Many sailors dream of sailing bigger boats. John Atkisson dreamed of sailing bigger waters. Specifically he dreamed of sailing from its home port of Deale, Md., to Ireland and Scotland, which is a bit sportier than your average offshore jaunt to the tropics.

That he did so, he assumed, would be no big deal to anybody but him. But even before surviving a collision with a trawler in the Irish Sea, while single-handing north from the Azores, he was acquiring a fan base via his website (www.kestrelboat.com). Part of the reason was his age – he left the dock at 64 – and part was his boat: a 1974 Bristol 32 he had painstakingly prepared and partly re-engineered over nearly three decades in preparation for the voyage. It's not exactly a dinghy, but still.

When he arrived in the Azores after nearly a month spent slamming into stormy headwinds during what was supposed to be a balmy Atlantic June, "we were in pretty special company," Atkisson recalled. "The docks were filled with sailboats – from 22 nations by my count – and every one had crossed an ocean to be there. There was only one other boat as small as Kestrel. Everybody congratulated us. That felt pretty good. I said 'Hey, I really am living my dream. And at my age my father had been dead five years.'"

For Atkisson, a burly, white-haired fellow who describes himself as a recovering lawyer, the Deale to Horta leg was only the first in a 1,200-mile Atlantic Circle passage that took him through the rock-bound cliffs, tidal rips and whirlpools of Ireland and Scotland, mostly alone down the European coast to Spain, Portugal and the Canary Islands, back across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, then north toward home. But he hadn't planned to see the Azores at all. The summer of 2005, when he arrived there, was just uncommonly fierce on the Atlantic. One low pressure area after another kept forcing him south of his rhumb line to Ireland and even the never-seasick skipper was growing weary of being shaken like a BB in a beer can. So his unscheduled stop in Horta turned out to be a high-point of his 20-month voyage.

Atkisson has to have believed – at least subconsciously – that mortality was a shipmate. He had wanted to sail alone on his first Atlantic crossing. His wife insisted her husband ship a younger friend as crew. That man, a retired policeman, experienced a minor heart attack amid all the rough seas before Horta and had to leave the vessel in the Azores. Atkisson continued on alone to Ireland where he fell in with "this wonderful Irishman – just filled with joy" who jumped at an invitation to crew on Kestrel's return leg from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean. But before that could happen, he was diagnosed with acute liver cancer. He died as Atkisson sailed to Martinique alone last December.

THE BIG BANG

While Kestrel was still 100 miles from Ireland, moreover, Atkisson was down below fixing breakfast when he heard "what every solo sailor most dreads – the sound of Diesel engines nearby." He leaped to the cockpit to see his boat heading straight for the port side of a 150-foot steel fishing trawler, which was westbound on autopilot with no one at the wheel. Kestrel's own auto pilot, set to a compass course, was blindly guiding the sloop into disaster. Atkisson struggled to disengage it but couldn't do so in time. He still hears the "loud clang of steel and the sickening sound of fiberglass being crushed."

The impact crumpled Kestrel's bow dramatically, mangling her pulpit railing and almost wiping out the stainless steel headstay. The trawler crew, brought on deck by the collision, stood by while Atkisson raced below to search out what he was certain would be a hole in the hull, gushing with all the chill water of the Irish Sea. Astonishingly, there wasn't a crack or a drop of a leak below. Kestrel continued on to Crosshaven, Ireland, wounded but under her own power.

Plenty of sailors would have sold the boat and sworn off the sea right then. Atkisson's maritime addiction, however, is more pronounced. Hooked on sailing as a boy in San Francisco, he spent his boating years there mostly racing. But when he moved to Washington in the mid-70s and acquired Kestrel, he switched to cruising, preferring to test his seamanship against his own limits and those of the watery world. With his wife, author and longtime Washington Post science writer Kathy Sawyer, he had explored the prodigious shoreline of the Chesapeake, glorying in leafy, heron-stalked anchorages and sunrise skinny dips in the misty morning.

