In Sydney, Australia, it’s called a southerly change, and it does what it says on the tin. It’s a shift from a northeasterly summer sea breeze to a southerly wind, often driven by the arrival of a cold front and an ­associated low-­pressure ­system sweeping up from the Southern Ocean. The waves meet the shallowing floor of the Bass Strait, and the southerly wind meets the East Australian Current, flowing south at around 2 knots along Australia’s east coast. The combination can make the ocean off the southeastern tip of Australia one of the roughest pieces of water in the world. And as it’s about halfway between Sydney and Hobart, the words “southerly change” can have an ominous ring for sailors preparing for the start of the annual Sydney Hobart Yacht Race.

“When we saw the race [weather] briefing, it was a little bit fuzzy,” Hobart veteran John Quinn says. He had been speaking to me earlier this year but recalling events almost three decades ago, back in 1993. “It could have been tough; they were a bit uncertain.” The crew’s biggest concern the morning of the start was the new mainsail. “We were tossing up whether to use it or not, and we came to the decision to use it. As it turned out, the [southerly change and accompanying low-pressure system] was a lot worse than what we thought it was going to be.”

With winds reaching over 70 knots, it was equivalent to a low‑grade hurricane, and Quinn and the crew aboard his J/35, MEM, hit the full force of the storm in the Bass Strait on Monday night, December 27, 1993. Before midnight, a wave came out of nowhere. “It came from an odd direction. It was a big wave. Picked us up, threw us straight over on her side. We had three down below, fortunately. All of us on deck, I think bar one, went over the side. I got washed straight out of the cockpit. And when my weight hit the harness, it busted. It was a harness inside the jacket that had been well cared for; it must’ve split the webbing or whatever happened. But anyway, I ended up in the water,” Quinn says.

The crew hit the man-­overboard button and recorded the yacht’s position, which was transmitted with the mayday call, and the search started. The water temperature was about 18 degrees C. The predicted time to exhaustion and unconsciousness is between two and seven hours at that temperature, with the outside survival time at 40 hours. It was the only thing he had going for him. “We’re talking about seas of on average 8 meters, and they’re breaking,” Quinn says. “So, the chances of seeing one individual off a yacht in that sort of condition in the middle of the night—and it was in the middle of the night—are sweet f— all.”

It was around 5 a.m. on Tuesday morning when the oil tanker Ampol Sarel arrived at the search zone. The captain, Bernie Holmes, started at the original point where Quinn had gone overboard, then shut down the engines and let the ship drift downwind. He turned on all the lights so she would coast silently through the search area lit up like a Christmas tree.

Brent Shaw, a seaman aboard the tanker, heard Quinn’s cries. “I was on the wing of the bridge, portside lookout, wearing my raincoat and rain hat when I thought I heard a scream,” he told reporters. “With all the wind and rain, I wasn’t sure, so I took off my hat, and then I positively heard the scream. I directed my searchlight toward the area—and there he was, waving and screaming.”

Quinn was about 20 meters away from the 100,000-ton tanker. “The scary part was we spotted him, and then he drifted out of the searchlight, and then he was in the dark again,” Shaw said.

The Ampol Sarel crew radioed to other search boats that they had seen Quinn, and one that heard the message was the 40-footer Atara. Its crew had already had their own share of adventure that night. One of the crew was 21-year-old Tom Braidwood, who would go on to a career with America’s Cup and Volvo Ocean Race teams. “It got to that stage where you couldn’t see the waves in the troughs. The white foam was filling all the troughs up. And the only way we knew—you’d hear the wave coming like a train and you’d be like, ‘Here we go.’” 

Eventually, one of those waves had rumbled in and hit the sails of Atara with such force that it snapped the rig. They cut it away, but not before it smashed a hole in the hull. Atara was now in serious trouble. They started pulling the bunks off the side of the boat and using them to try to shore up the structure because it was caving in under the wave motion. It was at this moment that they heard about Quinn and diverted to the search area—even as they struggled to keep their own boat afloat.

“We got to the area, and we’re all on deck with torches down each side of the boat. And we’re motoring around and next thing you know, we saw him and it was like… Talk about the luckiest guy on Earth. Well, unlucky falling in, but…”

They struggled to get him out of the water, lost him once, and had to do a couple of passes to get back to him. “He was drifting on and off the boat, and it’s hard to keep him there,” Braidwood says. “I had a harness on, so I turned around to the guys and said, ‘I’m going to go get him.’ I had my harness tied to a rope as well. I dove in and swam out to him. And as soon as I got him, it was like, uuuuhhhh, you know, like ­complete collapse.”

Braidwood got him back to the boat, and after an immense struggle, they got him on board. “We dragged him down below, and he was hypothermic because all he had on was thermals and a dinghy vest, like a little life jacket, a bit padded. That’s the thing that saved his life, you know, because he didn’t have a jacket, a wet-weather jacket, or anything.”

I first heard this story in Sydney, not long after that Hobart, which I had raced aboard Syd Fischer’s 50-foot Ragamuffin. It took me nearly 30 years to get around to tracking down Quinn and asking him what he was doing in the water in hurricane conditions with no life jacket on.

The flotation vest Quinn was wearing enabled him to handle the breaking waves—so long as he was strong enough to keep himself afloat with its limited support.

Quinn was no naive newbie to sailing, neither the Hobart nor the risks. He was brought up in Sydney and spent his childhood in and around the water. “I did my first Hobart race at the age of 21, so I started ocean racing probably about the age of 18,” he told me. By the time he was in his late 20s, he was part owner of a 33-footer, his first ocean racing boat, and over the next two decades he upgraded a couple of times, did a lot more Hobarts, and then bought MEM.

“I had on a Musto flotation vest. They were more for warmth, but they gave you a little bit of flotation. I also had on a normal jacket, but it was weighing me down, so I got rid of it. And I had sea boots on, which I got rid of.”

But what about the life jacket? “We had normal life jackets. You remember how bulky those things were. You can’t get around the boat on them. They’re terrible things.”

The life jackets on board MEM were of the type that relies on closed-cell ­polyethylene foam for buoyancy. They were big and could be awkward to wear, and made it difficult to move around the boat. So, Quinn decided not to wear it—despite the fact that if ever there was a time to be wearing a life jacket, this was it.

“We were relying on our safety harnesses really. You don’t expect to end up in the water if you’re using a safety harness, not when you’re clipped on,” he says.

He chose the harness as his personal safety gear, and now the harness had failed him.

He tried a couple of ­survival techniques he had picked up, including sealing the foul-weather jacket and filling it with air to provide buoyancy. “There’s no way that that will work in real life,” he says.

