Hail to the Fleet

And one who took the long way

It’s a long way to East Lyme, Connecticut, from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, but that didn’t matter to me. I was eager to mix and mingle with the other members in good standing of the Northeast Fleet of the Cape Dory Sailboat Owners Association.

This was my second rodeo. I’d already been to a much smaller meetup, at a yacht club in South Portland, Maine, and here the vibe in East Lyme was the much the same. To put it bluntly, we were all old. Back in Portland, there had been one youngish woman, who was there to drum up business for her family sailmaking loft, up in Rockport. Other than that, all oldsters.

I had the sensation I was dropping in to the 50th reunion of a college I didn’t recall attending. Many of these folks had owned their boats for decades. The guy next to to me was so old, he didn’t even own a boat anymore. It didn’t matter, because he had a lifetime of accumulated memories, like the time his boat was “knocked down”, off Block Island. He entertained me greatly with those stories, and must have sensed I lent an eager ear.

Somebody stood up to give a report on Association matters, as we munched away, at our iceberg lettuce bowls. The speaker was a serial, and even parallel, Cape Dory fixer upper, much to his spouse’s chagrin. He specialized in Typhoons, which are the smaller day sailers in the fleet. Like cockroaches after an apocalypse, those are the ones I’d bet will survive the longest, as we reach end times. There’s less to go wrong with them. If the outboard fails, no worries, just swap it out for a new one, or maybe even go electric. The hulls are relatively light, and simple. On the other hand, when you sleep aboard of one these, they call it “camping”, not “cruising”.

Not so with the “big girls”, the club that Sea Nymph and her ilk belongs to, though mind you, she’s at the shorter end of the spectrum. These are the classic Cape Dory’s with the long straight keels, and heavy hulls, that have sailed across oceans. But at forty years plus, their collective demise is in sight. I’d give them 20 years, max, which is about what I’d give the average banquet attendee here at Flanders Fish Market.

Tempus fugit, so carpe diem. Nobody lived that credo more than the great Bernard Moitessier. He had been on my mind since I had noted a fresh looking copy of his classic, The Long Way Home, on the raffle table, as I walked in.

I am fascinated with this sailor, who was born in 1925, same as my mother, and died of prostate cancer, a scant 70 years later. (For anyone who dies younger than my current age, now, or some number of years from now, I will always call the lifespan “scant”.)

Like Joshua Slocum, Moitessier had a special gift for writing about his adventures. And also like the old Master, he was an excellent seaman, and able shipwright. In fact, he built his ketch in Southeast Asia, and named it “Joshua”, as an homage to Slocum.

But beyond his considerable skills, as a writer, sailor, and boat builder, there is one thing about this man that looms large. That is his choice to drop out of the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, the first of its kind, in 1968. He was in the home stretch, after 6 months at sea, having just rounded Cape Horn, the hardest portion of this grueling voyage. It was a straight line back to Plymouth, and a walk in the park, compared to what he’d been through.

But he’d been mulling over the matter for weeks, and had firm resolve. To combat depression, he had begun a course of Yoga, and meditation, from a book he had just happened to bring along. Perhaps under this influence, the thought of the vanity of calling his profound journey just a “yacht race” had begun to repulse him. He turned Southeast, bound to round Cape of Good Hope for the second time within a year. And then he kept sailing, through the Indian Ocean, and then the Pacific until he reached Tahiti.

He remained in Tahiti for two years, while he finished his book about the round-the-world experience, and you can feel the passion on every page. What was going on? Why had this crazy Frenchman forsaken wife, kids, and possible first place prize money, only to pursue some hard to define sense of freedom or enlightenment?

Welcome to the rabbit hole of trying to understand Bernard Moitessier. As for me, I am only beginning to nibble around the edges. Offline, I’ll continue my research into the matter, starting with with my launch of a research query to Gemini 1.5 Pro With Deep Research¹ . I excerpt a piece of the result in the footnotes.

This subject makes me uncomfortable, for perhaps obvious reasons. A man, perhaps a bit obsessed with his own mortality. commits the selfish act of heading back out around the globe, in the hopes of finding spiritual peace. In my case, the globe is shrunk down to the size of Penobscot Bay, and I have no intention of heading back around, when Fall approaches. And at anytime, I can tie up Sea Nymph at her mooring, and head back down to Portsmouth, to check in on the family. But like a moth drawn to a flame, I want to learn more about this Bernard Moitessier.

Meanwhile, back at Flander’s Fishmarket, the obsessive restorer of Cape Dory Typhoons was concluding his remarks, whereupon we broke for intermission. The Commodore, seated to my left, tapped me on the shoulder, and said “You should go talk to Joe. He also has a CD 25D. He’d probably love to talk to you”. Playing against my innate introverted type, I rose from my seat, and threaded my way back through the cluster of tables. The bobbing flotilla of gray heads had to be navigated with care, like a field of lobster buoys.

Rounding up behind Joe, I hove to, and gave him a tap on his shoulder. With caution, I tapped lightly, so as not to alarm him or inflict possible injury. We fell into conversation right away, and I can’t really tell you what was said, per se. I think the communication must have been running mainly on a deeper level.

I didn’t even mention that I was on the hunt for an autotiller, an electronic device that attaches to the helm, freeing up the single hander to roam about his boat. An autotiller is one of the items on my short list of must-haves. From what I’ve read and watched, and been told, as a singlehander, you really want an autotiller. Otherwise, you’re like a slave to the helm, meaning you can’t scamper up to the foredeck, or down below. Besides, at this point, I don’t really “scamper” anyway.

It was Joe who brought up the matter first. “You should have my autotiller”, Joe said.

Some kind of thrill passed through me. Joe was really on my wave length.

“How much?”, I asked. “

“It’s yours, if you want it. Let’s go pick it up from the raffle table.”

This felt a bit like insider trading, being before the raffle. But Joe had driven to this meetup with the autotiller in his trunk, ready to pass it, like a baton, to the next generation. At this event, due to demographic scarcity, I guess I was it.

My luck continued to hold, in the real raffle, when my number came up second. Thanks to God, or fate, or some sort of unknown wind, I scooped up the Moitessier book, and felt all the luckier for it.

Attribution: Wikimedia

1. Here is a query I sent to Google Gemini 1.5 Pro With Deep Research: “Please do some research on the decision of Bernard Moitessier, the French sailor, to head back around the Cape of Good Hope, instead of sailing to possible victory of the 1968 round-the-world race. Find links to discussions about the morality of what he did, especially considering he was "abandoning" his wife and family, who were waiting for him back in Plymouth, England. Are these considerations outweighed by his decision to "save his soul" and head to Tahiti? What sort of reaction did he get from the public, at the time, and in subsequent evaluations by critical observers?”

Gemini came back with a full report, which I will lift a quote from here. (I don’t want to violate the Robot’s copyright, if it has one)

Bernard Moitessier: To Finish or To Be Free

Bernard Moitessier was a unique figure in the world of sailing. He was a gifted navigator and seaman, a writer, and a philosopher. He was also a man who made a decision that shocked the sailing world and continues to be debated today. In 1968, Moitessier was competing in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, the first non-stop, single-handed, round-the-world yacht race. He was in the lead and on course to win, but instead of heading for the finish line in England, he decided to continue sailing eastward, eventually ending up in Tahiti. This decision, to abandon the race and "save his soul," has been the subject of much discussion and debate, with some praising Moitessier's courage and others questioning his morality.

It goes on, for several pages, from there. Quite entertaining.