Читать книгу Little Ship of Fools. Sixteen Rowers, One Improbable Boat, Seven Tumultuous Weeks on the Atlantic онлайн

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Almost immediately, Steve, who with Roy’s departure was back in the fold, broadened his influence on the voyage. My own hope was that he would assume the captaincy, which would have been his for the taking. But he didn’t want it. He was an experienced Great Lakes sailor but did not feel confident in his navigational skills on the Atlantic. I think he believed too that the captain of an ocean rowboat should have made the crossing at least once as a crewman. However, he did set about bringing new people to the expedition, as did Nigel—an effort that would eventually put seven Canadians, a modest plurality, aboard an essentially American boat.

For the moment there were twelve of us. David wanted sixteen. Steve’s foremost acquisition, as it turned out, was not a Canadian but a Californian whose route to Big Blue was more circuitous, unlikely, and coincidence-ridden than the plotting of a Victorian novel. It began perhaps three months after Roy’s resignation, when a Thunder Bay skier and endurance cyclist named Frank Pollari, a friend of mine who is legally blind, had an inkling he might like to join our little band. He began to train. However, before he committed to the voyage he wanted to test himself on the ocean, in particular to see if an old vulnerability to seasickness still existed. Through Google, he located a veteran female rower in Long Beach, went out to see her, went rowing, and spent much of his time aboard with his head over the rail, puking into the Cali-fornia surf. And came home. And more or less forgot about ocean rowing.