Sea of Dreams Racing Alone Around the World in a Small Boat

IN THE COCKPIT of his boat, Derek Hatfield stood silhouetted in the moonlight of a June night in 2002 on Lake Ontario, his reddish-brown mop of hair and thick policeman's moustache bristling in profile. He had tucked both hands into the waist of his yellow foul-weather pants to ward off the chill, and plumes of steam rose into the air as he spoke. The air temperature was around freezing. After the warmest winter on record, the upper Great Lakes basin had seen the coldest, wettest spring ever recorded. This had delayed by a month or more the seasonal warming of one of the world's largest bodies of inland water. Hatfield's forty-foot racing sailboat, Spirit of Canada, was sliding down the middle of the lake, the lights of a power plant near Rochester, N.Y., visible to the south and those of the Pickering nuclear plant, east of Toronto, off the stern quarter. Hatfield was talking in measured tones about the epic journey that lay ahead of him. He stood with his legs planted wide, a man of forty-nine, of average height and compact build. Even with the bulky fleece he wore he seemed lean and spare, all sinew and muscle with not an extra ounce of weight. He leaned over and flicked on the autopilot. It whirred and clicked to life, freeing Hatfield to leave the cockpit and walk in sure-footed steps along the length of the fastest, strongest racing sailboat ever built in Canada. She had been assembled by many loving hands, including his own, to withstand the most dangerous natural forces on the planet. Yet she was so supple and swift that she would soon be breaking speed records. Hatfield touched and tested the rigging as he went, lingering over a turnbuckle here, tugging at a line there, stopping momentarily to listen to the hiss and gurgle of water rushing along the hull. "Am I afraid?" he asked, startled by the question. "Afraid? I'm looking forward to it. I'm concerned about not being able to finish, but that's not fear. You wouldn't do this if you were afraid. You couldn't." ***** Many people mess around in boats, but few sail alone and fewer still sail single-handed around the world, which Hatfield was about to do. The paradox is that he dislikes being alone even though he has always liked solitary achievement. At school in Newcastle, New Brunswick, Hatfield eschewed the team play of hockey and football for the individual challenge of track and field and badminton. He savours personal victory and is unafraid of the consequences of defeat. He came to sailing relatively late, as a married man in his mid-twenties and it took two and a half decades of ever-bigger steps to get to this starry night. He used his day jobs as a fraud-squad Mountie and later on Bay Street to support his growing sailing habit. First, Hatfield crewed aboard a neighbour's twenty-two-footer from Whitby, Ontario, about twenty-five miles east down the lake from Toronto. His experience was not much different from other novice sailors: the crew bench on Wednesday nights, learning about wind and weather, how a boat moves and why, and the arcane language of luffs and leeches and cleats and clews. He built his own seventeen-footer after reading a few books. A case of "footitis" led to a twenty-five-foot racer/cruiser. A few years later and a few more feet and along came Gizmo, a sleek needle-nosed racing machine in which he crossed the Atlantic Ocean and almost lost his life. Hatfield is not sure where his love of water came from. His father, Arthur, a retired forester, never sailed, though he built small boats and lovingly helped his son construct Spirit of Canada. Hatfield finds it hard to discuss such emotional things, keeping a cordon sanitaire firmly around his feelings. He is friendly and always polite, but so self-contained and emotionally underMayers, Adam is the author of 'Sea of Dreams Racing Alone Around the World in a Small Boat', published 2006 under ISBN 9780771057540 and ISBN 0771057547.