He also tried pulling into a fetal position to protect himself as the waves hit him. “That was one of the worst ideas they ever came up with because you get one of these waves that picks you up and it chucks you around—you get a roller coming up, and it just picks you up and it just throws you. I mean, it’ll throw a 4-ton yacht. I tried that first, decided that was a really bad idea.”

The problem was the breaking waves, the dangerous part being the white water. “What I ended up doing was […] what we always used to do when the waves came at us when we were surfing: I just dived under it. The flotation vest wasn’t so buoyant that it stopped me [from] doing that, so I was able to get through them. I was looking around for lights all the time, of course. Doing a fair bit of praying, remembering all the fine things at home, and wondering what the hell I’m doing there, that sort of stuff.”

This technique would have been impossible in one of the life jackets aboard MEM. “[They’re] very buoyant—I would’ve hated to have been out there with one of those things on,” he says.

Crew Overboard: Four Recovery Methods

The ­flotation vest Quinn was wearing enabled him to handle the breaking waves—so long as he was strong enough to keep himself afloat with its limited support. “I was getting toward the end of it. I’d been through the shakes. I started to shiver and shake pretty badly, and the shakes were just going, and then all of a sudden, I saw all these lights, and I swam toward the lights. As it turned out, it was a great big oil tanker, and she was coming down at me. And I yelled, and then I realized this thing’s going to run over the top of me, so I ended up swimming away.”

There was another bad moment when the Ampol Sarel’s searchlight lost him. “No sooner had the light gone off me and I remember going, ‘Oh, s—,’ and looking around, and then I saw the port and ­starboard lights of Atara.”

It was 5:09 a.m. when Quinn was pulled out of the water, five hours and 27 minutes after he went overboard.

“How could anyone do that?” Braidwood asks, reflecting on Quinn’s feat of endurance. Exhausted and hypothermic, the crew of Atara got him into a bunk with one of the only crew who was still dry. “We had the space blankets around him, jamming cups of tea into him,” as they resumed the passage home, Braidwood says. They were ready for this—they had the equipment and knew what to do.

Quinn was lucky—lucky the flotation vest had allowed him to handle the waves, lucky to be found before he ran out of the strength needed to help its limited buoyancy keep him afloat, and lucky to be found by a well-crewed and prepared boat. But again, only just… “Atara was in a total mess,” Quinn says. “I don’t know what they were doing there. The mast had come down. She was totally delaminated. I mean, she was a total wreck.”

Braidwood was just as aware of the frailty of their position. “I remember he came to, and he just turns around and he goes, ‘Oh, thanks guys. Thanks fellas.’ You know, and I turned around and I said, ‘Well, don’t thank us yet mate because your ambulance is about to sink.’”

The indomitable streak that had got Quinn to that point came out in his reply. “When they told me that the ambulance wasn’t in too good a shape, I think I said something rude. Like, ‘Can I wait for the next one?’

“The first thing I did when I came back was I threw out all the life jackets,” he says. “And I put inflatable life jackets on board the boat for everybody. Because inflatable life jackets allow you to control your buoyancy in the same way as a diver can control their buoyancy. And that I regard as absolutely critical because I think with a full life jacket [and] those waves picking you up, I don’t think you’d last very long.

“I made a number of fundamental mistakes,” he continues. “The first thing is that I shouldn’t have been racing a boat that night in the Sydney to Hobart Race. [It’s] a beautiful little coastal racing boat, the J/35, magnificent little boat, but [it’s] not designed to go into that sort of weather. The second mistake I made was when I realized we were going into that sort of weather, I should have pulled the plug and just simply peacefully sailed into Twofold Bay. Shouldn’t have allowed myself to get out of control, I know better than that. They were the two fundamental mistakes.”

These mistakes all had a theme. We could call it ­overconfidence—a deep belief that things were going to be all right, that nothing really bad was going to happen. It allows us to do things that, in hindsight, particularly after our luck has run out, seem reckless. At one point in the worst of the weather during that Hobart, I had unclipped my harness on the weather rail and slid down across the aft deck to get to the leeward runner. My luck held and I got away with it, but not everyone does.

There is an innate bias to overconfidence in all of us, and it’s so hard to overcome because it’s instinctive—we don’t stop to think things through properly.

It would only have taken a moment’s pause to realize how foolish it was to be sliding around the open aft deck of a 50-footer without being clipped. I did not pause. I just acted because I had this inner innate confidence that it would be all right. This instinctive overconfidence is a cognitive bias. These biases (and there are many of them) are hard-wired ­predispositions to types of behavior. The head of the TED organization, Chris Anderson, interviewed Daniel Kahneman (the Nobel Prize winner who, along with Amos Tversky, was responsible for the original work on cognitive bias) and asked if Kahneman could inject one idea into the minds of millions of people, what would that idea be? Kahneman replied, “Overconfidence is really the enemy of good thinking, and I wish that humility about our beliefs could spread.”

There is an innate bias to overconfidence in all of us, and it’s so hard to overcome because it’s instinctive—we don’t stop to think things through properly. In the conclusion to his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman says: “Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues. I have improved only in my ability to recognize situations in which errors are likely. And I have made much more progress in recognizing the error of others than my own.”

Despite Daniel Kahneman’s pessimism—and speaking as someone who has made some bad choices—I’m going to keep trying to do better. It’s surprising how often we can mitigate risks with little more than a moment’s thought. It can be as simple as putting a strobe light in the pocket of your foul-weather gear. Or as simple as throwing a shovel and a couple of blankets in the back of the car at the start of the winter.

There are a few strategies we can employ to help us overcome the pernicious bias of overconfidence, ways to learn to slow down and pay better attention. One of them is to build habits to review risk whenever there’s time to do so. I sailed in the 1993 Hobart Race with Neal McDonald, who went on to sail with six Volvo Ocean Race teams, twice as skipper, leading Assa Abloy to a second-place finish. He developed the habit of playing a “what if” game during any pause in the action. At any moment, he could start a pop quiz: “What do we do if that sail breaks?” or “What’s the repair if the ­steering gear fails?”

McDonald was constantly looking for solutions to ­problems he did not yet have, and it’s a powerful tool in raising everyone’s awareness of risk. A more formal mechanism that does much the same job is the pre-­mortem, an idea that came from research psychologist Gary Klein. The principle is straightforward: Before any major decision goes forward, all the people involved in it gather for a pre-mortem in which they project forward a year after the decision was enacted. The basis for the meeting is that the decision was a disaster, and everyone must explain why. Klein thinks that it works because it frees people to speak up about the weaknesses of a project or plan.

