Documentaries

Deep Water (Directors: Louise Osmond and Jerry Rothwell): I’m not sure how I man­aged to miss this one until now. Ten years ago, the teacher respons­ible for any HTML know­ledge I might pos­sess shared a quirky and incred­ible story with our class. Donald Crowhurst was an inex­per­i­enced sailor from England who in 1968 entered, at the last minute, a race to sail around the world alone. Despite his lack of pre­par­a­tion and inex­per­i­ence, his reg­ular reports seemed to have him leading the race. And then sud­denly his reports stopped. Some time later, his boat was found drifting in the North Atlantic, com­pletely off course and on the other side of the world from his last reported pos­i­tion. Crowhurst wasn’t on board, but invest­ig­ators dis­covered that he’d been keeping two sets of log­books and trying to deceive the race organ­izers into thinking he was win­ning. As his true and reported courses diverged, Crowhurst seemed to lose his sanity and his last entries are heart­breaking in their con­fu­sion. At the time I heard the story, the only book written on the sub­ject, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, was long out of print, but I was able to find a copy a few years later through eBay. Happily, the book is now back in print along with another book called A Voyage for Madmen that covers the rest of the race par­ti­cipants in more depth. To make a long story short, the aspiring doc­u­mentary film­maker in me always thought this would be an amazing film, and I even toyed with the idea of trying to buy the rights. It seems someone has beaten me to the punch. And that’s a very good thing.

This is an incred­ible story and I abso­lutely cannot wait to see this film. It opened the­at­ric­ally in Britain last December and is now in lim­ited release in the US but there is no planned the­at­rical release in Canada at this point. Pity.

UPDATE (December 31, 2007): Alliance Atlantis will be releasing the film on DVD in Canada on January 8th. Here’s my review of the DVD:

After my dis­ap­point­ment at the film’s lack of a the­at­rical release in Canada, my ela­tion at the DVD release could only have been expected. This unbe­liev­able story needs to be known by more people, and I’m glad to report that Osmond and Rothwell’s film does a great job of telling it. Not only that, but for those with no back­ground at all about the Crowhurst story, it builds the sus­pense care­fully and doesn’t reveal the mys­tery right away. If you’ve read this far in my review, you’ll know that I’ve already spoiled that mys­tery by telling you all about it above, but you will want to see this film to try to under­stand what drove this decent and mild-mannered man over the edge to mad­ness and suicide.

There is ample back­ground material on the Sunday Times Golden Globe Round the World Race, a com­pet­i­tion to become the first person to sail around the world alone and without stop­ping. This was some­thing like the first reality tele­vi­sion show, albeit broad­cast in the pages of a news­paper, and it attracted an enormous amount of atten­tion. In the end, nine men entered the race, and most had had much more sailing exper­i­ence than Donald Crowhurst, who was a late entry and con­sidered some­thing of a dark horse. Of course, the media played up that angle and when it emerged that Crowhurst was set­ting sail in an innov­ative self-designed tri­maran, the journ­al­ists por­trayed him as some­thing of a genius. In reality, he was the strug­gling pro­pri­etor of a busi­ness that sold nav­ig­a­tional instru­ments for boats, and his real ambi­tion was to pull him­self out of some dire fin­an­cial dif­fi­culties. In his des­per­a­tion to get funding to build his boat, he signed a restrictive con­tract that would punish his early with­drawal from the race by making him liable for the costs. As the dead­line to set sail approached, the boat was nowhere near ready to sail, but he found him­self pres­sured into launching anyway. A short test journey didn’t augur well, though. At the cere­mo­nial launch, the cham­pagne bottle didn’t break when crashed against the hull (a bad omen) and the journey took two weeks instead of the expected three days, thus eating fur­ther into his scarce pre­par­a­tion time. In addi­tion to mech­an­ical prob­lems with the boat, Crowhurst was also woe­fully inex­per­i­enced as a sailor, some­thing he was keen to hide from his sponsor and the press.

