“Fellow lunatics”— the commodore of the Cruising Club of America called us to order, in June two years ago; the moment had come to distribute the awards. Harvey Conover is dead now, drowned at sea, with wife, friend, son, daughter-in- law; lost, off Key West, in a screeching gale on New Year’s Eve. There was no presentiment, in his salutation to the largest regularly convened agglomeration of ocean sailors, of disaster. The Bermuda Race has been run twenty-one times; and only one man has been lost. The yachts are sound, the yachtsmen practised. When a modern boat is lost at sea, she has not yielded to routine perils of the sea; she has had an accident. Like Harvey Conover, whose 40-foot dreamboat was most probably run down by a heavy tanker which, in the deafening wind and tempestuous sea, was making its way as best it could, and had no eyes for sleek little racing yawls.
What Conover (who raced seven times to Bermuda) meant is that there is a lunatic quality in any man who voluntarily exposes himself to the rigors and aggravations of that passage, in that kind of boat. The moment was especially opportune, in June of 1956, for his characterization, for it had been the fastest and probably the roughest trip in the fifty-year history of the race. My first trip and—the thought crossed my mind as I bit at a salt-soaked sandwich while tugging at the helm, heeled over 35 degrees; or as I grappled in the claustrophobic reaches of the forepeak with yet another sail to drag up and hank on the base of a headstay which, like a submarine’s periscope, slid in and out of the water; or as I lay sleepless in my tossing bunk, lusting after the comforts of a Carthusian cell, jets of water streaming in from a leaky deck, the waves pounding two inches from my ear upon the arching bow—surely, I thought, my last. But sailors, like lunatics, are, in their lunacy, predictable; and like Harvey Conover, we would be back and back again; for we had developed an appetite for the sea.
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