On November 30, 2015, Victor Mooney completed a 5,000-mile transatlantic row from an island off the coast of Africa to the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. On that day, Mooney joined a growing list of adventurers who have made long-range, solo trips in small craft.
In fact, solo voyages were so popular in the 1960s that Yachting‘s February 1966 issue highlighted several adventurers who either were making or had recently completed long-distance passages. The article was called “The Single-Handed Mania.” One noteworthy voyager was 16-year-old Robin Lee Graham, who sailed from California to Hawaii with just his cat for company.
John Riding made an east-west transatlantic crossing in a 12-footer. Riding’s only means of calculating his position? A $6 watch and an Air Almanac that expired halfway through his trip. “Immediately you are at sea, all fear is gone,” Riding said at the time. “You accept the situation you have put yourself in to such an extent that if the vessel sank underneath you, you’d go down not with fear, but with a curse.”
They are loners who prefer to be on their own and don’t want to cause trouble for others; this seems to be a definite part of the psychology. – “The single-handed mania,” Yachting, February 1966
