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.
