* Deep water [movie], solo, non stop around the world, the strange voyage of donald crowhurst:

- Robin Knox-Johnston, as the only finisher, was awarded both the Golden Globe trophy and the £5,000 prize for fastest time. He continued to sail and circumnavigated three more times. He was awarded a CBE in 1969 and was knighted in 1995. His book, A World of My Own, tells the story of his trip in typically down-to-earth, blunt style.

- Moitessier: was pure dynamic quality [Pirsig, Deming], no objectives, no gadgets; “That is why I go there. It isn’t for the cash nor for the glory – it’s for the love of life.”

- Crowhurst: was/became materialist, opportunist, deceptive-liar [the situation he created demanded that he fakes the records], unprepared, disconnected, ambitious, controlled/managed by objectives, focused on useless/untested gadgets and theories-models-dreams [gold plating / over-processing, deceitful self-confidence, absurd (an absurdity is a thing that is extremely unreasonable, so as to be foolish or not taken seriously, or the state of being so), over-processor (over-processing occurs any time more work is done on a piece than what is required by the customer. This also includes using tools that are more precise, complex, or expensive than absolutely required.]); crowhurst was a classic case of ‘dare and do on a shoe string’; [jf: he did not understand that the more complicated things are the more problems there will be, or ambition-circumstances forced him in this situation];

On a shoestring: with a very small amount of money. We lived on a shoestring for years before I got a good-paying job. John traveled to Florida on a shoestring.

- robin knox jonhston: I don’t have to scream and shout about it, it is inside;

- the paddles of sponsorship are enormous [donald kerr (a very nice guy) or ted hynds], see also ‘the greatest movie ever sold’, once you accept sponsorship you become their puppet, same principle applies to debts and banks.

- Bernard Moitessier: it is always about choosing-sacrificing one thing for another is it not ? like choosing between your own-life-adventure-freedom and a woman [family, obligations, career, comfort...]; anyone doing this for the money or for the glory will break his neck; the rules within me had changed; it is so simple but it cannot be explained in words; it is when you are on your own that you can discover who you really are; il faut écouter sa voie intérieur sinon c’est le troupeau; Et tout ça, je sais très bien que ce n'est pas un rêve, tout ce que les hommes ont fait de beau et de bien, ils l'ont construit avec leurs rêves... Mais là-bas, le Monstre a pris le relais des hommes, c'est lui qui rêve à notre place. Il veut nous faire croire que l'homme est le nombril du monde, qu'il a tous les droits, sous prétexte que l'homme a inventé la machine à vapeur et beaucoup d'autres machines, et qu'il ira un jour dans les étoiles s'il se dépêche quand même un peu avant la prochaine bombe. Mais il n'y a pas de souci à se faire là-dessus, le Monstre est bien d'accord pour qu'on se dépêche... il nous aide à nous dépêcher... le temps presse... on n'a presque plus le temps... Courez! courez!... ne vous arrêtez surtout pas pour penser, c'est moi le Monstre qui pense pour vous... courez vers le destin que je vous ai tracé... courez sans vous arrêter jusqu'au bout de la route où j'ai placé la Bombe ou l'abrutissement total de l'humanité... on est presque arrivés, courez les yeux fermés, c'est plus facile, criez tous ensemble : Justice - Patrie - Progrès - Intelligence - Dignité - Civilisation... Quoi ! tu ne cours pas, toi... tu te promènes sur ton bateau pour penser!... et tu oses protester dans ton magnétophone!... tu dis ce que tu as dans le cœur... Attends un peu, pauvre imbécile, je vais te faire descendre en flammes... les gars qui se fâchent tout haut c'est très dangereux pour moi, je dois leur fermer leurs gueules... s'il y en avait trop qui se fâchaient, je ne pourrais plus faire courir le bétail humain selon ma loi, les yeux et les oreilles bouchés par l'Orgueil, la Bêtise et la Lâcheté... Je suis pressé qu'ils arrivent, satisfaits et bêlants, là où je les mène...