But blue-water voyaging was never far from his mind. "I always wanted to cross an ocean," he said. This was particularly true as he neared the age of his father's death: "I don't want to die thinking of a lot things I never got around to doing."

Gradually over the years he and Sawyer expanded their cruising range in Kestrel, adding voyages up the coast to New England and off the coast to Bermuda. Gradually but systematically he upgraded his sturdy little boat with things like redundant navigational systems, self-steering systems, cabin-reinforcement and extra sails. Repeatedly he resisted the siren's call of larger, more modern vessels in favor of keeping one whose every nut, bolt and cranny he knew with the intimacy of the seagoing engineer and craftsman he had taught himself to be. Kestrel became the "organizing principle" in his life when he retired from federal government attorneydom..

Explains Atkisson: "Wasn't it Pliny the Elder who said 'If a man requires occupation, let him acquire a vessel'?"

JOHN ATKISSONKestrel's bashed-in bow after striking a trawler.On July 8, 2005, 24 hours after her argument with the trawler, Kestrel was safely docked in Crosshaven where she would get a new nose job. Atkisson flew back to Washington for 10 months to ponder how two vessels sailing blind could find and run into each other on an otherwise empty ocean. And to contemplate darker possibilities: Had Kestrel been 100 yards further along on her course, the trawler would have cut her in two.

Undaunted, he flew back to Ireland in May, 2006, and embarked for Dublin where he was joined by Sawyer for a seven week sailing tour of Ireland, Scotland and the Hebrides. It was something of a pilgrimage for both, descended as they are from Ulster Scots plus, he says "whatever contribution was made by marauding Vikings." During those seven weeks they sailed 986 miles, through 10-knot tidal rips and 18-foot tides, dodging 40-knot ferries and looming freighters, Draconian wind shifts and some of the most beautiful scenery they'd ever experienced.

But sailing in Scotland and Ireland, Atkisson said, required "exact navigation every second . . . a bit like repeatedly crossing a Gulf Stream studded with cliffs and boulders." When they returned to Crosshaven, Sawyer flew home to work on a book project. Atkisson stocked up the boat to sail to Spain.

Crossing the notoriously rough Bay of Biscay was easier than anticipated, he says, in part because he had shipped a crewman for the leg from Crosshaven to Spain, and partly because he routed Kestrel west of Biscay's stormiest shallows.

But he said the most memorable aspect of his trip down the Iberian Coast, better even than the beautiful, festive cities of La Coruna, Spain and Lagos, Portugal, was "the wonderful welcome I received everywhere, in part because I'm a former drunk."

Mariners, he notes, have always been notorious boozers, and a goodly number are now on the mend. In every port city in the world some sort of 12-step meeting is underway almost any day. "And if you land in another country and don't know anyone, that's a great place to meet people." Perfect strangers took him into their homes, fed him meals, loaned him cars and committed other kindnesses beyond number, he said.

"I think my voyage had real meaning for them," he said. "It seemed to reassure them you can accomplish something difficult . . . with your life even after many years wasted as a barfly. And, of course," he said after a pause, "it represented that to me, too."

BEING A GOOD GUEST

But there was also the mystical kinship with the wind and sea, which no sailor can ever adequately explain.

"There is something truly glorious about being out there in blue water in brisk conditions on a boat you know intimately to be as well-prepared as any that has ever made the trip before, secure in your own knowledge of how to . . . take on whatever the sea may present . . . " he says. "If you are confidant in your boat and . . . your own seamanship you can even enjoy a storm . . . yawing and pitching over large, relentless waves through a pitch black night with surges of bioluminescence trailing back along the hull."

The lure, he emphasizes, "is very definitely not 'man against the elements'. That attitude can get you killed because you're tiny out there and the sea can easily and casually erase you without a trace. I wanted to go with the elements. At every sunrise in the tradewind passage I silently and prayerfully asked the ocean for permission to be its guest that day . . . .

