A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols

Rating: 4 of 5

What drives a man to sail a boat around the world single handed nonstop through some of the most difficult conditions on planet earth? Peter Nichol’s book answers this question and I think the answer is not pretty.

A Voyage for Madmen covers the 1968 Sunday Time Golden Globe Race. Although there were nine offical entrants into the race the book largely focuses on:

• John Ridgeway
• Chay Blyth
• Robin Knox-Johnston
• Bernard Moitessier
• Bill King
• Nigel Tetley
• Donald Crowhurst

I felt that Alex Carozzo and Loick Fougeron received scant coverage. Which is fine.

Its somewhat amazing to me that these men set out on this trip. With scant weather information, limited communication tools and in sometimes badly engineered boats. Its fairly surprising that none of the died due to ship failure.

Voyage does an excellent job profiling each madman and their sailboat. I really did feel like I got a sense for each man’s personality and what their journey was like. I liked reading what Robin Knox-Johnston ate and how Chay Blyth didn’t know how to sail and launched on a inadequate day sailor to traverse the globe. True insanity.

This was truly the “golden age” of modern sailing. The boats were accessible to the masses as fiberglass fabrication made the boats affordable but the technology will still pre-modern. The sailors navigating by sextant. Not knowing what the weather and waves were going to be and they were truly “alone”. These day’s technology blankets planet and the latest in weather is just a starlink uplink away. While I do think this technology makes life “better” I also think we’ve lost something with all this connectivity. The challenge of sail boating the world is no longer the same.

Anyway I recommend voyage to anyone who enjoys books of this sort. Its well written and entertaining.