At dawn, wind from the south. Huge swells, and very choppy seas. Laborious route to the northeast. Heading directly toward Vancouver — or Anchorage. If this keeps up, I’ll wind up in Alaska. Hellishly hard. Soaking wet from head to foot. I stop rowing, totally depressed. I hurt all over. Progress report: ten lousy knots. Morale at its lowest ebb.

Contrary to what some people may think, there is nothing masochistic about a crossing such as mine. Masochism consists of inflicting pain on oneself in order to derive pleasure from it. In my own case, I do concoct difficult situations but only in order to derive pleasure afterward, once the victory has been won. It is true that the more perils there are, the greater the satisfaction at having overcome them. I will have climbed a tall mountain, and earned my own esteem. But pain for pain’s sake has never held any attraction for me whatsoever.

We all have the desire — overt or covert — to accomplish some very difficult task, something that will instill pride in ourselves. Anyone who thinks that a suicidal tendency is an element of the picture is totally wrong. If I had ever had the slightest tendency in that direction, I would have been dead long ago. It’s not as though there were lack of opportunities. It is, rather, the opposite tendency at work here, namely the insatiable will to survive. In the course of this crossing, my survival instinct was ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times, stronger than it is in the course of a so-called normal life, because I want with all my heart and soul to reach my goal.

I have not been conditioned or programmed by any techniques of auto-suggestion. I have programmed myself, focused ever since the project began on a single objective:

get there, reach my goal.

I also add an element of pugnaciousness. Not aggressiveness, which I think is the wrong word. But pugnaciousness, which I think is what it’s all about. A combative spirit. Without it, I don’t think there’s a prayer in hell you could ever see it through to the bitter end.

There were times, for example, when for no reason at all I would be thinking of a friend whom I hadn’t seen in years, and when I talked to Christopher I was not at all surprised to hear him say that that very person had just called the office. The most astonishing aspect of the phenomenon was that it struck me as perfectly commonplace and normal.

In any case, this morning I had the distinct feeling that today would be marked by an encounter. Not only did I have an intuition that I was going to make contact with a ship, but I knew that it would be a very specific contact. I was so sure, in fact, that when a freighter hoved into view on the horizon, I already had my camera, my video, and my VHF radio right next to me, and the French flag was flying from the radio antenna!

It was the Russian freighter Pskov, out of Vladivostok, headed for Vancouver. Against all odds, but precisely as I had intuited, the ship reversed engines and came to a complete halt, to allow me to pull alongside.

"What are you doing here?" the captain asked.

"I’m going to the United States."

"So are we. Come on board."

Convinced that I was dying to join them, they unfurled a rope ladder down the side. They were completely taken aback when I politely declined. They assumed I had just arrived from outer space.

The crew took pictures. When they arrived in Vancouver, they were surprised to be greeted by a reception committee: Christopher, whom I alerted in Paris via radio, had arranged to have the ship met, so that the photos could be couriered back to France, where they appeared the following week on the cover of a weekly news magazine.

It was a serious blow. More serious than I wanted to admit. Now I could no longer prevent the southerly storms from pushing me inexorably northward. Without my sea anchor, my chances of putting in to San Francisco were virtually nil.

That was a disappointment but nothing compared to the realization that, to the north, the American coast was very inhospitable and the seas, at this time of year, extremely rough.

My appetite was steadily decreasing. I was eating only one meal a day. My growing lassitude regarding the dehydrated food was augmented by not being able to keep myself from conjuring up images of juicy steaks and bright green salads. I had the feeling I had lost a fair amount of weight, but with my many layers of clothing I couldn’t swear to it. My guess was that I had lost somewhere between fifteen and twenty pounds, which was about what I’d lost during my Atlantic crossing.

If the definition of an alcoholic is somebody who imbibes excessive quantities of alcohol, then I’m not an alcoholic. But I was nonetheless beginning to ask myself the question. Directly behind my number one desire — or, more properly, obsession — to make landfall in America, was my craving for a good glass of wine in a real glass; or a gin and tonic, a Scotch, a martini. But above all I craved the glass of good wine. And if in fact I was a closet alcoholic, and I set off on this adventure without weighing fully all the consequences of that possibility (I had only one five-liter jug of wine left, which I did not dare open), then all these weeks of forced abstinence should have served as an almost certain cure. But abstinence had the opposite effect. The longer I remained on the wagon, the more I dreamed about drinking. From that I concluded I was incurable. To make matters worse, my memories seized on various occasions when I had drunk this or that memorable wine, and I relived those glorious moments in living color. No alcoholic memory escaped the widening net of my memories. Ah yes, that cool bottle of beer we savored in the British port of Falmouth — the only beer in the house, but did it taste good! And what about that divine bottle of Bordeaux that the former owner of the Lady Maud had given us, that English millionaire we just happened to meet when we put into port at Bënodet in December of 1972. Oh, and that suspect bottle of Burgundy we drank in Beaune that day in 1981. And that whisky, that delicious whisky and soda we had on the deck of Lady Maud in the bay of Bantry twenty years ago.

