gear’s very existence was magical and essential to the success of the passage. Many other single-handers named their self-steering gear, but it seems more often to be the less experienced ones like me. Stuart Woods, for example, a writer who for the first time sailed across the Atlantic in the 1976 OSTAR, named his wind vane “Fred,” after his pet dog left ashore. David Lewis named his on his first cruise, calling it “Kiwi,” after his native country’s bird mascot which he had painted on the wind vane. As far as I can tell, Chichester did not name his self-steering gear after his first one, Miranda. Moitessier did not name his, either. Nor did Adams. Then again, when young Robin Lee Graham got a new wind vane, nearing the end of his circumnavigation, he named it “Gandalf.” And during his record-setting non-stoparound the world, experienced single-hander Knox-Johnston named his “The Admiral.”
Aboard my boat, I found myself naming other things, too, such as the preventer tackle for the main boom. This little rope-and-pulley system often got twisted, and because of the shape of the deck house, I often had to crawl and contort in awkward ways to untangle or move it to the other side of the boat after tacking. I used this preventer tackle to adjust the shape of the mainsail and to keep it from swinging in the wrong direction. I imagined it to be too proud and righteous, like a young waiter in a fancy restaurant who imagines himself superior to his customers because he’s an artist. I gave him a name, too: Philip. This allowed some nice alliteration for the angry adjective I most often ascribed to the finicky, frustrating thing.
Then there was the boat as a whole, the sloop Fox. I’d worked on Fox all winter, doing what were for me very big jobs, such as changing all the running rigging, installing new chain plates, new sea cocks, fiberglassing parts of the deck, repacking the propeller, reinstalling the rudder and bolting on the self-steering. In the spring I’d painted the hull a battleship gray, brushed on an ultramarine blue boot stripe, and rolled the bottom with green anti-fouling paint. I hand-painted the white letters on the transom: “FOX” and underneath “MYSTIC.” My Pearson Triton was an antique. With a deep traditional keel, it was graceful, simple, clean, and tough—a design that had made many deep-ocean passages. A man named James Baldwin has sailed his 1963 Pearson Triton twice around the world alone. He still sails the boat and specializes in repairing the Pearson Tritons of other sailors. I believe quite sincerely that Fox took care of me and suffered through many of my mistakes. I regret that I later sold the boat and have lost track of the person who bought it. Every once in a while I search the Internet to see if it is owned somewhere or is for sale. It’s hull #646, if you ever see it anywhere.
As I was sailing in the middle of the North Atlantic, I talked to the boat, usually saying thank you. Sometimes I patted it. Although I didn’t use the pronoun, “she,” I was as steeped in the animism of my boat as any other sailor. I didn’t really imagine it as exactly matriarchal or as a lover of any kind, but I understand the sentiment. Many single-handed writers use “we” when talking in their narratives about their progress, referring to themselves and their boat. This makes sense, because it shows humility and the recognition that this couldn’t be done without a good boat. It was certainly true for me that Fox tolerated its new owner, caring for me far more patiently than I deserved.
There is something magical about propelling your own little home across the water by the power of the fickle, faceless breezes—to travel along while the boat takes care of itself. The why-go to sail across an ocean alone in your beloved tidy house by the power of the wind has always seemed to hold a challenge and a magnetism that is quite different from any other sporting event or adventure of any kind at all, even ocean rowing or ice climbing or polar crossings. Richard Hutch, a philosopher of sport and a scholar of single-handed sailing literature, wrote that offshore sailing reaches “outer existential limits” beyond any other sporting activity. Hutch compared the solo sailor to a pearl that is shaped, honed, and crafted by the oyster that is their sailboat.
The soulful relationship between the sailor and boat is eloquently exemplified in the narratives of Slocum, Pidgeon, and Moitessier, those who spent years with their vessels and were intimately responsible for every stage of the building and voyaging. Dumas, even though he did not build his boat himself, wrote of a moment after leaving Valparaiso, his first night alone and back at sea on the way to pass around Cape Horn, when he found himself leaning over and kissing a wood panel down below in “a surge of affection for my ‘shipmate.’ ” At the end of the voyage Dumas wrote that he patted the boat, thanked him—Spanish uses the male pronoun, el barco—for how much he had been through, believing that “God must have loved him.”
After his first voyage in 1962, Kenichi Horie donated his Mermaid to the city of San Francisco. It is now curated and maintained by the San Francisco Maritime Museum and displayed in the welcome center. When Horie donated the boat he gave the museum a commemorative plate, on which is inscribed a letter explaining how he was entrusting this boat to them, this craft who had given him courage and to whom he had given encouragement back. “Please be kind to my tired lover,” he wrote as translated: “Will you please speak to her, this lonely heart, when you are moved to do so. And will you please listen to her talk about the stars, the waves and the skies over the Pacific Ocean.” A member of the staff who maintains the small boats at the museum told me that she always feels a little guilty when reading this: she said she doesn’t speak often enough to Mermaid.
One of the best descriptions regarding the importance of the vessel itself was written by Robert Manry in the 1960s, writing about his 13.5-foot sloop Tinkerbelle, his companion, his friend, which he had rebuilt himself over many years to make it ocean-safe:
A voyage made by a solitary person is sometimes called a singlehanded voyage or a solo voyage, but neither of these terms gives proper credit to the most important factor in any voyage, the boat. Far from being solo, a one-man voyage is a kind of a maritime duet in which the boat plays the melody and its skipper plays the harmonic counterpoint. The performances of the boat and the skipper are both important, undeniably, but if it comes to making a choice between the two the decision must be in favor of the boat.
Manry pointed out that boats have floated by themselves over great distances and survived at sea for months at a time on their own. Not the other way around.