The race offered two prizes. The Golden Globe trophy for the first boat to arrive back in England, and a £5,000 cash prize for the fastest time. These were sep­arate things because the race rules allowed the sailors to leave any­time between the begin­ning of June and the end of October. Needless to say, Crowhurst was the last to launch, on October 31, 1968, and due to the boat’s unfin­ished con­di­tion, he quickly ran into trouble. After only a few weeks, he knew that the boat wouldn’t with­stand the wild seas in the Southern Ocean. But because of the pre­carious fin­an­cial situ­ation he was in, he real­ized that drop­ping out would ruin him, even though con­tinuing might kill him. It is with this dilemma in mind that he for­mu­lated what he thought was a way out. He began sending back reports in which he claimed to have covered much greater dis­tances than he had in actu­ality. The problem became worse when his actual and reported pos­i­tions grew fur­ther and fur­ther apart. In the end, he kept two sep­arate log­books and cre­ated a fic­tional voyage in which he was gaining on his com­pet­itors. His plan was simply to sail around the south Atlantic and wait for the rest of the field to actu­ally cir­cum­nav­igate and sail north from Cape Horn. By the time the other boats had caught up to his actual pos­i­tion, he hoped to join them again and slip in around fourth or fifth place, where no ques­tions would be asked. He might not win the fame or for­tune he was after, but he could save face.

Unfortunately for him, the race had claimed many of the other boats, and after Robin Knox-Johnston had claimed the first home prize on April 22, 1969, and his nearest com­pet­itor, Frenchman Bernard Moitessier had aban­doned the finish line and decided to keep sailing, it looked like Donald Crowhurst might be in line to win the fastest time award. When the boat of Nigel Tetley, the only boat ahead of him, sank on May 21st, Crowhurst knew that if he fin­ished the race at all, he would be wel­comed as a hero and sub­jected to media scru­tiny. In his men­tally unbal­anced state, he left the boat sailing very slowly north, writing increas­ingly unhinged reports in his log­books. The last entry is from July 1st and is for all intents and pur­poses a sui­cide note. The boat was found drifting with no one on board on July 10th, and Crowhurst’s decep­tion was quickly dis­covered and jumped on by the press. Knox-Johnston had received both prizes as the only sailor to com­plete the race, and he donated the cash to Crowhurst’s family.

The film­makers were for­tu­nate for sev­eral reasons. Because the race was such a media circus, lots of archival film and audio record­ings exist, including film and audio Crowhurst made him­self during the voyage. As well, most of the race par­ti­cipants (or their family mem­bers) con­trib­uted inter­views, including Crowhurst’s widow Clare and sev­eral of his chil­dren. Perhaps the most moving of all the inter­views was with his best friend Ron Winspear, who even now is quick to jump to his friend’s defence. After praising his courage for even attempting some­thing so dan­gerous, he tear­fully recalls, “In my mind, I gave him a hero’s burial.” Though the inex­per­i­enced Crowhurst seemed at the begin­ning to be very dif­ferent from the rest of the sailors, by the end, we see that he pos­sessed the same ambi­tion, the same courage, and per­haps most heart­break­ingly, the same determ­in­a­tion not to give up.

I was reminded sev­eral times of another recent doc­u­mentary about brave and single-minded men, a film about the Apollo astro­nauts called In The Shadow of the Moon (review). One of the journ­al­ists inter­viewed actu­ally does com­pare the sailors to the astro­nauts, con­sid­ering that they were news­worthy at the same period in time. Our relent­less hunger for heroes, how­ever, does lead to some cas­u­al­ties, and that in itself makes the film a must-see.

I have only one tiny cri­ti­cism of the film, and that is that the titles/subtitles are in a font that is far too small and dif­fi­cult to read. Since quite a bit of inform­a­tion is con­veyed this way, it detracted just a bit from the experience.

The DVD includes some won­derful spe­cial fea­tures, including extra footage telling the stories of some of the other race com­pet­itors, as well as fuller inter­views with Crowhurst’s family and the journ­al­ists who covered the race itself. As well, there is an inter­active fea­ture allowing the viewer to explore the cabin of Crowhurst’s boat, the Teignmouth Electron.

Buy Deep Water from Amazon.ca

Buy Deep Water from Amazon.com

Trailer
Official Site

(9/10)

Tagged as: Documentaries, DVD, sailing

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