Deep Water

Watching a documentary about a British weekend sailor, 35-year-old Donald Crowhurst, who enters a non-stop 'round the world solo yacht race in 1968 sponsored by the London Times.

He had some idea that he could do it with the help of electronic navigation aids. He raised the money to do it. He had a wife and children. He was always smiling and cheerful during interviews, then when the cameras turned off, his face would drop. He seemed to know what he was doing wasn't such a good idea.

He sets out in the race. He starts out very badly. He soon realizes that his boat is in bad shape and that, if he continued on the trip, he wouldn't survive, but, if he quit the race, he would be financially ruined. His sponsor in the race was a businessman who knew nothing about sailing. If Crowhurst dropped out of the race before it started or early on in the race, he would be forced to buy the boat being built for him.

But he has an alternative. This was the '60s. There was no GPS. There was no way for anyone to know where he was. So he simply radioed in his position and lied. Suddenly, he was breaking speed records, traveling hundreds of miles in a day.

He stopped and was floating around in the Atlantic ocean radioing in his position. He finally said he was having trouble and wouldn't be radioing them anymore. He started keeping two logs, one with his real position, one that was fake. But the fake log would be carefully examined and he knew, if he "won" the race, that he would exposed as a fraud.

This wasn't that big a problem. All he had to do was come in last place in the race. No one would be interested in studying the log of the loser. He would finish the race and spare himself humiliation.

But there were problems with this that he didn't foresee.

I won't tell you what happens. It's all on Wikipedia if you want to see.

For some reason I keep watching documentaries and being surprised at the ending.

The movie was interesting but depressing. Imagine spending nearly a year completely alone on a boat, in serious danger the whole time. And imagine having your husband out there. Imagine being a child whose father is out there.

It reminded me of the amateur mountaineers who are now dying on Mt Everest. Now that you can call home from anywhere in the world with a satellite phone, they imagine it's perfectly safe climbing up there.

Well. I can understand it to a degree. In the 1980s, some people I knew in The Communist Party flew a small airplane across the country, down to Florida and across to Cuba. They had a good time seeing the place. A couple of them had been in the USSR in the 1920s.

And I suppose, in a way, it's like the low budget filmmakers who put everything into making a cheap horror movie. Like the fertilizer salesman who made Manos, the Hands of Fate, or the couple who made Teenagers from Outer Space. They never made their money back.

But it also reminds me of the idiotic things people do to avoid relatively minor problems. Making drug deals or embezzling to avoid bankruptcy, murdering spouses to avoid getting divorced. Marriages and business partnerships break up every day. Is it really that terrible?

The prize for winning the race was only 5,000 pounds. An average salary in Britain back then was 1,607 pounds. You could buy a house back then for about 5,000 pounds.