While McDonald’s “what if” game and the pre-mortem are good at revealing what might otherwise be hidden risks—like the bulky life jackets—there is another strategy that can force a rethink on what’s an acceptable risk and what’s not. This one was prevalent within the OneWorld America’s Cup team in the early 2000s, where almost any assertion could be met with the riposte, “You wanna put some money on that?” And I can tell you, the prospect of losing cold, hard cash forces one to reconsider any misguided ­optimism very quickly.

Annie Duke, a former professional poker player, goes into this strategy in some detail in her book Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts. Along with Don Moore’s Perfectly Confident: How to Calibrate Your Decisions Wisely, it’s an excellent book to help understand our disposition for risk-taking—no bad thing when you consider the consequences of hauling up an anchor or untying the dock lines. For all its wonder and immense beauty, the sea is fundamentally hostile to human life; without the support of a ship or boat, our survival has a limited time horizon. If you’re not ­convinced, just ask John Quinn.

The post How John Quinn Didn’t Drown appeared first on Sailing World.

There is something about the silence of sailing. It’s the movement through water—be it slow and stately, or fast and frenetic—powered solely by the wind. The absence of a noisy engine hammering away is one of the attractions of the sport, or at least in theory it is. The farther we stray from the coast and the bigger the boat, the more reality diverges from the picture; power is essential to any long-distance cruising or racing boat.

These days the source might be solar panels, but the diesel generator or alternator is still a critical piece of equipment for many bluewater sailors. If the boat relies on desalination, there will be no fresh water without power. There will be no instrument or satnav systems, no autopilot, no satellite ­communications for weather forecasts, no radar or even navigation lights. The loss of these things isn’t necessarily a big deal—particularly in daylight, fair weather, and with the security of a harbor or marina just a short sail away—but there are times when it can be very, very serious.

“It was the last day of 2000, and when I started the engine the previous day, I had heard a bad noise, but I didn’t care. The day after, I wanted to start it again to charge the battery, and nothing happened when I switched on the contact and pushed on the start button…. So, my first job was to remove the starter to understand why it didn’t switch on. I removed it from the engine, and then I opened it, and I found out all the brushes are more or less dust, nothing repairable.”

The speaker was Michel Desjoyeaux. And on New Year’s Eve 2000, he was leading the Vendée Globe—the nonstop solo circumnavigation, arguably the planet’s toughest and biggest ocean race. If that weren’t bad enough, Desjoyeaux was deep in the Southern Ocean on his way to Cape Horn. “My press officer told me, ‘But you should have a spare for this, no?’ And I told him: ‘No. If I carry a spare part for this, then I carry two boats, which is not efficient,’” he continued.

The engine had been built by Yanmar, and Desjoyeaux had good contacts there, so his first act was to talk to them. “They told me: ‘Oh, we are very sorry. Something [like this] happens one time in a million maybe, and it’s a very low occurrence issue you have now, and we are very sorry, and we can’t help you because there is no solution.’”

The response must have seemed like the end. The rules are strict for the Vendée Globe race. Once started, there is absolutely no ­physical assistance allowed—so for Desjoyeaux, a stop anywhere to pick up spare parts would mean that he was out of the race. How could he possibly fix the starter without the parts? It would have been a harsh ending to what had been a brilliant performance to that point. However, Desjoyeaux was no ordinary sailor; there’s a reason he’s known as “Le Professeur.”

Desjoyeaux grew up in his parent’s shipyard in Concarneau in Brittany, and sailing was his life from the very beginning. “My home was attached to the yard, and the yard was our recreation when we were young. We didn’t need to go on holidays anywhere because…I mean, we didn’t want to go on holidays anywhere because we had everything we needed. I also did all my school lessons until I was 10 with my mother, who did the teaching at home.” It’s hard to imagine a better background for becoming familiar with boats and marine engineering.

He was just 20 when he competed in his first round-the-world race as crew for the legendary Eric Tabarly, and he’s followed that French icon into sailing history with a series of remarkable achievements. Few would argue against the assertion that Desjoyeaux is the most successful solo racer of all time, having won the Vendée Globe not once but twice. On the second occasion, he overcame a 40-hour deficit to win. (He restarted, after having to return to repair the boat.) He’s also won the less well-known (outside France anyway) but probably more competitive Solitaire du Figaro three times, along with two major trans-Atlantic races.

The man has had a great career, and one of the most extraordinary moments came after his discovery that he couldn’t start his engine in the Southern Ocean. “I switched off all the electronics that were not useful, only the [auto]pilot with the compass left—no displays, no computer, no satellite connection, no weather forecast, nothing. The minimum possible, no navigation lights, I was fully in the Southern Ocean, and I didn’t need lights because there is nobody. And I spent a lot of time at the helm to save energy, preferring to sleep during the day with the solar panel to help me. During those days, I tried to understand what I could do to try to find a good solution.

“I was a bit farther [east] than New Zealand, so it was too late to make a U-turn. This was very lucky for me because I think that if I would have been able to get to Australia or New Zealand, then certainly I would. I think that maybe I would postpone, stop the race…put the traffic indicator light on left and turn.” However, pulling out wasn’t an option, so Desjoyeaux had to find a way to repair the starter motor—or find a way to start the engine without it. It was a very long way to Chile without power, particularly without the desalinator (and no way to reconstitute freeze-dried food), the pilot or communications.

The state of the starter motor and lack of spares forced Desjoyeaux to look at the problem another way. Could he start the engine without it? The boat did have a second alternator. “There was a big additional pulley at the front of the engine, and the two alternators were horizontal, one each side. So my first idea was to remove one belt of one alternator, and drill a hole to be able to put a screw in and attach a padeye to the pulley.” The padeye would allow Desjoyeaux to attach a rope to the pulley. “Then maybe four or five turns [of a rope] around the pulley, then find a second block on the front of the boat, and go out from there to the cockpit and onto a winch.”

The rope (it was red) that Desjoyeaux had attached to the pulley would allow him to turn the engine over—just as a rope starts a lawn-mower engine or an outboard. Once it was led out from the interior of the boat onto the deck, he could try using the mechanical advantage of the boat’s winches to help him pull. “I turned the winch, and I understood directly that the load was not necessarily very big. I had the capacity to pull this load, but for sure, with just a winch, I would not be able to pull long enough and hard enough to make it start. It was cold, the temperature was more or less between zero and 5 degrees Celsius, so it’s not very easy for a diesel engine to start. And I didn’t have enough battery to preheat the engine.”