-- Quand j'étais petit garçon, ma mère me racontait des contes de fées. Et une fois, un pêcheur très pauvre avait pris un gros poisson aux couleurs d'arc-en-ciel. Et le beau poisson l'avait supplié de lui laisser la vie. Alors le pêcheur lui a rendu sa vie, et le poisson magique lui a dit de faire un vœu chaque fois qu'il aurait besoin de quelque chose. Le pêcheur a demandé au poisson que sa chaumière ne fasse plus d'eau par le toit, et qu'il ait à manger un peu moins rarement, si c'était possible. Et quand il est rentré dans sa chaumière, elle avait un toit neuf, le couvert était mis, et la soupière était pleine de soupe de lentilles avec des croûtons dessus. Et le pauvre pêcheur n'avait jamais été aussi heureux en mangeant sa soupe de lentilles bien chaude avec les croûtons qui nageaient dessus, dans sa chaumière qui ne faisait plus d'eau par le toit. Et en plus le lit était fait, avec une paillasse bien sèche et une couverture toute neuve, épaisse comme ça. Mais le pêcheur a demandé d'autres choses ensuite, et encore d'autres choses, et toujours d'autres choses. Et plus il avait de choses, plus il en voulait. Pourtant, même quand il a eu un palais avec des tas de serviteurs et tout plein de carrosses dans la cour, il était beaucoup moins heureux que lorsqu'il mangeait sa soupe de lentilles avec les croûtons dessus, dans sa chaumière qui ne faisait pas d'eau par le toit, et qu'il s'endormait ensuite sur sa paillasse bien sèche dans les tout premiers temps de son amitié avec le poisson magique aux couleurs d'arc en- ciel. Alors il a demandé à être le Roi. Là, le poisson magique s'est fâché pour de vrai, il lui a retiré son amitié et rendu sa chaumière avec le toit qui faisait de l'eau et la paillasse humide et rien dans la soupière.

- Francoise Moitessier: Bernard disait toujours ‘celui qui fera ca pour l’argent ou pour la gloire, va se casser la figure’

- Ted Hynds [journalist], Donald Kerr [bbc reporter], Ron Winspear [Crowhurst’s closest friend, really nice guy]: reality was not as perfect as the idea; reality was starting to set in and it was not as imagined, that is why ideas are dangerous; sponsors, papers, Teighenmouth fleet street wanted this to work; every day he woke up to the same problems, he could not get peace, it was ruin or death, was there a third option [faking the voyage] ?; his messages were cryptic beyond belief; he was running out of options; the preparation was total chaos, he lost track of what was going on; Rodney Hallworth and the sponsors stood to make a lot of money if he succeeded and nothing to lose if he failed; he was playing the character; Donald was always positive superficially, but inside it was another story as revealed by the logbooks; he had a playful nature and he just started playing games; he made a mistake and had to face his fears, but he could not do that; when he stopped communicating he no longer had just the sea as an enemy but he also had himself as an enemy; he was not where he was supposed to be that was the trap he set for himself;

- Ron Winspear: when you are alone on the ocean it is no longer about the imagination, it is about the delicate mechanism of the mind, the sea-universe does not care about you; that first decision to fake the truth became a trap of its own; the crowd were mocking him, but when someone has risked and failed and fallen from the tight rope, someone has to pick them up and give them a burial, the best thing is for a friend to do that, in my mind, don just wanted to see a bright future for himself and for his family, in my mind I gave him a hero’s burial; ron was always positive on the surface but the logs revealed a different story; reality was not as perfect as the idea, that is why ideas are dangerous; game playing is over now and we are back to real life; he was living totally in his own mind and found refuge there; he invented a relationship between him and the universe;

- Simon Crowhurst: my father and mother were trying to protect each other, but that did not work; he turned the initial difficulties into something much worst but that is all he could do;

- Donald Crowhurst: time and money, decisions; man is avoiding his responsibilities by constantly looking at god for solutions; the sum total of men equals to nothing; the explanations of our troubles is that cosmic beings play chess with man; there is no good or evil, only truth; by learning to manipulate the space time continuum man will become gods and cease to exist in the physical world; I have become a second generation cosmic being; I was forced to admit that nature forces on cosmic being the only sin they are capable of, the sin of concealment, a minor sin for humans but a terrible sin for cosmic being; it is finished it is the mercy; it is the end of my game, the truth has been revealed and it will be done as my family requires, there is no reason for harmful; during his lifetime each human plays chess with god, the shameful trick he uses because the truth would hurt too much is that there is no good or evil only truth; the explanations of our troubles is that cosmic being are playing games with us;

- Clare Crowhurst: have you really considered what you are doing ? the children were oblivious to the danger which is just as well; it is like children if you squeeze them too tight they will do the exact opposite of what you want; he felt he had failed at everything and had nowhere to go; I did help him when he needed it; you cannot know at the time which road is the right one;

- he sailed over the horizon and effectively into oblivion; never let the facts get in the way of a good story, faking the race created tremendous pressure;

- Rodney Hallworth: [to Clare Crowhurst] donald did not sail around the world and he committed suicide.

