Appreciation: Lessons of the Sea

“We are in the gale,” Rich Wilson wrote on January 1, 2017, describing his exhaustion and demoralization as the sea pounded his sixty-foot monohull Great American IV. “Imagine being inside a house getting tilted by a crane,” he said two months later, “then being repetitively dropped from fifteen feet onto a concrete slab.”

America’s greatest blue-water sailor has broken records for fifty years while piloting old boats on shoestring budgets, and yet he performs in a sport barely recognized in his home country. The New York Times wrote that he looks more like an accountant who does a singlehanded sailor’s taxes than a singlehanded sailor, and his only Wikipedia page is in French.

When slammed like so much flotsam, Wilson had been alone for fifty-six days, since November 16, 2016, at the start of the Vendée Globe, a twenty-seven-thousand-mile, circumnavigation race, when he and twenty-eight other sailors were sent off by three hundred thousand spectators lining the jetty in Les Sables d’Olonne, France.

In those eight weeks, Wilson had seen land only once—while rounding Cape