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I had been in correspondence with Eric Le Rouge, one of France's leading multihull designers, for some months. Eric had told me that he could probably find sponsors for me to build a trimaran for the Star voyage - but it would take a year or two. Now a year or two at twenty or thirty or forty years of age is a fairly short time, but when you are approaching sixty years of age, it is a very long time indeed - it is perhaps a quarter of your remaining lifetime. Nevertheless, if no other solution to my problem of finding a suitable craft turned up - and I had a strange feeling, as I flew across America yet again, that synchronistic destiny was at work, bringing unknown strands together into the weft and warp of a certain design. . . .
She was at anchor off a golf clubhouse. She was low, and fast-looking, and of the right sort of line; there was an indefinable air of longing about her and when my eyes fell upon her, all the other yachts around her dissolved into a blur. As I drew near her in a borrowed dinghy, she seemed to me to be imbued with the spirit of a song, a carefree, never- ending rhythm that was part of the rhythm of the sea, perhaps of the universe itself. She was, as I stepped, stumbled and clawed my one-legged way up her stern, an engine, pure and unadorned. A sailing engine and a hard nut if I ever saw one. My whole being was overcome by the feeling: This one's for me. On board, it was no longer "I" but "we."
I sensed her lines, their round practicality, and I knew that she was "just right." Even though she was bare of all gadgets like winches or guardrails, I could see them all in place, as she could be - as she would be.
She was not a makeshift craft, as most of the multihulls I had looked at had seemed to be. A makeshift craft will not do for any kind of serious voyaging. Skippers and crews are influenced above all by the temperament of the vessel they sail, and they adjust themselves to her living spirit. That a yacht can be but a machinelike convenience for sailing to distant lands is an illusion. She must be more. She must live, and she must be made to live. She must have the character, the turn of temperament, the high spirit, to dwell in salt water - with the flow of the wave, with something of the wind captured in her very bones. Perhaps all things touching the elements so completely must have this conforming character, this flame, in order to exist. The sea can make or break the spirit of any venture by making or breaking the spirit of the craft and, in turn, that of the crew.
The craft herself must also be an adventurer in the real sense - a living spirit. And the spirit is vital, not vague, in a good voyaging craft, emanating directly from the integral spirit of her designer; a symbol revealing his science and, more important, his art; and even before these, his ideas, loyalties, faiths. There was nothing mystical here for me, as I looked her over in San Diego, merely a hint that she was approved by my heart as well as my head, and that she had been designed by someone who went beyond the feel of ships, someone who was striving to find Truth in his creation; someone who was not only a scientist, and surely someone who was not a layman, for never have such sweet lines in a vessel been designed by a layman, and never yet has a happy amateur-designed vessel sailed the seas. The name on her side was Osprey, but to me she was already Outward Leg, and a symbol of far greater things than design only. . . . And someone wanted to meet me and discuss fitting her out for the Star voyage.
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