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star celebrity known only to sports figures like David Beckham today in Great Britain, Moitessier became a national hero. Awards were heaped on him. In England, the ‘Moitessier method’ was discussed at a
Yachting World
forum on heavy-weather tactics, where it was pronounced ‘rather startling’. By the end of 1966 he was world-famous.
    And very unhappy. He felt he had dashed off his book too fast, rushing it to coincide with and augment the glory of the Salon Nautique. He felt, he wrote later, that in so doing he had committed a crime. Moitessier experienced nothing in moderation. His books are written with an ingenuous, exuberant lack of restraint (and editing), full of a sensual exultation of sea. When he was up, he was way up. But when he was down …
    October (’67) was devastating. Wrapped in total silence, sucked down by a huge inner emptiness, I sank into the abyss … I felt madness burrowing into my guts like some hideous beast. I found myself wondering what last thoughts come to someone who has swallowed a lethal dose of poison.
    This goes beyond remorse for skimping on a book. It seems more likely that following his epic voyage and starburst of fame and glory, he was experiencing a pronounced bipolar slump.
    He got himself out of it with a typically intense swing back into the stratosphere.
    I must have been on the point of suicide when … in one blinding flash … I saw how I could redeem myself. Since I had been a traitor by knocking off my book, what I had to do was write another one to erase the first and lift the curse weighing on my soul.
    A fresh, brand-new book about a new journey … a gigantic passage….
    Drunk with joy, full of life, I was flying among the stars now. Together, my heart and hands held the only solution, and it was so luminous, so obvious, so enormous, too, that it became transcendent: a non-stop sail around the world! … And this time I was setting out for the battle of my life alone.
    He doesn’t mention Chichester. But his blinding flash seems to have come around the end of 1967. Chichester had sailed home that May.

3
    W INTER IS A DISMAL SEASON for sailors in England. The weather offshore is bad, even dangerous, and the misty coastal glim has become impenetrable and uninviting. Boats are cold and damp and under wraps in their mud berths or puddled boatyards. But in January the gloom is pierced by the arrival of the annual London Boat Show. Boaters, boatbuilders, yacht designers, ship chandlers, brokers, and sailing journalists from all over the country come in out of the rain and look at new boats and hardware. They finger the new rain gear, talk about anchor chain, and try to find some aspect of it all that might appeal to their wives and girlfriends. And they pore through cruising guides to Brittany, or the Bahamas, or anywhere a boat can sail to. So it is also the season of their dreams.
    One of these dreams, that January 1968, was epic, Ulyssean, and talk of it passed through the yachting community like contagion. Everybody now knew what the next great voyage must be: a nonstop solo circumnavigation. So when it was rumoured at the boat show that Bernard Moitessier was preparing for another voyage, the shape of it was easily guessed at. The details of Bill King’s
Galway Blazer II
, then under construction, were released to the newspapers during the boat show, and hisintentions became known to all. And there was talk of others making similar plans.
    John Ridgway, reading of Bill King’s proposed voyage, made a ‘military appreciation of the situation’ and decided to advance his plans by a year. He would forgo the transatlantic race, which he had looked on as good experience for a circumnavigation, and concentrate wholly on the bigger voyage. His literary agent immediately contacted
The People
newspaper, which had sponsored his transatlantic row, and they agreed to back his circumnavigation. In order to get a jump on