- Chichester’s book ‘Gipsy Moth Circles the World’

- Robin Knox-Johnston, like his boat, was the best-balanced of all those who set out.

- Nobody could accuse the next yachtsman to declare his hand, Bernard Moitessier of France, of being ‘distressingly normal’. Amongst long-distance sailors he was already a legendary figure. He had sailed many thousands of miles in the Pacific and had in 1966 completed the (then) longest non-stop voyage by small sailing boat – 14,216 miles from Tahiti to Spain via Cape Horn, accompanied by his wife, Françoise. A sensitive and literate writer, he had written two classic books of the sea: ‘Un Vagabond des Mers du Sud’ and ‘Cap Horn à la Voile’.

- Like Crowhurst, Moitessier had a colonial background – he had been brought up in French Indo-China. But there all similarity ends. Moitessier, a strong, wiry man, is by temperament a true romantic with an almost mystical feeling for the sea. And the thing he hates above all on board a sailing boat is anything to do with electronics. Moitessier had formulated his plans for the voyage before the end of 1967; he spent January in Paris at the French Boat Show, making detailed preparation of his equipment; he then left for Toulon to begin several months of careful work fitting out his boat, Joshua, for the voyage. Joshua, five years old, with tens of thousands of miles behind it, had been built as tough and rugged as a trawler and, though bearing the scars of a hard life, it was still absolutely sound. She had a great welded steel hull painted red, two chunky masts of solid wood, and a primitive self-steering gear which may have lacked the sophistication of a Hasler, but looked infinitely less delicate. Joshua possessed, wrote Moitessier, the secret of all good boats: ‘Solid, simple, sure – and fast on all points of sailing.’*

- British electronics engineer Donald Crowhurst announced his intention to take part. Crowhurst was the manufacturer of a modestly successful radio navigation aid for sailors, who impressed many people with his apparent knowledge of sailing. With his electronics business failing, he saw a successful adventure, and the attendant publicity, as the solution to his financial troubles — essentially the mirror opposite of Moitessier, who saw publicity and financial rewards as inimical to his adventure.

- Unable to see a way out of his predicament, Donald plunged into abstract philosophy, attempting to find an escape in metaphysics, and on 24 June he started writing a long essay to express his ideas. Inspired (in a misguided way) by the work of Einstein, whose book Relativity: The Special and General Theory he had aboard, the theme of Crowhurst's writing was that a sufficiently intelligent mind can overcome the constraints of the real world. Over the following eight days, he wrote 25,000 words of increasingly tortured prose, drifting farther and farther from reality, as Teignmouth Electron continued sailing slowly north, largely untended. Finally, on 1 July, he concluded his writing with a garbled suicide note, and jumped overboard.

- Moitessier’s book, The Long Way, tells the story of his voyage as a spiritual journey as much as a sailing adventure and is still regarded as a classic of sailing literature.

- Admiralty book on recommended courses for steam and sailing boats known as Ocean Passages. This volume, the result of centuries of maritime experience, describes the most favourable courses to reach various destinations at different times of the year, and records the prevailing winds in any area.

- It was possible for Eric Hiscock, Sir Alec Rose, and even the more sophisticated Sir Francis Chichester to write of such salt-sprayed themes with a bluff directness that was entirely unselfconscious. For Donald Crowhurst, an intellectual with a penchant for role-playing, it was not (he was acting in bad faith).

- The problem for anyone trying to interpret Crowhurst’s voyage is to untangle this role-playing from genuine observation. Obviously, the two mingle frequently. But by close study one can distinguish the public tone of Crowhurst the Hero from the private tone of Donald Crowhurst the real, and suffering, man. It is the difference, for instance, between his posturing letters to Frank Carr or Stanley Best, and his posthumous letter to his wife Clare. He never absolutely ceased to pose (who does?), but the contrast is striking enough to be called the difference between sincerity and pretence. In the logbooks Donald Crowhurst is sometimes – as in the three ‘public’ passages we have quoted – writing as a Hero, and imitatively; at other times, usually when frankly depressed, he is much closer to his genuine self.

