A Challenge That Put Wind in His Sails

John Atkisson Took a Transatlantic Route to Post-Retirement Fulfillment

Atkisson and his sailboat Kestrel, which he guided to the British Isles and back. (By James A. Parcell For The Washington Post)

The first thing you need to understand about John Atkisson is that he doesn't think what he's done is any big deal.

It's a big deal to him, certainly. No one can sail a 32-foot sloop from Deale, Md., to the rockbound cliffs of Ireland and Scotland, weathering storms, tidal whirlpools and a mid-ocean collision, and then sail her down to Spain, Portugal and the Canary Islands, back across the Atlantic to the Caribbean and north toward home -- no one can do that without a pretty fair sense of accomplishment. Particularly at an age (he's 66) when most men won't even carry their own golf clubs.

But Atkisson, a burly, white-haired fellow who describes himself as a recovering lawyer, is well aware that others have made more impressive solo voyages. Joshua Slocum sailed alone around the world in the 1890s in a 37-foot yawl he'd virtually built himself. He was 54. The legendary Howard Blackburn in 1901 sailed a 25-foot sloop from Gloucester, Mass., to Portugal. He was only 41, but he had no fingers. He had frozen them off years earlier rowing a fishing dory 60 miles from the Grand Banks to Newfoundland through a snowstorm. Sir Francis Chichester was 66 in 1967 when he sailed his 54-foot ketch Gipsy Moth IV around the world in 228 days with just one stop. And he had terminal cancer.

So even with 12,000 offshore miles under his belt, Atkisson doesn't confuse himself with Columbus or Magellan. His white-hulled vessel Kestrel, a Bristol 32 built in 1974, simply became the "organizing principle" in his life when he retired from federal government attorneydom in 2005.

Explains Atkisson: "Wasn't it Pliny the Elder who said, 'If a man requires occupation, let him acquire a vessel'?"

These days, with satellite-based navigation, communication and weather forecasting, plus space-age composite hulls, sails and rigging, weekend sailors like Atkisson often circle the globe, though most do so on far larger and more modern boats. In fact, there's an entire industry built around the men and women who race huge, multi-million-dollar sailboats around the world single-handed. Some of them were at the massive United States Sailboat Show -- the world's largest for new sailboats -- in Annapolis this weekend.

Still, when he arrived in the Azores after being shaken like a BB in a beer can for nearly a month slamming into stormy headwinds during what was supposed to be a balmy Atlantic June, "we were in pretty special company," Atkisson admits. "The docks were filled with sailboats -- from 22 nations, by my count -- and every one had crossed an ocean to be there. There was only one other boat as small as Kestrel. Everybody congratulated us. That felt pretty good.

"I said, 'Hey, I really am living my dream. And at my age, my father had been dead for five years.' "

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The lure of an ocean voyage, Atkisson emphasized to a friend aboard Kestrel for the last day of his voyage, reaching north from Solomons Island, "is very definitely not'man against the elements.' That attitude can get you killed, because you're tiny out there and the sea can easily and casually erase you without a trace. I wanted to go with the elements. At every sunrise in the trade wind passage I silently and prayerfully asked the ocean for permission to be its guest that day."

And he must have felt, at least subconsciously, that mortality was a shipmate. He had wanted to sail alone on his first Atlantic crossing; his wife insisted he ship a younger friend as crew. That man, a retired policeman, had a minor heart attack amid the rough seas of the eastward passage and had to leave in the Azores. Atkisson continued alone to Ireland, where he fell in with "this wonderful little Irishman, just filled with joy," who jumped at an invitation to crew on Kestrel's return voyage. But before he could do so, he learned he had acute liver cancer. He died last December, as Atkisson sailed alone to Martinique.

Moreover, while still 100 miles from Ireland, Atkisson had been down below fixing breakfast when he heard "what every solo sailor most dreads -- the sound of diesel engines nearby." He leaped to the cockpit to see Kestrel heading straight for the port side of a 150-foot steel fishing trawler that was westbound on autopilot, with no one at the wheel. Kestrel's own autopilot, set to a compass course, was blindly guiding the sloop to disaster. Atkisson couldn't disengage it in time. He still hears the "loud clang of steel and the sickening sound of fiberglass being crushed."