Crowhurst was in financial ruin and saw the race as an opportunity for fame and financial windfall, inspired by Sir Francis Chichester's success.
Participants had to circumnavigate the globe solo without stopping, starting between June 1st and October 31st, 1968, to avoid freezing in the Southern Hemisphere's winter.
His maiden voyage was plagued with mechanical problems, taking nearly five times longer than expected, and he suffered from severe seasickness and burns from the generator exhaust.
Traditionally, a bottle that doesn't break is considered bad luck, which foreshadowed the many problems Crowhurst would face during his voyage.
He created a fake log claiming he was making record-breaking progress, reporting speeds and distances that were impossible, while his boat was actually drifting aimlessly.
By November 15th, he realized continuing would mean certain death, leading him to abandon the race and start fabricating his progress to avoid humiliation.
He began writing incoherently about time, space, and God, and his logs became increasingly nonsensical, reflecting his growing detachment from reality.
The Tynmouth Electron was found adrift in the Sargasso Sea with no one aboard, and his body was never recovered.
Initially, they were enamored with his fabricated progress, but when the truth came out, it led to widespread shock and disappointment.
His story became a cautionary tale about the dangers of pride and deception, and his mental collapse during the race highlighted the extreme psychological toll of solo ocean voyages.
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Welcome to Strange and Unexplained with me, Daisy Egan. I will not be remembered as someone particularly adventurous. I will not go down in the annals of history as intrepid. My obituary will likely not say I had pluck or courage or valor. It may, though, point out I was quick to judge those who did. How often, after all, have I discouraged any activity that involves getting off the couch?
If you do choose to confront the many dangers out there in the world, stranger, you, like Donald Crowhurst, may just become the focus of my judgment. We humans, to our eternal damnation, are all about conquering. Or, more accurately, you humans, as I've established, I have no interest in conquering anything other than a big plate of nachos in front of the TV.
In 1968, the United States and the USSR were locked in a race to see who would be the first to plant their flag on the surface of the moon. The Concorde's supersonic air travel was in its infancy with the aim of cutting transatlantic travel time in half. Civilization itself was speeding up. We had started to harness information at the speed of its dispersal as LED, RAM, and computer mice—mouses—were all created.
In other words, speed was, and still is, the thing. And while others were focused on the skies, the Brits would show the oceans who was boss. The Sunday Times of London called upon intrepid seafarers, launching a contest to see who could circumnavigate the globe the fastest. The trick was, though, they'd have to do it alone. No crew.
They were calling it the Golden Globe Race. Only one guy up to that point, Britain's own Francis Chichester, had solo circumnavigated the globe in a boat whose name is no longer appropriate to say out loud because racism.
Chichester started out in Plymouth, UK on August 27th, 1966 and returned to the same on May 28th, 1967. His voyage took 226 days, but he'd made one stop at Sydney, Australia to have his boat fitted with floats so he could cross the Tasman Sea.
The Times made it clear that in order to win their contest, the contestants would have to make it all the way around the globe without stopping. ♪
The Sunday Times Challenge was really a competition for fame and notoriety, but the 5,000-pound prize couldn't hurt. Which is roughly 50,000 in today U.S. money, which frankly seems pretty paltry for the proposed task, if you ask me. Then again, I know nothing of sailing. Maybe it's a piece of cake, though I'm willing to bet it is not. And also, goddess knows I like my alone time, but 10 months with nothing but the open ocean and sky for company?
Not today, Bob. Plus, remember, there was practically nothing in the way of satellite GPS, and last time I checked, there were no signposts in the ocean. With a distance of something like 33,000 miles? Holy Christ. It's a long way with no signage. There are basically three routes around the world by water. One through the Suez, one going north, and one going south. Everybody in this race decided to go south.
which looked like this. You head out from the British Isles, you turn south to pass Portugal, then the equator, and the entire east side of the continent of Africa. Then you round Africa's Cape of Good Hope to venture into the vastness of the Indian Ocean. You keep heading east until you're sailing south of Australia and into the Pacific, then around Chile's Cape Horn where the Pacific gives way to the Atlantic.
Here, you turn north and pass the Falklands. Then keep going until you hit the equator a second time, and you're back into the North Atlantic and home. All this while braving weather that could range from equatorial heat to the wind and ice around the fjords of Patagonia. Did I mention the 12-story high waves that are unrelenting around Cape Horn?
and that most of the time you can't exactly sightsee because for the most part you can't see land in any direction no matter how good your equipment is. It's just you, a radio, some canned food and water. Water everywhere. Just you. I feel like I have to reiterate that. They say solitary confinement is one of the most cruel punishments you can exact on a human.
