A Voyage For Madmen (42 page)

Bill King's
Galway Blazer II
was conceived for such a voyage, but not a race.

Naval officer Nigel Tetley. He read about the race in the Sunday papers.

Tetley's
Victress
. ‘I can think of nothing that was right about that boat for that race.'

Loïck Fougeron under way. After his first storm at sea, the decision to drop out was an easy one.

Donald Crowhurst. ‘I feel like somebody who's been given a tremendous opportunity to impart a message.'

Donald Crowhurst's logbook.

Moitessier. Not since Captain Nemo had a man felt so comfortable and self-sufficient at sea.

Nigel Tetley's lonely Christmas dinner.

Crowhurst at the start of his voyage – his lines were tangled and he was towed back ashore.

Teignmouth Electron
being unloaded from the
Picardy
at Santo Domingo.

The interior of
Teignmouth Electron
at the end of its voyage.

Final resting place of
Teignmouth Electron
. Cayman Brac, 1999.

Suhaili
enshrined at the National Maritime Museum. Greenwich, England, 2000.

*
Still, they can disappear and perish at sea, as did Canadian Gerry Roufs in the 1996 Vendée Globe race.

*
This was not the first time two men had rowed across the Atlantic: George Harbo and Frank Samuelson, Norwegian immigrant fishermen from New Jersey, did it first in an 18-foot lapstrake dory, departing from New York City on 6 June, 1896, reaching St Mary's in the Scilly Islands fifty-five days later.

*
This describes the trim-tab vane gears used at the time. Modern wind vanes often use slightly different principles.

*
Whitbread's mild interest in Crowhurst's circumnavigation would later grow into something much larger when the brewery became the sponsor of a major international sailing marathon, the Whitbread Round-the-World Race, the sailing world's grand prix event, featuring a fleet of fully crewed maxi sailing yachts, which took place every four years through the late 1970s, the 1980s, and the early 1990s.

*
This doesn't only apply to large ships; when my 27-foot yacht was sinking in the North Atlantic in 1983, a 900-foot-long American container ship, the
Almeria Lykes
, responded promptly to my Mayday call, left its course, and steamed up over the horizon to rescue me. No thought was given to the size of my boat or to the singular number of its crew. The
Almeria Lykes
was on its way from Rotterdam to Galveston, Texas. On its passage east across the Atlantic several weeks before, it had rescued a yachtsman who had suffered a heart attack and taken him to Bermuda.