The full treatment is in "lead, Follow or get Out of the Way" oF 1981, the Ted Turner biography, long out of print. A summary is in "Philosophy of Sailing."
I am contending again with Fastnet memories for the new book called "The Long Voyage Home," an "autobiography in 20 sailboats" due out in December. Memory revises itself, but for the Fastnet crew it's safe to say the race remains for all of us a delicate balance of real and unreal, and of pushing harder and harder the worse it got because probably everybody else was slipping into survival mode, or safety mode, or exhausted mode. We were all at the height of our personal powers and recognized the storm as a blood test and opportunity we might never have again to show our stuff. Turner was a romantic lead who at any time might spread his arms and cry out to ask "Now who will stand on either side and hold this bridge with me,' from the many verses of Macaulay's "Horatius" he had memorized. He was a charming reckless unfiltered loudmouth but unlike the entire elected government today was honor bound as a Greek or Roman, demanding but not cruel, determined to save the planet not destroy it for his own vulgar aggrandizement, and in war would've given Patton and Montgomery a run for their money in risking it all for glory, and be much less of an asshole than either of them. Turner was a flame for moths, his attention span was short and around him there was always the smell of somebody being immolated by overreach. In the end, his financial empire was undermined by his own failure of cynicism and his Rhett Butler-like cornball determination to do the right thing. The bottom-line money guys eventually outsmarted him, merged him and finally sidelined him, and that was long before the current crop of jackass no-soul lying oligarchs arose from the gates of hell to destroy America. Ted is irrelevant now, his example antique and forgotten, and it's a kindness of fate that illness prevents him from seeing the evidence all around us. He thought money was a means to an end, and not bitcoin the end in itself.
