Status Updates From Godforsaken Sea: Racing The...

"Autissier and Chabaud inhabit the border area between what men are conventionally able and allowed to do and the corresponding territory for women. They do it without pretension or self-consciousness. They look like they belong there. And if they do, what woman doesn't?"

An absolute banger from Mr.Lundy

Such good writing, but the flow is significantly interrupted when a tangled statement like this comes in the final pages:

Two collision bulkheads should be fitted, one located 5 percent of the length from the bow (some boats already had these) and one just forward of the rudder.

It had been just like New Zealand during his first race, an unnecessary port call. Now here he was, a daysail from the finish line, and it wouldn’t count. He would need a third Vendée Globe, he said. Otherwise, it was unfinished business.A few hours later, with exquisitely ironic timing, the big bolts that secured the keel to the hull sheared off.

And as I’m doing all that, the wind picks up, and the boat heels and all the tools fall off the chart table. And the tablets turned out to be efflorescent and should have been dissolved in water, so now I’m frothing at the mouth, and it was quite funny, really.”

The most amazing wonder of the deep is its unfathomable cruelty.

You could say that the example set by the sailors—their courage, self-reliance, and endurance—paid this money back many times over. Perhaps we’re all encouraged to live better lives, roused by the example of our heroes when they’re summoned by destiny to answer the call to adventure.

Jeantot defended the huge costs involved in rescuing Dinelli, and Bullimore and Dubois, especially. How much money do we spend on repairing the consequences of crime or drug or alcohol abuse, for example, he asked. The answer is, Many times more than the amounts it took to pluck these people out of the Southern Ocean.