"Today the sky is bright and sunny. The sea is gentle. Green fields cap the cliffs."

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Who is he?

Callahan ought to know. Little more than a year ago he began an 1,800-mile, two-and-a-half-month oceanic ordeal as harrowing as the one Wins-low Homer envisioned. On the night of Feb. 4, 1982, two days before his 30th birthday, Steven Patrick Callahan was cruising alone in mid-Atlantic aboard his 21-foot-4-inch sloop Napoleon Solo. He had built the boat by hand the previous summer and entered it in the 1982 Mini Transat, a single-handed sailing race from Penzance, England to La Coruña, Spain, then on across the Atlantic to Antigua in the West Indies. Callahan had been forced out of the race in Spain when Solo (named for the Robert Vaughn character in The Man From U.N.C.L.E.) developed a crack in her bow. Now, after repairs, he was sailing the Atlantic for the first time alone. "I was working on a novel while Solo sailed herself," he recalls, "writing stories and letters, scribbling pictures of sea serpents in bow ties, pigging out on fried potatoes and onions, just plain enjoying it all."

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