Indeed, in the run-up to the start of the race, psychiatrists were quoted in the British press saying, quote, a man could go mad with 10 months of loneliness, end quote. And if shit started to go metaphorically south, you had no one to help apart from what you could hear or ask via radio. That is, when the radio worked. It was a modern-day 20,000 leagues in real life type of adventure.
If you were the Sunday Times, you knew it would make great copy for slow news days. Though it's hard to imagine there were very many slow news days in 1968 and 69.
The rules for the Sunday Times Golden Globe race were simple. In addition to the one man per boat, no stopping stuff, contestants had to start sometime between June 1st and October 31st, 1968, so as to sail the Southern Hemisphere's waters in its summer and avoid freezing to death. The contestant who arrived home first got a trophy, while the one who did the whole thing the fastest got the 5,000 pounds.
Nine men took up the challenge, but by the end, only two men remained, pushing themselves and their boats to their limits to make it back before the other. Or that's what everyone thought was happening.
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get 25% off your first month at ritual.com slash strange. That's 25% off at ritual.com slash strange. Happy squatting! To me, Donald Crowhurst was like a slightly more driven Forrest Gump. Perhaps not as far as his IQ went, but in his ability to kind of just drift along and do whatever the next thing that presented itself was. And perhaps without the unearned success of Gump.
Crowhurst was born in British colonized India, where his dad had great cred and he had a pretty posh childhood. Something went awry, I suspect it was that India threw off its British chains, and the Crowhurst family went back to live in a country they did not recognize, with a bit of poverty thrown in. He and his family were in financial ruin.
As a young man, Donald did stints in the Royal Air Force and the British Army before being asked to leave both because, as I read the literature, he was a guy who let hijinks go a little off the rails and get a little out of hand. For example, the time he got drunk and tried to steal a car while stationed in France. The military types don't love that kind of thing.
Safe to say he loved adventure of any kind, though most who knew him figured he leaned a bit hard into self-destructive impulses, having had more than his share of car accidents and close calls before he was even 30. Despite that, he became a family man with a wife, Claire, and four kids.
He had his own little business called Electron Utilization. The closest I came to finding out what his struggling company did was in Deepwater, a documentary on Crowhurst which reported that it made navigational aids. He was also something of an inventor, though apparently not of anything useful.
According to author David Roberts, who included Crowhurst in his book Great Exploration Hoaxes, Crowhurst's penchant for self-destruction may have inadvertently given him the feeling that he was invincible. When the Times of London announced its Golden Globe race, Crowhurst thought it was right up his alley, despite not owning a boat or ever having spent more than a weekend on one.
This would be akin to me deciding to run a half marathon. Incidentally, if you ever see me post that I'm running a half marathon, please know that it's code for I've been kidnapped, call the police. I don't run unless something is chasing me.
Or to Cheryl Strayed, who suddenly decided to hike the Pacific Crest Trail, all 1,100 miles of it, despite having never hiked before in her life, as laid out in her wonderful book, Wild, From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.
Anyway, all of the other eight men who joined the race were sailors who had actual experience out in the open sea. But what's experience worth when you've got a gung-ho attitude? Who needs experience? Pah! The words bad idea don't seem to have occurred to Crowhurst. Or maybe they did. Who knows? Some people get off on making incredibly bad decisions, it seems.
All nine men who undertook the race perhaps were made of stronger stuff than most, or thought they were. One of those men, Robin Knox Johnson, later explained that, quote, the more I was told I couldn't do it, the more I was convinced I wanted to do it, end quote.
Another participant, Bernard Moitessier, whose wife characterized him as a poet and philosopher, believed that kind of challenge is where, quote, you discover who you really are, end quote. For him, that was the sole appeal. It so happened that when the Times of London announced this undertaking, Crowhurst was trying to figure out where to turn for a financial windfall and some middle-aged spark.
The 35-year-old romantic told his wife, Claire, about his harebrained scheme to join the race. She, being a supportive and realistic wife, told him, "If you can find the money to build the boat, I'm in." Crowhurst had admired Sir Francis Chichester's accomplishment and made note of the way it had made him both rich and famous. He figured he'd just write a letter to Sir Francis and ask him if he could borrow his boat.
Sir Francis did not respond to his offer because, duh, could you imagine?
