Word: crowhurst
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...STRANGE LAST VOYAGE OF DONALD CROWHURST by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall. 317 pages. Stein...
...last drizzly day of October 1968, 36-year-old Donald Crowhurst set sail out of Teignmouth, England, the tail-end starter in a single-handed nonstop sailboat race around the world. Eight months later, newspapers reported Crowhurst on the last leg of his voyage making excellent speed and sure to finish with the fastest time. Then came word that a freighter had discovered Crowhurst's yacht, ghosting along under its mizzen but still seaworthy, mysteriously abandoned in mid-Atlantic...
...When Crowhurst's logbooks were examined, the story became stranger still. Though his radio messages had him circling the globe, Crowhurst's daily log entries revealed that he had never left the Atlantic. The logs, moreover, contained almost unintelligible passages-25,000 words in all-and documented an eerie religious revelation experienced by Crowhurst in the closing weeks of his voyage. There was also what appeared to be a three-page suicide note...
...most intriguing aspect of the voyage was discovered last week by Sir Francis Chichester, the celebrated circumnavigator, who was a judge in the race. Examining Crowhurst's logs, he found that the yachtsman had sailed 14,500 miles but never left the Atlantic. He had invented his positions in countless short-wave radio broadcasts to indicate that he was traveling around the world. Moreover, Crowhurst began a new logbook on Dec. 12, and about that time he began sending false radio messages. It appears that he intended to fill the old log with fake entries and throw...
Ironically, Crowhurst's despondency over his apparent failure was less justified than he thought. Unknown to him, eight of the nine other competitors in the race had dropped out before Crowhurst vanished-all of them because of the same kind of mishaps and small illnesses that he himself suffered...