Still, Desjoyeaux could feel his excitement rising; back at the Yanmar offices, they had been able to start an identical engine manually.

“One of the things we asked them was to understand how much you can unscrew the injector.” Desjoyeaux’s engine didn’t have a decompression lever, fitted to older engines to allow them to be manually started using a hand-crank. They reduce the pressure in the engine so it’s easier to turn it over. Then once the rotation of the engine has begun and it has momentum, the pressure is reapplied, and the diesel explodes.

“I unscrewed each injector. I remembered it’s a three-­quarter turn on each screw to have the minimum pressure to make turning it over easy, but also the minimum pressure to make the explosion possible when the engine compresses the diesel. In the Yanmar factory, they were able to start the engine with three people pulling on the rope. I was confident,” he explained, “because I realized that the load to turn the engine and try to start it was not very big. We didn’t need tons, we just needed maybe 200 or 300 kilograms, but no more.” And Desjoyeaux, a master problem solver, knew exactly where he could find a force that would pull a rope with 200 or 300 kilograms of load.

“I tried to make a system to pull with the jib. It connected directly to the jib sheets.” The idea was that if he released control of the sail, the wind would pull the starter rope. “The problem is that when you ease a sheet, you get a very big load at the beginning, but when you start to ease the sheet, the sail collapses completely and you are not able to maintain power long enough to start the engine.”

Desjoyeaux realized that the jib wasn’t powerful enough. “I didn’t want to use a bigger sail or a sail that could break because I would need to do this operation every day. So my idea was to go to the mainsail.” Desjoyeaux pulled in the main as hard as he could onto the centerline and cleated the sheet. The red rope was then wrapped around the engine pulley at one end, with the other run out to the end of the boom, along it to the mast step and then cleated off on the deck. Once everything was in place, Desjoyeaux released the mainsheet. The load on the oversheeted sail pushed it out, transferring this force to the red rope all the way back to where it was wrapped around the ­pulley and, in his own words:

“So, my red line [attached with the turns around the engine pulley] went to a pulley at the back of the boat, up to the boom, back to the mast foot, the mast base, back to the cockpit. When I needed to start the engine, I prepared my rope in the boat and on the engine with the five turns. Then I trimmed in the mainsail more than needed for the performance, pulled on the red line, pulled on the winch very strong, removed the mainsail sheet from the winch, put the contact on the engine, and burned the diesel arriving at the injector with a small spark to heat it just before the injectors. And then I came to the cockpit, opened the clutch of the mainsail, and then it pushed the main out. The first time I tried this, the engine started. It was incredible because it meant that I was able to continue the race.”

The solution was quite breathtaking for its ingenuity. Desjoyeaux was able to finish the race without stopping for spares or help, and subsequently won his first Vendée Globe. It was an exemplary piece of problem-solving that has joined the canon of MacGyver solutions, being used again by Sébastien Destremau in 2016—and quite probably by others. When I heard the story the first time, I could not help but wonder how I might have fared in the same situation. Desjoyeaux mostly got to his answer via a series of logical steps, but there were two pieces of truly inspired thinking. First, taking the step to look for a way to start the engine without the starter motor, and second, realizing that he could use the sails to provide the force required on the starter rope.

It’s easy to think that only an exceptionally creative mind could have come up with a solution like this, but writers such as Edward de Bono, author of Lateral Thinking, or Michael Michalko, who penned the much more recent Thinkertoys, want us to understand that there are practical methods to improve creative thinking, and they can be learned. An example from Thinkertoys covers exactly the ground that Desjoyeaux traveled to get to the first part of his solution. Imagine, Michalko suggests, that you are in a room with two pieces of rope hanging from the roof. The challenge is to tie the loose ends of the ropes together. Unfortunately, they are sufficiently far apart that when you hold onto one, you cannot reach the dangling end of the other.

“Initially, you might state the problem as: ‘How can I get to the second string?’” Michalko writes. “However, you would then waste your energy trying to get to the second string, which is not possible. If, instead, you state the problem in a different way: ‘In what ways might the string and I get together?’ you will likely come up with a solution.” This is because a different range of solutions opens up with the reframing, like tying a weighty object to the loose end of one rope and setting it off in a pendulum motion that will swing it toward you while still holding the other rope.

What led Desjoyeaux to a solution initially was the way he framed the problem. He was focused on the real goal—­starting the engine—rather than getting distracted by the apparent problem, a broken starter motor. They say that necessity is the mother of invention, and it may well be that Desjoyeaux was able to figure out a way to start his engine simply because he had no other options. The fact that the starter motor was completely beyond repair may have been what saved Desjoyeaux’s race; he had no choice but to look for other ways to start the engine.

A great deal of de Bono’s Lateral Thinking process is about reframing things, or at least escaping the obvious framing, because that’s often the route to an answer. When the problem is structured in the right way, the answer will come. After talking it through with him, I don’t think Desjoyeaux knows how he arrived at his solution. It’s trite to say that it just came to him, but that is the way it works sometimes. What de Bono, Michalko and other thinkers in this area want us to understand is that this moment of it “just coming to us” can be made more likely with the right techniques.

“The aim of lateral thinking is to look at things in different ways, to restructure patterns, to generate alternatives. The mere intention of generating alternatives is sometimes ­sufficient,” as de Bono puts it. For those of us not blessed with Desjoyeaux’s problem-solving superpower, there are well-established techniques to do this. Many are straightforward, for instance what Michalko calls slice and dice. “To stimulate new ideas, identify and list the various attributes of a problem and work on one attribute at a time,” he explains in Thinkertoys.

These are just the components of the problem, things such as materials, structure, the function and processes, cost and value, and so on. If we were to break down the diesel engine in this way, we might get a list something like this:

• Metal
• Precision engineering
• Burns diesel fuel to create mechanical energy
• Efficient method of converting fuel to energy
• Ignites through diesel mixing with highly compressed hot air
• Delivers power when an exploding gas expands and moves a piston to rotate an axle
• Starts when required pressure and temperature are achieved in a pre-combustion chamber so that the diesel will burn
• One of many ways of creating mechanical energy by burning carbon fuel

Everyone’s list will be different, but there’s a good chance that something in there will spark the right line of thought. In this case, it’s probably the notion that the starter motor isn’t doing anything that clever. All that’s required is sufficient force to compress the air and some warmth applied to the fuel. The problem then becomes one of applying the necessary force and warmth. And there’s sufficient force on a sailboat to move it through the ocean, so why can’t that be applied to starting the engine?

