Vanished at Sea

I picked up a $6 book in a newsagent within a Melbourne hospital recently; I was attracted by the picture of the boat on the front cover (go figure!). I kind of wish I hadn't been.

The book is the story of a gruesome true crime, outlining the disappearance of Tom and Jackie Hawkins from their 55 ft trawler, the 'Well Deserved' in November 2004.  The boat had been listed for private sale. When Tom and Jackie took 25 year old Skylar Deleon and his friends for a test drive, they were over-powered with stun guns and sent overboard with one of the ships anchors to drown.

The motive? Pure financial gain. Skylar Deleon wanted the boat and assumed, wrongly, that its owners must be rich. They weren't. As the boat name suggests, they had scrimped and save for years and then sold their home to follow a lifelong dream to go cruising. The birth of their first grandchild had convinced them to take up life as landlubbers again, putting the boat on the market in Newport Beach, California.

Today, Skylar Deleon remains on death row in Orange County, USA, after painstaking efforts by Newport police and family and friends of the Hawks to get justice for the couple. Their bodies were never recovered.

There is no lesson to be learned here; no 'moral to the story', unless you decide it is best to trust no-one in life, which would be a sad thing. Jackie and Tom Hawks were tragic victims of a sociopath.

Mind you, after reading this, I'd think twice about taking strangers for a ride on your boat...

 

What are the attributes of a great sailor?

Peter Nichols book, 'A Voyage for Madmen', tells the individual stories of each of the nine men who set out on the inaugural Golden Globe, Singlehanded Around the World Race in 1968: a race which only one competitor would finish.
Early in the book, Nichols discusses 'the Ulysses Factor', as mooted by JRL Anderson in his book of the same name. Nichols describes Anderson's 'lone hero' as having 'a powerful drive made up of imagination, self-discipline, selfishness, endurance, fear, courage and, perhaps most of all, social instability...a genetic instinct in all of us but dormant in most.'
I was fascinated by this, particularly when he went on to explain 'part of the attraction of these loners is that they invariably look and sound normal; they look like us (I don't know about you, I'm seeing Jessica Watson  right now and thinking, OK, she looks like an average kid). They're usually modest when asked how they survived their terrible ordeals (yep, check, she was), they readily admit their fear (yep again), and in doing so they fool the rest of us into thinking that they are like us - or more accurately, that we could be like them. They become our idealized selves, and so they take us with them, in a way, when they climb Mount Everest or sail around Cape Horn'.
Well, Jessica Watson certainly took a lot of people with her, as evidenced by her blog and the thousands who lined up to greet her upon her triumphant return to Sydney.
So...are the characteristics described by Anderson and Nichols - imagination, self-discipline, selfishness, endurance, fear, courage and social instability - the same characteristics that make a great sailor in general?
I'd be interested in what other sailors think! Perhaps we can disregard the 'social instability' part, as I think it may be in reference to the capacity to walk away from one's everyday life for an unknown period of time, which most weekend sailors don't have to do! So let's just stick with imagination, self-discipline, selfishness, endurance, fear and courage.
Is anything missing from the list? Anything you want to argue shouldn't be there?
I would like to add 'intuitive' to the list - when an understanding of the wind and the effect it is having on the sails and the boat in general becomes truly intuitive, then surely a sailor has reached a level of mastery that many others can only aspire to?
That's what I'm aiming for; a better personal handicap be damned...I want to be intuitive!
Chay Blyth, now one of the world's sailing legends, had never sailed before he set out to race around the world in that infamous 1968 race. He followed a friend's boat to the start line, copying every move made by his mate! Yet his explanation of why he attempted the race is simple and profound and cements his 'lone hero' status ...

'It was my voyage of discovery, and what I wanted to discover was me.'