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

The biennial Around Alone yacht race is the most thrilling adventure in the world for the sailors passionate enough to undertake it. It’s a two-class solo race that starts and ends in Newark, New Jersey, with stops in England, South Africa, New Zealand, and Brazil, and it is as tough in its way as the non-stop race, the Vendée Globe. In 2002, thirteen sailors competed, some of them professional sailors, well funded by corporate sponsors, and some of them adventurers who sacrificed almost everything to enter the race. Among the adventurers wasDerek Hatfield, a former fraud-squad Mountie, whose forty-foot Spirit of Canada had cost him almost everything he had.

The race takes sailors through the wild storms of the Bay of Biscay, the frustrating and infamous Doldrums, the angry Southern Ocean, and the treacherous seas off Cape Horn, the southern tip of South America. All of them dangerous waters that stretched the sailors’ abilities to the limit – and beyond. Hatfield’s Spirit of Canada became the plucky Little Boat That Could when it lost its mast in rounding Cape Horn.

In this nail-biting account of the race, Adam Mayers brings to life the joys and the agonies of racing alone – and the dreams that drive these men and women to sail around the world solo.

A journalist with the Toronto Star, Adam Mayers is a senior editor of the newspaper’s Web site and was responsible for comprehensive coverage of the race. He is the author of three books.