But then Crowhurst, clearly in need of a benefactor, accidentally fell upon one. Stanley Best, a quite prudent British investor, had previously put some cash into Crowhurst's business, Electron Utilization. When Best threatened to pull his money out, Crowhurst managed to talk him into putting that money into his boat-building exercise, which would pay off for everyone when he won. Wow. The audacity on this guy. ♪
Against all common sense, Best agreed to back the plan. With one caveat, if Crowhurst dropped out of the race early, he would have to buy the boat back from Best. So Crowhurst put the family home up as collateral. I wonder if his wife intended for him to hand over the deed to the home when she said, if you can come up with the money. Somehow, I doubt it.
So, if he shit the proverbial bed on this one, it would mean ruin. Not just for him, of course, but for his wife and children. But Crowhurst was perhaps too busy designing and building his boat, a 40-foot trimaran, to consider the possibility of failure.
He was also trying to learn about how to work the radio, how to send a telegraph, how to sail into headwinds, how to fix anything that would go amiss on the boat. Hell, he was probably boning up on how to bail water efficiently. Which is to say, he was trying to learn sailing 101 and 102 and 103 and the post-grad course all at the same time.
He had to learn how to sail a three-float boat, and he had to do it under the most extreme conditions. And do it day in and day out for months. Alone. All so he could return a triumphant, prosperous, and adventurous man to his sweet wife and his four children, all of whom were less than ten years of age. ♪
All the while he worked on the boat, Crowhurst seemed to gain more belief in himself. He was even busy calculating how much time it would take for others to make the voyage. He gave the best yachtsman on the planet an estimate of 234 days. He put his own journey at something like 130 days. What the fuck, dude? Someone should have said that to him. They really should have, but no one did.
For their purpose, the London press kind of egged him on, referring to him as the mystery yachtsman. Because of course they did. Because could you imagine the headlines? Amateur sailor who'd never sailed before sinks to the bottom of the Atlantic! For his purposes, Crowhurst hired a press agent, one Rodney Hallworth, whose job it was to make Crowhurst's every move into copy for all of Britain to read and revel in.
But time was of the essence. The last day Crowhurst could launch was October 31st, per race rules. On September 23rd, his wife Claire dutifully tried to christen the boat for its first practice foray into the ocean. The champagne bottle refused to yield as she let it fly onto the hull. It would take others a few tries to smash the bottle against the boat to get it to break.
I'm no mariner, but isn't it bad luck or something if the champagne bottle doesn't break? I think this does not bode well for the boat. Now labeled the Tynmouth Electron, named for the small but willing seaside port that would help sponsor him. To get the boat from where it was to Tynmouth for the launch was a small trip that usually took three days. ♪
Crowhurst was at the hull but was not alone on that maiden voyage, bringing two other guys along for the trip, reports author Roberts. All spent most of the time trying to MacGyver the various problems that arose with the boat. Crowhurst burned his hand on the generator exhaust pipe somehow. He told no one about the burn and carried on in pain.
Vomiting on a boat, however, can't be so easily hidden. Crowhurst was violently seasick a good deal on that short journey. But did anyone stop him? No. Neither did anyone stop him when that trip that was supposed to take three days took two weeks. I don't know math, but I'm pretty sure that means it took him almost five times longer just to get to port than it should have.
Remember when he thought he'd be able to circumnavigate the globe in about half the time than seasoned, experienced sailors? Was any of this discouraging Crowhurst? Hard to say, but he did ask Claire if this was still a good idea. She would later say that she should have told him it wasn't. But she did not want to be the reason he had not achieved his dream. And so she said nothing to dissuade him.
For his part, shortly before the deadline was to arrive, Crowhurst told the BBC, I hope he meant about prepping for the trip and not, like, in his life. Considering raising four children is relatively important.
Speaking of the BBC, they had been following him, keeping the British audience abreast of all the news of his quixotic quest. At some point, though, BBC producers told the cameramen and reporter to stop what they were doing and help Crowhurst build his boat so the deadline could be met. But sure, there weren't too many things of importance left to do.
People who watched him closely through those days grew more concerned. They sensed panic and disorientation, exhaustion and more. He kept murmuring, it's no good, I'll say. According to Nick Tomalin and Ron Hall in their definitive book on Crowhurst, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst,
When Crowhurst and his wife went to bed the night before the launch, he told Claire that he, quote, was very disappointed in the boat. She's not right, and I'm not prepared. If I leave things in this hopeless state, will you go out of your mind with worry? End quote. Claire replied by asking him, quote, if you give up now, will you be unhappy for the rest of your life? End quote.
