Jeff’s Reviews > Godforsaken Sea: The True Story of a Race Through the World's Most Dangerous Waters > Status Update

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.

If it was worthwhile to spend money to get humans to the moon, then, for the same reasons, it’s all right to spend big money outfitting people with boats and gear to sail these races, and to rescue them when they get into trouble doing it. The vicarious benefits to our societies are worth it.

People living in Belfast during that time, or where daily life is anything but regulated and secure (which includes most of the world), won’t go to sea in small boats or climb Mount Everest. Why look for risk when there’s plenty of it in daily life? But where life is routinely safe and controlled, where the incidence of risk has been reduced through affluence and good government, it’s a different matter.

I can see the attraction or, in a sense, the usefulness of those forays beyond the pale of safety. We’re all heading for the same place. In death, we leave the pale forever and enter the universal unknown zone. The protective frame of life is always illusory...if it were a constant part of my understanding of the nature of my life, perhaps I wouldn’t view fierce ocean storms in the same way at all.

These risky adventures become a kind of reconnaissance. Isn’t it human nature to want to take a closer look at where we’re all going? There is possibly nothing better than these bold and exuberant sorties for cozying up to the inconceivable idea of it all. And the rest of life, its day-to-day progression, is transformed too, the significance and pleasure of its mundane activities affirmed.