The Middle-Aged Man and the Sea

At 40, I built a catamaran and sailed around the world alone. The storms were wild. The calm seas terrified me the most.

- HUGH HOWEY

THE SOUNDS OF A SHIP IN a storm can drive anyone mad. The wind screams through the rigging; the flapping edges of the sails boom like thunderclaps; the fiberglass hulls twist under stress, creaking and popping like joints in old age. A boat is as serene as a sleeping duck when she's in port, but in a maelstrom, she groans and growls as if every seam were coming undone. When I turned 40, I took a yearlong break from writing novels and built a catamaran on the southern tip of Africa, a boat that I would then take across the Atlantic and the Pacific to Fiji and beyond. It'd been my dream to sail around the world since I was young. Growing up in North Carolina, I learned to sail soon after I learned to walk, then lived on a boat while I was in college in Charleston. After my junior year, I dropped out to cruise around the Caribbean, eventually stumbling into a career as a yacht captain.

The writing was something I did in the middle, sandwiched between adventures at sea. But it was the writing that most people knew me for. I'd written a dozen novels, a few of which had done quite well. So when I sailed off from Cape Town in 2015, it seemed out of character to many. A midlife crisis, perhaps. An act of someone burned out from book tours and two or three novels a year. Those who knew me best knew the truth: I was leaving because I could finally afford to. Privately, I knew something else: I couldn't afford not to.

SAILORS INVARIABLY GET ASKED about the storms. No one ever asks, "Did you swim with whales out there?" Or "Is there any place still untouched by man?" They want to know about the waves. The big ones.