- When he was making tape recordings for the BBC, he was almost always playing a self-conscious and disingenuous role. His wife noticed this, and subsequently would always say how much she disliked the recordings. ‘They’re not the real Donald,’ she said. ‘They’re so trite.’ [trite: Overused; lacking originality or freshness]

- This was to become increasingly the pattern of the reporting of Crowhurst’s voyage. The combination of secretive (and, later, misleading) telegrams plus Hallworth’s optimistic interpretations in the end produced some ludicruous results.

- Moitessier, though he had no radio (he had resisted all attempts to provide him with one arguing that they were both irritating and dangerous because they distracted one from serious sailing), was known to have closed the gap on Knox-Johnston. He was, meanwhile, filling his logbook with gentle abuse against civilisation and thoroughly enjoying the Roaring Forties. His countryman, Fougeron, by contrast, had not at all enjoyed the Roaring Forties, which had knocked his boat over and wrecked most of its contents. He had decided that civilisation was not so bad after all and was heading gratefully for dry land.

- He called it the ‘Cosmic Integral’: which means that the summation of man from minus infinity to plus infinity is nothing – or, in general terms, that mankind, over the whole course of time, adds up to a blank.

- He [crowhurst] had theorised for himself an escape from his unresolvable predicament. Yet again he could abandon the old, unsuccessful challenge, and take on a new one on a higher plane. Just as he had abandoned the army for Cambridge, Mullards for Electron Utilisation, and Electron Utilisation for a heroic circumnavigation, now he could abandon the race, his boat, and the whole tragic mess of his failed and fraudulent voyage for a new existence, where no niggling reality of money, winds, leaking floats or forged logbooks could interfere with his triumphant achievement. He could become God.

- The Einstein Relativity, however, was much more to his taste. It is not a particularly mystical work, though Crowhurst, reading and re-reading it, made it so. It was written by Einstein himself to explain his theory, so far as was possible, to people ‘of a standard of education corresponding to that of a university matriculation examination’, and presumed no great mathematical expertise. Einstein may, it is true, have slightly over-estimated the intelligence required for matriculation, and did admit that it required ‘a fair amount of patience and force of will on the part of the reader’. From Crowhurst he certainly got it.

Crowhurst annotated the book in the margins, and wrote a critique in Logbook Two, aimed (apparently) at showing that the General Theory was not general. The book was, it should be remembered, one of his very few sources of intellectual stimulus on board Teignmouth Electron. He made it his gospel in the same kind of way that family Bibles were read before the coming of public libraries and cheap paperbacks. And just as an old-time fundamentalist might seize on particular biblical passages out of context, and derive meanings that were never intended, Crowhurst would read deep cosmic significance into snatches of Einstein’s text.

He was especially fascinated by one paragraph, in which Einstein said:

“That light requires the same time to traverse the path A to M as for the path B to M is in reality neither a supposition nor a hypothesis about the physical nature of light, but a stipulation which I can make of my own free will in order to arrive at a definition of simultaneity.”

Einstein was, in fact, saying nothing more than that he would choose, for the time being, to define the word ‘simultaneous’ in a particular way, so that everyone would know in precisely what sense he was using the word. But Crowhurst saw in Einstein’s phrase an almost god-like assertion. Here, he thought, was a superior being who could order the nature of the heavens of his own freewill! He turned down the corner of the page, and repeatedly referred back to it. In his essays, Crowhurst began to refer to Einstein as ‘the Master’. He saw the equation E=mc^2 as a cosmic revelation, equivalent to the Christian equation ‘God is love’.

In a later essay, Crowhurst described his conversion. He said that when he first read Einstein’s definition of simultaneity, he thought it was trickery: I said aloud with some irritation: ‘You can’t do THAT!’ I thought, ‘the swindler.’ Then I looked at a photograph of the author in later years. The essence of the man rebuked me. I re-read the passage and re-read it, trying to get to the mind of the man who wrote it. The mathematician in me could distinguish nothing new to mitigate the offending principles. But the poet in me could eventually read between the lines, and he read: ‘Nevertheless I have just done it, let us examine the consequences.’

It was a peculiarly religious approach to Einstein. Crowhurst may have rejected the biblical fundamentalism of his Jehovah’s Witness mother, but he still needed another gospel to put in its place. His elaborations around the Einstein book were to play an important part in his later delusions.

- The wording, through a series of rewrites, was shaped into yet another masterpiece of disingenuousness. It was full of inconsequential detail and half-truths, of which the only immediately checkable facts were careful distillations of the weather forecasts that Crowhurst had been patiently copying down in his Radio Log.