Understanding techniques like this—and there are many others—can be a boat saver, or even a lifesaver, when faced with a challenge a long way from help. If we’re going to put ourselves in situations where that’s possible or even likely, then doing the groundwork now and tuning up our problem-­solving skills will, at some point, pay a high rate of return on the investment.

The post How to Use Your Sails to Start Your Engine appeared first on Sailing World.

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The post The new National On-Water Standards (NOWS) identify best practices for in-boat based instruction. appeared first on Sailing World.

The NOWS describe what recreational boating skills to instruct and how best to instruct them. They are designed to help boaters have the best experience possible when learning to operate a recreational boat; and also, to help ensure students across the country learn a common fundamental set of skills associated with safely operating a recreational boat regardless of where they take the course.

“Most of us know someone who had a difficult first-time experience on the water and never went back to boating. The standards, now available to boating safety educators, will help give boaters the skills and experience they need to be more comfortable and confident about their readiness to safely operate a recreational boat and enjoy themselves on the water,” said Jim Muldoon, NOWS Program Oversight Committee Member

The public can have confidence in the new national quality standards. They are the result of one of the largest studies ever conducted on safe boating skills. This seven-year project involved over 900 expert recreational boating instructors working with hundreds of beginner-level boaters. The experts developed and nationally field-tested the four quality standards a total of more than 600 times to determine the priority of the skills to teach and the best approach for teaching them.

People interested in learning to safely operate a recreational boat, or just brush up on their skills, are encouraged to choose course providers displaying the NOWS logo, which shows that a provider is following the National On-Water Standards for what skills to teach and the approach used to teach them.

For more information please visit boatingsafetymag.com for a list of education providers following the national standards for boating skills education. Be sure to only choose a boating education course that is following the National On-Water Standards.

National boating education associations have also begun the process of adopting the standards. US Sailing, American Sailing Association, US Powerboating, and the American Canoe Association (ACA) for example, are reviewing their beginner-level programs to ensure they follow the new standards. Subsequently, more and more of their member organizations and schools are building the standards into their local courses and use of the standards is becoming the new norm for course providers everywhere.

About the National On-Water Standards (NOWS) Program
The National On-Water Standards (NOWS) Program is a collaboration initiative led by a diverse group of 27 volunteer Subject Matter Experts from many different recreational boating organizations across the recreational boating community. Funded in part from US Coast Guard Grants awarded to US Sailing, and facilitated by a professional facilitator, the purpose of the NOWS Program is to help raise the overall quality, consistency and availability of recreational boating entry-level skills instruction throughout the United States. It does this by developing national standards, tools and other resources education providers can use to design and deliver on-water instruction that trains people to operate recreational powerboats, sailboats or human-propelled craft. The ultimate goal is to increase the level of safety and enjoyment recreational boaters experience on our nation’s waterways… saving lives in the process.

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Maidentrip

If you’re hibernating in Newport, R.I., and dreaming of the next time you’ll get out on the water, you should head over to Jane Pickens Theater on Feb. 18 to check out MAIDENTRIP, the story of singlehanded sailor Laura Dekker.

For more details on the screening, presented by Team One Newport and Gill North America, visit newportFILM’s website. Director Jillian Schlesinger will be in attendance for a post-film Q&A.

ABOUT MAIDENTRIP:
Born on a boat and raised in shipyards, Laura Dekker grew up with one dream: to sail around the world alone. At thirteen, her daring plot sparked resistance from Dutch authorities and a global storm of media scrutiny. A year later, she won the right to set sail. Now, far from land, family, and unwanted attention, Laura spends her pivotal teenage years exploring the world alone in search of freedom, adventure, and lost childhood dreams. Jillian Schlesinger’s debut feature amplifies Laura’s brave, defiant voice through a mix of Laura’s own video and voice recordings at sea and intimate vérité footage from locations including the Galapagos Islands, French Polynesia, Australia, and South Africa.

To read more about the movie, check out Tim Zimmermann’s recent blog post. You can find a complete screening schedule here.

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Flamenco bodysurfing

If you want to experience the ocean, go sailing. If you want to commune with the ocean, go body surfing.

That, at least, is my conclusion after surfing the same beach each Christmas over a period of about 10 years. I must have put myself into more than a thousand waves over that period of time, humbly submitting myself to the immense power and sublime beauty of each and every one of them. Each wave delivered something special and unique: a rush of water, the sensation of speed and power, and a brief and total immersion into the watery world. No matter how many waves I surfed, each ride was its own thrill and had its own story.

True reverence for the sensation and experience of body surfing a wave was only fully realized over time, and it snuck up on me. It started with a beach called Flamenco, on the island of Culebra, off the East Coast of Puerto Rico. I first discovered Culebra in 1998, when I sailed my Bristol 35.5 to the Caribbean and spent a night in Manglar Bay simply because Don Street said it was one of the 10 best anchorages in the entire Caribbean (he’s right, but from a seaman’s point of view, as opposed to a night-clubbing/cruiser point of view). As coincidence would have it, a few years later my parents and some relatives went in together to build a house on a point overlooking Manglar Bay. Christmas in Culebra became part of the family tradition.

Culebra is an island of beautiful beaches and little development. The beach of beaches, as far as the the crowds (though it is hard to ever call Culebra crowded) and my kids are concerned, is Flamenco. It’s a picture-postcard long half-moon of sugary sand, turquoise water, and astoundingly reliable surf.

I’m not sure what generates such good surf at Flamenco. The topography of the bay and shape of the seafloor must have a lot to do with it. But mostly I think it has to do with the fact that it is a northerly-facing beach, open to big swells that come rolling south into the Caribbean from Atlantic lows and fronts. Whatever the specifics, and though the surf varies in size from mild to heart-pounding, it is rarely too little or too big for a good body-surfing session.

Just as important, there is something about the shape of the waves that makes it a better body-surfing beach than surfboard-surfing beach. That means that for me and my kids (and numerous other members of my extended family), Flamenco is for one thing and one thing only: regular and reliable body-surfing sessions which never fail to deliver the sensations our psyches have come to crave.

Photo: Natasha Zimmermann

When we first started going to Flamenco my son, Jamie, and daughter, Natasha, were toddlers. They wore life jackets. We took boogie boards. Their mother worried they were too small to be in the surf. Sometimes I pushed them onto waves they didn’t want to go on because they were too big, and they sometimes got rolled as a result. They yelled at me. My wife yelled at me. But over time they learned what surfing a wave was all about and started to love going to Flamenco. After a few years, if you asked at breakfast what everyone wanted to do that day, to my wife’s regret (because she likes new places and new experiences) the answer was always the same: go to Flamenco. A daily trip to Flamenco (especially with their older cousin Arthur) became a non-negotiable part of a Culebra day. Natasha and Jamie stopped seeing many waves as too big. Instead, they started seeing many waves as too small.