I mean, maybe. But you know who will be more unhappy if he dies in the process? His four children. Crowhurst cried all night. Was he trying to get his wife to stop him? Probably. But would he have stopped? That's unknowable. He was who he was. ♪
On the very last day he could launch and still make the deadline, he did so, with much ballyhoo from the Tynmouth locals. He left at 5 p.m., but soon enough, he had to be towed back to port for a malfunction with the sail. That fixed, he set sail again that same evening, headed south.
You know that story about the man in a flood praying for God to come save him? A small raft floats by and the man says, "No, no, God will save me." And a boat comes along and the man says, "No, no, God will save me." And a helicopter comes along and he says, "No, no, God will save me." And after he drowns, he goes to God and he's like, "What the hell, dude?" And God is like, "I sent you a raft, a boat, and a helicopter."
I feel like all the gods were trying to send Crowhurst all the messages to tell him not to do this. Claire and her small children watched until he disappeared over the horizon. She had faith her husband would make the best of it, alone on his boat with no experience. He was smart, resourceful, inventive, and this would make him the man he knew he was.
He had promised to keep an audio diary for the BBC, which had also handed him a video camera as well, so that he could occasionally record his daily life on board the Tynmouth Electron. This would make great TV someday. To say that things had not gone well from early on would clearly be an understatement at this point. But now, on the water, in the actual experience of the experience...
things continued to go not well. Hall and Tomlin, in The Strange Last Journey of Donald Crowhurst, do their best to document what happened on the Tynmouth Electron as best as they can reconstruct it.
In his official log, he kept his official notes, things like how many miles he was logging, wind speeds, etc. In his audio diary, he was a swashbuckling guy capable of daring do, jokingly complimenting his entire crew for their fine work. But by day 14, Crowhurst decided to keep a separate, shall we say, more honest log of what was happening.
In his little blue notebook, Crowhurst wrote just two weeks in, quote, My bloody boat is falling to pieces, end quote. He said he wasn't sure he could go on, that this whole business, quote, was a bloody awful decision, end quote. Donald Crowhurst confessed in his notebook he figured his chances of living through this ordeal were an even 50-50. ♪
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The nine yachtsmen racing out in the great blue beyond were kept abreast of each other's progress, radioing their positions as best they could surmise, giving coordinates and updates as they went, the better to keep newspaper readers on the edge of their seats. That is, when their radios were operational. ♪
It was in this way, on November 15th, that Crowhurst discovered that three men had dropped out very early due to mechanical issues, and it was now a race between six intrepid men. Great, but utterly useless to Crowhurst, who had arrived at the inescapable conclusion that to continue meant he would die out there. 50/50 had been too optimistic.
He made a nine-page list of all the shit that was mechanically fucked up on his boat. He pondered what to do. The only clear path was to go back, or, better yet, sail for the nearest land and hitch a ride back to England post-haste. But that was untenable. What's a fella to do when he is in way over his head and his very pride is on the line? Invent a new option.
Unless everyone else dropped out, Crowhurst's chances of making it around the globe on his falling apart dinghy were getting worse by the day.
Maybe he'd sail to America on a lark, just show up and laugh. Though how he thought he'd make it all the way to America, I don't know. Or maybe he thought he'd just stay out there in the Atlantic, out of view of the shipping lanes, breezily enjoying the southern hemisphere summer, while telling the folks back home he was cruising toward Australia. And, it seems, this is the option he chose. ♪
No one knows when, exactly, Crowhurst made the decision. Surely it had not occurred to him earlier, though one friend would report that they had joked about such an eventuality months earlier. But surely he meant to succeed legitimately. Maybe reason finally took hold. And he must have decided, if you're going to be on an imaginary voyage, might as well make it interesting. ♪
On December 10th, Crowhurst telegraphed his PR guy and reported he was hurtling east, making an average of 100 miles a day, thanks to very strong trade winds. He'd even had one day, he said, where he clocked 172 miles. The following day, he reported he was practically flying over the waves, having made 243 miles that day.
The newspapers ate it up. What an achievement, screamed one headline. It was a new record for a solo sailor. Ever since humans had stepped foot on a boat, the sea was something they imagined could not be tamed. But here was Crowhurst beating it at its own game, getting ahead of even birds that flew over it and fish that swam through it. All hail the mystery yachtsman, Small Fry Guy, showing the experts how it's done.
