Edward Allcard, who was said to be the first person to sail both ways across the Atlantic Ocean single-handedly — save for a stretch with a young woman who stowed away on his return home to England — died on July 28 in Andorra, a principality in the Pyrenees Mountains, where he lived. He was 102.
His wife, Clare Allcard, said the cause was complications of a broken leg.
A bearded adventurer who loved life alone on the sea — he also circumnavigated the globe on his own — Mr. Allcard was a child in England when he first thought of sailing for America. When that time came, in 1948, he chose to do it aboard Temptress, a 34-foot yawl, built in 1910, that had not sailed for a decade.
To test the craft, he sailed first to Gibraltar, Spain. On the way, a storm sent water pouring into the boat.
“There was no escape,” he wrote in “Single-Handed Passage” (1950), his account of his trans-Atlantic voyage. As he braced himself in his galley seat, stirring porridge with a wooden spoon, anxious thoughts began to overwhelm him.
“The boat was untested and not ready for a gale,” he recalled thinking. “Were the fastenings all right? Would a plank spring? Would she spew her caulking? And so it went on. At each heavy lurch, I whispered, `Damn.’