At first, I went because they wanted to go. Boogie boarding was fun, and it was easy to catch waves. But you rode on top of the waves, you didn’t feel part of the ocean. It was like a good amusement park ride. As time passed, and boogie boards broke, and we got tired of schlepping them around, the boogie boards disappeared. All you needed to surf Flamenco, we realized, was a bathing suit.

That changed the experience. As soon as we arrived at Flamenco the kids would tear onto the beach and race into the water. Within minutes they would inevitably be set up in the right place to surf waves that day, at that particular tide, standing in just the right place in the break to have the best chance of catching a good ride. I would follow them. Everyone would scan the horizon, looking for the telltale humping a couple of hundred yards out that foretold the arrival of a good set. We started to speak Flamenco-speak.

“I think I see some big waves coming.”

“Yep, second one looks best.”

“Quick, get deeper.”

“Here it comes. It’s a rider.”

“I’m going. You going?”

Then the wave would be upon us. Sometimes it was big enough that you’d hear a lot of oohs and ahhs. It would sweep in and start to peak. The crest would start to curl. And you’d launch, hoping you had the timing just right. If you did, the wave would pick you up and hurtle you toward the beach. You’d be encased in water, the rush of it would fill your ears, and send tingles down your spine. You’d feel your body tilt down as the wave started to break, and you’d hope for a smooth transition. If it was a big one, that brief moment between stable flight and whitewater chaos, which could either end with you getting slammed into the sand or experiencing the exhilarating rush of miraculous salvation, could feel as important as any moment in your life. Sometimes you’d get washing-machined, and come up spitting seawater, dizzy and disoriented. Anyone who had ducked the wave or missed it would laugh and ask, often facetiously (given they had probably just seen your feet peddling frantically in the air as you executed a spectacular somersault), “Did you get rolled?”

Most times, your body would tilt down toward the sand and accelerate. The wave would crash all around you and rocket you up the beach. You’d hold your breath, lie still, and see how far it would carry you. When you couldn’t hang on any longer, you’d come up with a big gasp and look around to see who was still with you. Sometimes four or five of us would catch the same wave, and we’d look at each other with satisfaction, silently acknowledging the shared experience of a good wave, well-ridden. Being farthest up the beach was a subtle honor. We’d all laugh at the thrill of it, and wade back out into the break, eager to catch another one.

Putting ourselves into wave after wave taught us a lot about the characteristics of the waves, and what worked, and what didn’t. We learned that an incoming wave could sometimes flatten out just before breaking (especially if a previous wave was a big one and lots of water was coming off the beach). When that happened, almost invariably, no matter how hard you swam, you’d fail to hook into the wave and get left behind, wasting effort and perhaps missing the next wave–which of course would be perfect. “Too flat, too flat!” the cry would go up, and everyone except the hopeless optimists all around us would duck and wait for a better prospect.

We learned that sometimes the waves would develop two crests, the smaller preceding the bigger. And that even if you caught the bigger crest the ride would fizzle as it over-ran the smaller crest, and you’d lose a clean and decisive break. The kids were ever vigilant. Other people in the water might get excited at the sight of a seemingly decent wave rolling toward them. But Tasha, Jamie, and Arthur wouldn’t be fooled. “It’s a double,” they’d tell each other dismissively, and duck, as all the other suckers tried to ride a wave that wouldn’t ride.

Over the years, I loved to see how in tune with the Flamenco waves the kids became, and how good they got at reading them and riding them. Other kids would sometimes gravitate towards Arthur, Jamie, and Natasha, keying off their confident patter as they read the waves and made Go/No-Go decisions. If Arthur, Jamie, and Natasha went, they went. If they ducked, their attentive disciples would duck. In the eyes of (at least some) others, with their sophisticated evaluations and group cohesion, Arthur, Jamie, and Natasha were gurus of Flamenco, the ungrizzled veterans of the local surf. Maybe one day we’ll have to go here …

Because I was at Flamenco with them, I would surf alongside the kids, revelling in their pleasure. Slowly, the experience of repeatedly immersing myself in wave after wave, and joining each one for the climactic moment of its life-cycle, worked its magic on me. I grew to love the experience of clawing my way onto the face of a reluctant wave and suddenly feeling the effort rewarded by a hissing acceleration as the wave finally accepted a passenger. I grew to love briefly merging my body fully in the infinite forces and sensations that constitute a breaking wave, of feeling it take over my immediate destiny as it raced to its own final destiny on the beautiful sands of Flamenco.

Every wave was different. Every wave was the same. To be inside a wave was to be deep inside the ocean, in a cocoon of water that was both peaceful and at the same time alive with energy and life. No matter how many I rode it never got old. When I’d pull my head from the foam, the wave would be gone forever, but the memory of it would be with me forever. And then I would look out at the ocean, and see another Flamenco wave coming my way.

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Macif

Michel Desjoyeaux and Francois Gabart were enjoying a comfortable lead in the Transat Jacques Vabre, after their relatively easy and smooth passage across the Atlantic from Le Havre, France. Desjoyeaux was down below getting some much-needed rest while Gabart busied himself on the deck as the IMOCA Class Macif sailed along in a breeze of 15 to 20 knots. They had less than 2,000 miles to go before the finish at Itajai, Brazil, and were virtually assured of what would have been their first victory as a duo.

Then, for reasons that still remain unexplained pending structural tests, the mast suddenly snapped about 30 feet up above the deck. It crashed down on the aft side of Macif, the boat Gabart had successfully singlehandedly piloted not less than a year ago to win the Vendée Globe.

Fortunately, Desjoyeaux and Gabart were uninjured, but the sting of defeat because of a breakage was particularly painful to the pair, who also dismasted when they took part in the Barcelona World Race in 2011. Then, Desjoyeaux expressed disappointment over dismasting for the first time during an offshore race on Foncia, a boat in which he had invested much time and effort to prepare for the race. Now, almost two years later, dismasting a second time was especially ironic considering the two sailors have amassed three Vendée Globe victories between them on IMOCA Class boats.

“The situation is painful and sad, but these types of breakages show how basic structural mechanics are a big part of racing,” says Gabart, who is often able to break down much of long distance offshore sailing in a way engineers tend to do.

Desjoyeaux and Gabart’s heartbreaking end to their race could have been one of many dismastings or other such incidents in the fleet—but it was not. On the day of the scheduled start, the fleet was set to head straight into 60 knot winds and cresting waves of 20 feet or more in the Bay of Biscay. A large percentage of the 44 boats taking part would have invariably abandoned the race. But as it turned out, the race organizers decided to postpone the start by four days.