Sir Francis Chichester scoffed at the notion. He called bullshit, though he didn't say it quite that way. On December 10th, Crowhurst started a new third log that was necessary to keep track of where he actually was in the ocean. It was quite spare. The official log kept the pretend data, which took more than a few hours to calculate, but he had time as his boat was just drifting at this point.
Around Christmas, Crowhurst was able to speak via radio to his wife. His official log stated he was 550 miles ahead of where he actually was, though he did not reveal his position to Claire when she asked for it because she was being hounded by the press for detail. He said he had not had time to take readings. He gave no hint of his deception or his melancholy. He showed little sign that he was deteriorating mentally.
Make no mistake, he was deteriorating. Some of his telegraphic messages seemed nonsensical. Mermaid, read one. New Year Sherry Party, read another. Deepwater, the documentary made about his voyage, termed his missives, quote, raw and indecipherable, end quote. On January 19th, he put his position 4,000 miles ahead of where he actually was. He wrote poetry.
In early February, at sea now for 100 days, he sent a message that his radio was having trouble, and sure enough, the radio messages abruptly came to a halt. This is probably because the work of faking the official log was becoming taxing. It is also true that radio transmitters from station to station across the world could make easy work of triangulating his true position.
To do that work, he eavesdropped on all radio traffic coming from the other contestants, using their readings as a guide and their reported weather conditions as a way to craft his own in the log. The game, instead of getting easier, in some ways became harder.
He maintained radio silence. For seven weeks, his family, his publicist, and the nation waited to hear from Crowhurst, who, when last they heard from him, was chewing up the miles across the immense southern oceans. He wasn't. In the last weeks of February, he noted in his blue notebook that he was going to have to port soon to fix his boat if he was going to stay afloat, and he needed more food if he was going to stay alive.
I suppose he just had to hope that wherever he happened to make landfall, they wouldn't be able to report back to England. And he was in luck. On March 6, the outpost off Argentina he landed at had neither rail service nor telephones to connect it to the rest of the world.
It only had three men stationed there in shifts. An Argentinian coast guardsman named Santiago Francese came upon Crowhurst and thought the sailor was distraught and wasting away. Fed and re-fortified, he was taken to the ranch of another man, a French-speaking ex-military man who gave Crowhurst the materials he needed to fix his sails and floats.
He made no effort to notify his wife that he was alive and doing well. His plan, it seems, was to continue with the charade. On April 9th, Crowhurst telegraphed a message that was picked up in Buenos Aires. He would not give up his position despite their repeated queries to get that. PR guy Hallworth decided he was near southwest of Cape Horn.
Again, Chichester called bullshit. He even tried talking to race officials about it. But the public, thanks to newspaper enthusiasm about the weekend voters' achievements, did its best to back Crowhurst's version and gave no shrift whatsoever to Chichester's skeptical view.
On April 22, 1969, Robin Knox Johnson, who had previously been feared dead, rolled back home after 312 days at sea. He made an average of a relatively slow 92 nautical miles a day. The regatta of ships that sailed out to meet him was prodigious, as was his reception home, hailed as an achievement that rivaled Marco Polo's.
Knox Johnson was given the Golden Globe Award for getting back soonest, because he'd left the earliest. That left Crowhurst and a man named Tetley vying for doing it the fastest and in line for the 5,000-pound reward. Nigel Tetley thought he was being chased to the finish by Crowhurst. Tetley's trimaran was in bad shape, but he felt he had little choice but to push it as hard as it would go.
He was just 5,000 nautical miles from home and struggling. He barely slept as he urged his boat to eat up the ocean. Haworth informed Crowhurst that he was hot on Tetley's tail. But Crowhurst, by this point, was going in and out of reality. He was writing almost unintelligibly about time and space and the cosmic integral.
Crowhurst recorded a lot of pseudoscientific claptrap about, quote, the total extent of mankind from plus infinity to minus infinity is zero, end quote. He went on about God, sin, and Einstein. He wrote bawdy poetry that made little sense, but a lovely story about a lonely owl. Through all of this, he never gave up his secret.
No one, especially Tetley, had any way of knowing that Crowhurst had given up competing months earlier. Crowhurst, when lucid, kept telling his PR guy that he wasn't likely to beat Tetley home. In fact, he may have thought that this was the perfect ruse. That he'd make sure Tetley came in first and he'd be a runner-up, playing the quintessential good sport and gracious loser. No one would give a rat's ass about his trip's details.
