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

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At this point, I had not actually seen the already storied rowboat that had occupied my thoughts and dreams day after day for so many months. And I had developed a deep hankering to do so. And was not disappointed. As we spilled out of the van that had transported us from JFK, the boat sat dramatically before us in the lights of the boatyard, spidery and futuristic in its new coat of paint. For half an hour or more, we circled it in a kind of trance, patting and rubbing at it, tummying up to it, peering into its recesses, fiddling with its hatches and seats, unable to get the smiles off our faces. The $10,000 I had put in, which at the time had struck me as a chunk, seemed suddenly small, while the boat, or at least its aura, expanded like Topsy in our midst.

Structurally, Big Blue is a study in simplicity: two narrow hulls, each nearly forty feet long, joined by aluminum beams so they sit twenty feet apart. Each hull has four rowing positions, while the joining beams support a tidy little spaceship of a cabin.