It was so much harder for these guys - no GPS, no radar, no sat phones, no email, no shore crews, no sponsors, wooden boats more fragile than today's ocean racers (which have their own problems.)
Edward Allcard, Solo Sailor on the High Seas, Dies at 102 - The New York Times
by Richard Sandomir
Edward Allcard, Solo Sailor on the High Seas, Dies at 102 - The New York Times
by Richard Sandomir
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.’
During the crossing, which took 81 days, he survived fierce gales and squalls, one of which capsized his boat; a near-collision with a whale; and encounters with sharks.
“Sharks never came too near me when I was bathing,” he wrote. “However, several times in the calm, a shark came to scratch its back on the topsides, whereupon I would hold my revolver to its head and fire.”
A thousand miles before reaching Sandy Hook, N.J., he began to feel joy about soon reaching his goal. But he also wondered if leaving the comfort of the water would not suit his loner’s personality. What was there to celebrate?, he remembered thinking. “Getting near to the artificialities and impurities of civilization, where money was God?”
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