SNCF-Geodis on an Atlantic that was not always calm, despite the absence of major depressions during the race.

Without major depressions to take into account, more than 90 percent of the entire fleet followed the same course, which only varied by 100 to 150 miles from one another past the Azores Islands. The number of tacks and jibes were few, with little variations in the weather patterns to worry about along the way. Except for Macif‘s dismasting and a few other more minor incidents, the transat was largely predictable and uneventful.

However, Manfred Rampsacher, the race director, said postponing the race was absolutely necessary. Allowing the fleet to head into likely disaster for many of the boats was not even under discussion.

“If they had left on the scheduled date, it would have been a survival course and not a race,” Rampsacher says. “A large number of the fleet would not have even left the port.”

Only six boats out of the fleet abandoned the race. Photo: Jean-Marie Liot/DPPI

But regardless of Rampsacher’s decision to postpone the start, the professional world-class sailors in the circuit would have still probably prevailed. PRB, skippered by Vincent Riou and Jean Le Cam, finished first in the IMOCA Class after completing the 5,450-mile** **course in 17 days. Like Desjoyeaux and Gabart, they were among the favorites to win the race, regardless of sea and wind conditions. Sebastien Josse and Charles Caudrelie on Edmond de Rothschild, one of the two MOD70 boats, predictably finished first in the fleet in 11 days, taking advantage of the fast speed the 70-foot monster-size multihull design offers. Sebastien Rogues and Fabien Delahaye on GDF Suez, and Erwan Le Roux and Yann Elies on FenetreA Cardinal won the Class40 and Multi 50 categories, respectively.

Desjoyeaux and Gabart, of course, would have been more than comfortable with the prospect of taking Macif through raging seas and 60-plus knot winds in the Bay of Biscay. But now that the race is over, the thought of a mast breakage in such conditions is not something either of them, or any sailor for that matter, would probably like to dwell on.

Already, Gabart is thinking ahead and planning on taking part in next year’s Route du Rhum transat. “Macif is a fantastic boat and remains one of the leading builds in the IMOCA Class,” Gabart says. “I am totally confident in it and am preparing to add a new mast in time for the next Route du Rhum.”

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All is Lost

“All is Lost,” opens in select theaters on October 18. The movie follows Robert Redford’s abandonment of his 39-foot sailboat at sea. Here‘s where you can see it:

CALIFORNIA
Los Angeles – AMC Century City
Los Angeles – Arclight Hollywood
Los Angeles – The Landmark

NEW YORK
New York – AMC Lincoln Square
New York – Angelika Film Center
New York – Cinemas 1, 2, 3

The movie will open nationwide on Oct. 25.

From the production notes:

With their one-man cast in place, the producers sat down with the list of necessities for shooting the film. At the very top: a handful of sailboats, and a place to sink them. As it turned out, shooting the story of one man and his boat actually required three boats—specifically, three 39-foot Cal yachts. While all of them serve as Our Man’s sailboat, the Virginia Jean, each of the three boats was used for a separate purpose: One was for open sea sailing and exterior scenes, another was for the tight interior shots, and the third was for special effects.

Finding three similar boats proved to be a challenge, however, says production designer John Goldsmith, whose previous credits include No Country for Old Men and The Last Samurai. “We scouted them at different times and purchased them in different ports. They all had to be imported, which was a logistical exercise in itself. I think we were two weeks into prep before all three were side by side, ready for us to work on.”

Once they had them, the filmmakers put the boats through their paces—and then some. “We did pretty much everything that you can do to a boat on film,” Chandor says. “We sunk it, brought it back to life, sailed it, then put it through a massive storm, flipped it over, and sunk it again. I think it’s paramount to have a pretty deep understanding of the way these boats work, the way they sail and sink, as well as all of the different kinds of sailing elements we use to help move the story along.”

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All is Lost

**** Are Robert Redford and filmmaker J.C. Chandor about to upend history and deliver a sailing movie, called “All Is Lost“, that sailors can truly love?

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If so, it would be a nice surprise. The reality is that Hollywood has never made it a mission to gratify and thrill the small subsegment of the American population known as sailors. Deal with it.

Yes, we’ve had “Wind.” It was fun, and nice to see our sport featured. But it was full of totally predictable (and not very flattering) caricatures, and sailing scenes which definitely required a full suspension of disbelief. Yawn.

And we’ve seen “Master And Commander“, which was pretty decent, and sorta authentic, but not quite great (I’m not sure why, sorry).

I can come up with at least one great sailing movie, “Deep Water“, featuring the fascinating and tragic final voyage of Donald Crowhurst. But it was a documentary, not Major Hollywood, and naturally didn’t quite bring the glitz, recognition, hipness, and cultural acceptance that all sailors crave deep down.

In fact, for my money, the best sailing movie wasn’t even about sailing. It was about a scary, crazy dude, and bumbling Sam Neill being heroic and determined, and a young Nicole Kidman being, well, a young Nicole Kidman. It was called “Dead Calm“, and it had a really sweet yacht as a co-star.

So here we are, a century into the magic of moving pictures, and we have yet to experience a movie that really nails the reality of humanity’s experience of venturing across wide oceans on small craft. But I am hoping “All Is Lost”, which will premiere next month, might change that.

First off, it’s got Robert Redford, who is crossing from craggy into creaky, but is still a mega-marquee Hollywood star. The movie features Redford as a solo sailor who hits a container and then must battle for his life. And Redford, who apparently acts the hell out of the role without saying hardly anything at all, is getting rave reviews.

Just as important, man and small boat against the sea (and large sneaker containers) is a timeless, resonant theme. It is at the heart of every voyage, It is the core appeal of every voyage. And that seems to be the only story that Redford and Chandor want to tell. No side stories, no frippery, no distractions. Just a simple, yet primal, struggle between sailor and death.

Filmed in the massive water tank built for “Titanic”, if “All Is Lost” can pull the sailing audience into that struggle without any jarring, lubberly mistakes (okay, Redford apparently has no working EPIRB, but hey, it could happen!), then they might just win the title of greatest sailing movie ever. Or at least so far. And the early reaction from critics is off the charts.

Even so, the always-hopeful sailing community has repeatedly been burned by Hollywood’s penchant for backwinded jibs, yachts sailing across windless seas, and clunky, nautical dialogue, so skepticism is in order. As an antidote, however, I offer the “All Is Lost” trailer. If it does not touch the sailor in you, then all is truly lost.