It was a perfect way to end all of this. Then, with just 1,200 miles left on May 21, 1969, Tetley and his boat, the Victress, could not go another mile. She fell apart just as Tetley was able to get off a distress call and climb onto a rubber raft and pray someone had heard him. The next day, a tanker found him bobbing in the ocean, alive. It was all Crowhurst now.
Maybe he knew the scrutiny would be too much. His records and logbooks would be published, and people who knew these things would know he engaged in more than a bit of fantasy. He was almost out of food. His radio was kaput, though he got a telegram that detailed how excited the masses were about his homecoming and how detailed the plans were for his celebration to follow. It may not have mattered much by then.
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No purchase necessary. VGW Group. Void where prohibited by law. 18 plus. Terms and conditions apply. On June 23rd, Crowhurst made a tape for the BBC. His last. He also wrote for the last time in his logs. Quote...
He didn't finish the sentence.
A week later, he wrote about Einstein again. Quote, No real classification possible until last stage reached. I introduce the square root minus one because it leads directly to the dark tunnel of the space-time continuum. End quote. He suggested that to, quote, Love thy neighbor's ideas as thine own will lead us through the tunnel. End quote. LOL. Not my neighbor's. Not today, Bob.
He imagined he was God, and this was cosmic chess. He pondered retribution, vengeance, and his dead father. He said he had a complete set of answers facing mankind. He followed a few of these thoughts with as many as 18 exclamation marks. He wrote of being outside of his own body. He rambled incoherently. He bemoaned that God does not pardon the sin of concealment.
Newspapers were in such thrall that they included maps of the best place to see Crowhurst's boat return and where best to park. Hallworth figured there would be 100,000 people there. On July 1, 1969, Crowhurst wrote, quote,
10-14-30 My folly gone forward in imagination Wrong decision, not perfect Time no longer computed Had disorganized clocks The minutes ticked away
10-15-40. Clocks. Think no need worry about time, plus or minus, but only elapsed time. Plus or minus may be meaningless. Important reason for work is lost. Understand.
10-17-20, right, sorry, waste of time. 10-20-22, understand reasons for task of conflict, rule of game unsure, if. 10-23-30, attempt to put everything back, where is back, end quote. A bit later, he added, quote, it is finished, it is finished, it is the mercy, end quote.
Whether he was referring to the game or life itself is unclear. England thought he would show up any minute. The Brits waited while two weeks passed without another word. On July 10th, a mail boat found the trimaran floating aimlessly about. No one was aboard. The vessel's captain radioed the authorities in Britain. He confiscated the logbooks and began to read.
Claire hoped her husband had rowed off somewhere and would pop up. The hoax, such as it was, was still under wraps. The mail boat crew that had anxiously looked for life aboard the Tynmouth Electron landed in Santo Domingo, where it was met by PR guy Hallworth, who was told the truth about the duplicate logs. "Maybe it'd be best," the captain said, "if some of those papers were destroyed to save the family pain and embarrassment."
Robin Knox Johnson won the 5,000 pounds, canceled his celebrations in deference to the Crowhurst tragedy, and gave the prize money to Claire. Now that is magnanimity. Others also pitched in to help his little family survive. Those people included Sir Francis Chichester.
Donald Crowhurst had been at sea for 243 days. Judging from where the boat was found, it looks like he turned the boat into the Sargasso Sea where it foundered amid the shallows and seaweed there. His body was never found. Nigel Tetley was given a thousand pounds as, I'm guessing, some kind of we're sorry you got fucked prize?
With it, he built another trimaran, named it Miss Vicky, and decided he'd go do this whole Focaccia thing again. But 1,000 pounds wasn't enough to fully outfit the boat for the challenges he knew were out there. And so, his second attempt never came to pass.
Much later, when the imaginary log was analyzed, it was found that Crowhurst's mind-bending ability to conjure up distance traveled and weather conditions and various quirky issues that had been created out of thin air were, in fact, not unbelievable at all. He had done the mental work of the math and the seamanship expertly, even as his hold on reality seemed to have loosened its tether.
In other words, maybe he would have succeeded if he hadn't decided to go AWOL. Maybe. A draft of a letter that Donald had written to Claire in the event of his death was made public, with Claire's permission, by authors Hall and Tomlin. Quote,
End quote. He knew, and she probably did too.
Lying about his abilities and his chances had gotten him here, but it could not get him out. Next time on Strange and Unexplained, we're doing something a little different for the holiday week. An interview with Michelle Brock, past life regression coach and author of Who Do You Think You Are? An interactive journey through your past lives and into your best future.
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