''I'd guess the seas were 15 to 18 feet, tops,'' he said. Leonard, however, dismisses much of Junger's account. In what he describes as 30-foot seas, Junger wrote that Satori was ''starting to lose the battle to stay afloat.'' In Junger's book, which is based largely on interviews with Stimson, the sailors survive through the initiative of the women, who are forced to take action when Leonard, ''sullen and silent, sneaking gulps off a whiskey bottle,'' refuses to do so. While that fact is indisputable, the events leading up to the rescue remain unclear there are two very different versions of Satori's fateful passage. Several days into the trip, after receiving a Mayday call relayed by a commercial vessel, a Coast Guard helicopter plucked Satori's crew from a roiled sea. In October 1991, accompanied by Karen Stimson and Susan Bylander, two women he had spent the summer working with, Leonard and Satori set out from New Hampshire bound for Bermuda.īy all accounts, the voyage was a nightmare. Divorced in 1985, he moved aboard Satori the same year. ![]() The boat was well equipped with designated storm sails, and Leonard had plenty of chance to use them in roughly 60,000 miles of sailing. She was very well named for me.''įrom 1974 to '91, Leonard sailed Satori hard and often, mostly alone. Whenever I got into a bad fix with her, she always did better than I thought she would. ''I was at the midpoint of my career, and the boat gave me new insight into myself. ''Satori is the Buddhist word for enlightenment,'' Leonard said. Leonard, 72, bought his Westsail in 1974, the same year the rugged little double-ended yacht was featured on the cover of Time as the perfect vessel for folks ready to chuck it all and head for the South Seas. That's a shame, because Junger, whose book focuses on the loss of the fishing vessel Andrea Gail and includes vivid writing about meteorology, long-line fishing and Coast Guard heroics, missed a grand opportunity to capture the passion of a long-distance sailor. But in a 1997 interview about Leonard in The New York Observer, Junger said, ''He didn't sound like the kind of guy I wanted to talk to.'' Junger, who did not speak to Leonard for his book, did not return a phone call seeking comment for this column. ''But as for hats, I just wear a ball cap at sea. ''I haven't seen the movie and I probably won't until I can borrow a copy of the video,'' Leonard said last week from the small home he is building for himself in western Vermont. In fact, Leonard is a retired research ecologist for the United States Forest Service, a former college administrator and an accomplished long-distance voyager with a Coast Guard license and tens of thousands of miles under his keel, and he does not fall within the neat, nasty boundaries of his depictions. ![]() With each subsequent retelling of his story, the lines that define who Leonard is and what happened during that terrible, perfect storm become more blurred. Portrayed by Junger as a strange introvert with a fondness for the bottle, Leonard has now been skewered both in print and by Hollywood. He's silly, smug and about to get walloped.Īs readers of the book know, the character is based on Ray Leonard, the skipper of Satori, a Westsail 32 that was abandoned by its crew in a North Atlantic gale during a United States Coast Guard rescue operation in the fall of 1991. About midway through ''The Perfect Storm,'' the film adaptation of Sebastian Junger's phenomenal best-seller, the skipper of the 32-foot sailboat Mistral, sporting a jaunty yachtsman's cap and a highbrow New England accent, makes an offhand remark about his vast offshore prowess.
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