"I saw some really beautiful dorado, really big ones, trailing the boat, and they would have been really tasty. I love dorado. But I said to myself, hey, it's their ocean. They're keeping me company. I'm going to leave them alone."

He awoke in wonder in mid-Atlantic at the dust on his deck from Sahara sandstorms a thousand miles to the east. He marveled at the cobalt blue of the deep ocean. And he delighted in the accuracy of the classic trans-Atlantic sailing instruction as old as Columbus: From the Canary Islands sail south until the butter melts, then turn right.

GOING IT ALONE

Not every day of his solo trans-Atlantic voyage was perfect. Sixteen days into the 25-day passage he spent nine hours rolling around in a greasy bilge fixing a maverick oil leak and rewiring his engine. He had to run the Diesel periodically to charge his batteries for power to run his navigation lights and the radio with which he received weather forecasts and entertained his friends ashore with emails of his adventure:

JOHN ATKISSONJohn Atkisson pilots Kestrel up the ICW.

After nearly surfing at an almost unbelievable 7.7 knots . . . in clear skies and moderate seas and big moon at night, 20 knots of East Northeast winds at the stern, and temperature about 82 degrees, there is serious question whether I will be content, when this is all over, to go back to . . . ashington . . . do begin to understand, though, why Bernard Moitessier after circumnavigating in the first [single-handed] Around-the-World Race, instead of sailing to the finish line port to claim his honors, just kept going, and going, and going. It is beautiful to a spiritual dimension out here . . .

[The] magnificent 625-square-foot tri-radial spinnaker is up . . . pulling Kestrel toward Martinique at just under 6 knots in only 8 knots of wind. Not bad for an old broad. Skies are blue, seas are moderate, and [the weather] promises more of the same for four days . . .

Was it difficult getting up the chute when I was alone? Yes. Will it be difficult getting it down, being that I am alone" Yes. Is it madness to be flying a chute when in the middle of the North Atlantic alone? Yes. Next question? . . .

He stole what sleep he could between regular scans of the horizon ("It takes 24 minutes for a fast ship to come down on you from when it's first visible") and had his radar rigged with a beefed-up alarm to wake him if anything unseen showed up. He saw trawlers in his dreams, but in the whole ocean passage east never once glimpsed a single other vessel.

HOME COMING

He had left the dock in Tenneriffe Dec. 1, 2006. He arrived in Martinique Christmas Eve. There he was met by Sawyer and their cat Beacon for a shore-side breather and a leisurely four-month cruise together up through the Caribbean, the Intercoastal waterway, and home.

Now back at his home in Washington, just nine blocks east of the U.S. Capitol, Atkisson has been surprised and strangely moved by how closely friends and acquaintances followed his voyage, and how much it seems to mean to them. He realizes now he's been sailing, in a way, for all those who never leave the dock.

Almost every sailor dreams of crossing an ocean some day, he notes, but by age 64 the dream for him was an imperative ("One of these days you're going to wake up dead" and at 66 I've done it, which puts me in a very exclusive little club. Am I proud of that? Hell, yes!"

But he was also sailing, he says, for Adrian O'Donovan, his Irish friend who died of liver cancer during his voyage.

"He was the first person I met on the dock in Crosshaven, and against all the odds he was almost exactly my age, and like me had hit the bottle hard for many years before giving it up.

"But what was really extraordinary about him is that boozers like me tend to be moody and get down on ourselves, even after we stop drinking. Adrian found delight in everything. He lived in a little tiny house and had a little tiny boat, had almost no money and had never crossed an ocean. But he saw everything in positive terms, particularly messing about in boats. One day when I was feeling down he looked at me with this big grin, hit me on the knee and exclaimed 'Johnno, isn't it great we can do this stuff!' And that put everything in perspective."

Atkisson mounted Adrian's motto on Kestrel's radio during the voyage. He says it's there to stay.

Longtime Washington Post reporter and tall ship sailor Ken Ringle these days writes from retirement. He is master and commander of the schooner Whisper, which he sails on Chesapeake Bay.