Postscript – On RKJ Day

I'm always struck by the tone of reverence English writers have for Robin Knox-Johnston. I think the rest of us may understand and respect what he accomplished, but can't quite feel what he means to his countrymen. We all know of the famous race and of how Sir Robin came to be the only finisher - you almost can't be a sailor today and not know the story. But I grew up far from the sea, more than an ocean away from him, in an urban culture that took little note of his victory. On April 22, 1969, my hometown newspaper was far too absorbed in the new baseball season to much care about the idle adventures of some English yachtsman. For those of us who sail, though, there is a very real connection with RKJ. Few of us will ever circumnavigate. Fewer still will do it alone, or in the Southern Ocean, or all the way around without stopping. And none of us will ever again be the first to try. But we all know what it feels like to attempt something scary we've never done before. Learning to sail is a series of terrifying 'firsts' for everyone. The first time on your own at the helm. The first dinghy capsize. The first time we back out of the slip in a boat big enough to do serious damage. The first time we take the family out and realize the trust they've placed in us. The first passage - even if only from one side of the bay to the other. We agonize over all that could possibly go wrong, and still we know there are things we must be forgetting - there are monsters out there we can never know. It's in our moments of personal terror that we begin to realize just what Sir Robin accomplished - how much more terrible his monsters must have been than ours, and the courage it took to confront them - with a whole nation watching. For if they didn't care much in Philadelphia or Peoria, in England they were watching. In 1969, the sun was setting with humiliating regularity on what was left of the empire. The world's greatest sea power was no longer. It had been too many years since Spitfires circled low over Duxford, or that shrewd orator vowed to fight on the seas and on the oceans and to never surrender. The space race was being fought in an ocean unpatrolled by English ships. It was the perfect moment for a confident young sailor on a 32-foot boat to do something at sea that no one had ever managed before - alone, with no teams of scientists or technicians to guide him home - an English sailor who would be damned if a Frenchman would get there first. On April 22nd, anyone who's ever held a tiller in his hand will regret, if just a little, not being English.