Then on to the Place de l’Ecole Militaire in Paris where, on the terrace of a bistro, we savored a wonderful dark beer.

I seemed to remember virtually every drink of note I’d ever had, and quite a few of little note. Not only the drinks themselves but the shape of the glasses, the color of the liquid, the reflections of glass and bottle on the table, the atmosphere of each and every setting, and, of course, the taste, the exquisite taste. My memory went so far as to transport me back to my earliest discoveries in this area back to the family house in Kërantré, where as a wayward child I used to sneak sips of Cointreau and Benedictine, alone and in hiding from prying eyes but surrounded by the disapproving stares of the family ancestors who gazed down at me severely from their appointed places on the library walls. Foremost among them, the General seemed to disapprove most heartily.

In the morning, as I was talking to Christopher on the phone, I realized that at this point we were not only geographically worlds apart but worlds apart in our thinking. The subject under discussion was plane reservations, and

for him it was a matter of utmost importance. He wanted to make sure he booked tickets for all those who wanted to be in the States when I arrived. Arrived? The thought still seemed so far off to me. Christopher was living in "Parisian time" while my time was slowness and perseverance. To pin things down, he wanted to know exactly when and where I planned to land. I blew my stack, not realizing that to secure thirty or forty plane tickets for a single flight was not a given, or at least could not be accomplished overnight. But what could I tell him? I now knew that the chances of making landfall in San Francisco were slight, as I also knew that the final stage of my journey would be difficult and painful.

Now I was doing everything in my power to keep Sector headed for San Francisco, because that was the place I had picked to land, whereas the real goal of the voyage had been simply to make landfall somewhere in North America. At this point I was 500 miles from Vancouver Island and a good 800 from San Francisco. It would be ridiculous on my part to keep focusing on a secondary objective — San Francisco — that was increasingly inaccessible, especially since I had lost the larger of my two anchors. The problem was, I was approaching a rugged coast, one of the most dangerous in the world, where ports are few and far between. To make matters worse, these ports are generally protected by barrier reefs that are impossible to cross in bad weather. The central issue was to bring Sector ashore safely — and me with it — rather than organizing some wonderful ceremony.

Everything I thought or did was merely a pretense for figuring out where I was in relation to my arrival. I had seventeen cigarettes left; I would smoke one a day, hoping that I would have enough to last me till I landed. I took out a tank of bottled gas, telling myself that it was certain to be the last, or next to last. Well, maybe two more. The one thing I refused to do was count the strokes of my oars; that would have been sheer torture.

Memories, memories... In September 1980, on the train that was bringing a friend to the Brittany port of Brest as part of the welcoming committee to celebrate the triumphant conclusion of my Atlantic crossing, the friend turned to a journalist sitting next to him and said, "From what I just heard on the radio, apparently Gerard’s hands have doubled in size.

The next day newspaper headlines blared: HIS HANDS ARE TWICE THEIR SIZE! As soon as I landed, everyone rushed to see what my hands looked like. Their comments were varied, but this one made me chuckle for a long time afterward:

"God, his hands must have really been tiny when he started!"

It took them a long time to realize that my hands were just like anyone else’s. But the initial impression is always what counts. A decade later, scarcely a week went by without somebody stopping me to say:

"I still remember those hands of yours, poor fellow, when you pulled in at Brest. They were twice their normal size!"

At Choshi, before I departed, a Japanese journalist insisted on taking a photograph of my hands. What he should have photographed were my buttocks. That’s the part of my anatomy that suffered most during the crossing.

Last night, an abrupt return to reality: Sector capsized twice. It hadn’t happened to me for three weeks.
The first time it was as if I were being given a gentle reminder. It was the least threatening capsize since I’d set out. A three-hundred-and-sixty degree revolution in the space of a few seconds. I was fast asleep when it happened. When I woke up I wasn’t even sure the boat had actually capsized until I checked and found a number of objects not in their usual place. In other words, it was a real sweetheart as capsizes go. And yet, two hours later I was out in the cockpit battening down the oars, not wearing my safety harness, although the winds were high, and if the same thing had happened then — that is, if the boat had turned over and righted itself immediately — it would have sailed away leaving me in its wake. Fault me for not buckling up, but after going through a full somersault, you tend to think that lightning won’t strike again right away.

I rowed under a bright moon tonight, and it was comforting to think that I might be able to enjoy the moon’s company till the end of my trip. Very heavy westerly swells, waves up to twenty-five feet, though not unpleasant, since they were not breaking. But my nerves were still raw, and for all intents and purposes I could no longer sleep..,

I informed Christopher that I was aiming for the Columbia River and landfall somewhere between November 21 and 23.
Somehow frightening to have reached a fixed time and place of arrival, with no hard knowledge of the weather conditions. Final straight line. Frightening, too, to think that even this close to land anything might still happen, especially if there are squalls close to shore.