>>Read production notes from the making of “All is Lost”

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MacFarlane Sailing

Sailing the Mini Transat is arguably one of the most difficult, testing challenges a solo racing sailor can inflict upon him or herself. It gets even harder when your Mini starts to break up underneath you just five months from the start, and you are forced to abandon to a Spanish Coast Guard helicopter. The was the fate suffered by Jeffrey MacFarlane, the latest U.S. sailor to enter into Mini Transat world. It was a fate made crueler by the fact that MacFarlane was the #1 ranked Mini sailor at the time, so looked to be a candidate for the podium.

Here’s MacFarlane sailing in last year’s Atlantic Cup:

********But then it was back to Mini sailing, and the Mini sailing gods decided to play rough. MacFarlane was pounding through his 1000-mile qualifier in late April, in about 35 knots of wind, when his boat literally started to crack apart, with the failure of the deck structure, mast structure, and keel box. The result was a boat that was thrown violently around by the big waves, which resulted in MacFarlane’s left hand getting brutally crushed. MacFarlane did his best to try and stabilize the situation, and managed to keep it all together until he was airlifted off the boat. Here is what the carnage looked like:

Sheer, bloody-minded stubbornness is perhaps the most important quality in any Mini sailor. After a stay in the hospital, MacFarlane set about resurrecting his Mini campaign. He’s back in France, racing to learn and prepare a new, leased Mini. I checked in with him to see how things are going.

What is the state of your campaign and your efforts to sail the 2013 Mini Transat?
JM: My campaign has certainly taken a detour … At the time of the incident I had a world ranking of #1. But since then my ranking has slipped three places since I missed some important races. I spent the last month in New York, rearranging my plans and trying to salvage my Mini Transat efforts. I arranged to rent a new boat. My new boat is #759, it is a Sam Manuard design. I am excited to start sailing it.

How did you recover from losing your Mini in April? What was your state of mind, and what physical issues did you face?
JM: I spent most of my time recovering in New York. I was in and out of doctors’ offices to address my broken hand. My hand was broken in two spots and not set properly in Spain. After seeing several doctors, the consensus was that I needed to have surgery. They wanted to re-break the bones and set them with pins and screws. Doing this surgery would have meant, at best, two months before I could sail again … I opted to postpone the surgery until after the Mini Transat and had them re-break and re-set the bones without the surgery. While I do not have the full range of motion at this point, I will be able to start sailing again.

The loss of my Mini was a huge setback, but I am still very focused and determined to compete in the 2013 Mini Transat. I have to admit: In the beginning it was discouraging. Not knowing if I would be able to compete (while I was trying to find a boat and determine if my hand would be healed in time) was not a pleasant feeling. However, now that I’ve overcome those difficulties, the circumstances have made me more determined than ever, and I am excited to start training and racing again.

716 in better days.

Did you find another boat, or did you manage to salvage the first boat? How have you managed to deal with the unexpected financial costs?
JM: Unfortunately, I had to charter a new boat. This changes things, and of course, it has increased my costs by a fair amount. Because I am without a title sponsor, my campaign is funded completely through private donations (through my website) and personal contributions, so the additional cost of chartering a new boat has been difficult. I am still really hoping for a corporate sponsorship to come through … The personal sacrifices I’ve had to make are difficult, but worthwhile.

How much do you think the setback cost you in terms of your Mini Transat preparation? Is there anything about the experience that you think will help you in the Mini Transat?
JM: Losing the boat and the time I spent learning/preparing the boat (716) is without a doubt a huge setback. In order to compete in the Mini Transat there are a number of qualifications that you must do in the boat you intend to race the Mini Transat in. One of those criteria is racing 1000nm in Mini Class races and doing a 1000nm passage by July 15. Normally this would not be an issue. I had already completed about 1600nm racing with 716. However with a new boat, I will have to redo those miles. Since there are only three races left (just over 1000nm) on the 2013 calendar, it is imperative that nothing breaks and I finish all of the races. This puts added pressure on my campaign. I will also be more cautious–I will not be able to push the boat as hard in those races to ensure the boat’s safety.

Of course this experience is not ideal, but I think the experience will help me in the Mini Transat. First, my new circumstances demand me to be extremely efficient with my time and resources. I have to get a lot done in a little time, but I think the difficulty of doing so will help in the long run. Second, I think the rescue experience, in itself, is helpful. I know that I am able to handle such a situation. While many people thought that the boat failures (mast, deck, and keel box) and my injury may have stopped someone out of fear/discomfort, etc … that was not the case at all. Without even thinking of an alternative, I went right to work–focusing first on my own safety, then on ensuring as little water as possible was coming aboard, and finally, on keeping my mind busy. I think this test proves that I am prepared for whatever the Mini Transat throws at me.

The new ride.****

How much support rallied to your cause from the sailing community and the Mini Transat community?
JM: I was so impressed by the amount of support that has come from the sailing community through donations and well wishes. The Mini community has also been supportive helping me find another competitive boat in a very short amount of time. Oakcliff Sailing Center has been especially supportive. Just after the incident occurred, Dawn Riley went to work to find a place for me to stay and funds for me to use (when I got off the boat I did not grab any cash or credit cards). Through the help of Nicola Breymaier, friends of hers picked me up at the hospital and hosted me for several days/nights in Menorca. It was amazing to see how generous the sailing community (both at home in the U.S. and internationally) can be. This kind of support is still continuing.

How are you feeling about your prospects for the Mini Transat?
JM: I still feel that my chances to place well in the Mini Transat are very strong. While I do have a lot of sailing time to make up, basing myself out of Lorient allows me to train with some of the best coaches and sailors in the singlehanded world. On top of this I have more determination than ever.

What is your timeline to the start?
JM: I will be extraordinarily busy until the start of the Mini Transat on October 13. I have just launched 759 and sailed with the boat designer last week. This week, I’m heading up to Douarnenez for the Trophee Marie-Agnes Peron (MAP) which starts on June 13 (singlehanded) and the Mini-Fastnet, starting on June 23 (doublehanded). Immediately after that, I’ll leave for my 1000nm qualification solo sail. The last race before the MT is the Transgascogne 2013, a singlehanded race starting July 28. I will spend all of my other time training. I plan on being on the boat every day–training with the other competitors and some of the coaches in Lorient. I will also be busy working out and studying the weather. It’s going to be a busy four and a half months!

MacFarlane certainly deserves a few good breaks, after so many bad ones. If he manages to complete the Mini Transat, that alone will be a triumph of will. If he manages to place high, or even win the thing, even Hollywood wouldn’t be able to write a better or more thrilling comeback story.

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