Sailing Magazine : The Beauty of Sail

Sailor and journalist Dodge Morgan, whose record-breaking round-the-world voyage made international headlines in 1986, died September 14 at a Boston hospital. He was 78.

Morgan was the first American to complete a solo, non-stop, around-the-world voyage, which started and ended in Bermuda. His time: 150 days, 1 hour and 6 minutes. The accomplishment bettered the previous record of 292 days set by Englishman Chay Blyth.

Morgan made the trip aboard the 60-foot American Promise, custom built in Marblehead, Massachusetts, by yacht designer Ted Hood. In the mid-1980s, Morgan was a familiar face on the Marblehead waterfront. He spent six months “camping out” at Hood’s Little Harbor Boat Yard while the high-tech yacht was under construction.

The $1.5-million cutter-rigged American Promise was the last boat built by Hood in Marblehead before the company moved its facilities to Portsmouth, Rhode Island.

When Morgan passed St. David’s Light and crossed the finish line in Bermuda on April 11, 1986, he wore the same tuxedo and red suspenders that had added color to his start. His wife, Manny, from whom he would later divorce, was there to greet him with son Hoyt and daughter Kimberly. After 150 days at sea, Morgan wanted two food items: a hamburger and a bag of popcorn. Both were waiting at the dock.

Later that day he shared with this writer by phone the highs and lows of his ordeal. Of the Southern Atlantic, he said, “I wouldn’t recommend going there to anyone. It’s like a long, slate-gray tunnel. The sea is dark gray, darker than the sky. There’s virtually no sun. Limited visibility. It’s a world without light.”

Did he ever consider turning back? “There were times when I sure as the devil wished I were somewhere else. But I never considered stopping” he said.

To pass the time, Morgan read books and set up milestones of minutes, hours and occasionally days in his mind. As he explained it, “If I thought any farther ahead than that, say a whole week, I wouldn’t be able to reach it. I had to take things in small increments; one at a time.”

Morgan said the boat was stocked with music cassettes but he didn’t listen to it. “I found that if I listened to music, it saddened me rather than picked up my spirits. Music has too much human emotion in it, and that’s the one thing I didn’t want to think about. People. I came here to get away from all that and I had to keep my thoughts on the job at hand,” he said.

Morgan was born in Malden, Massachusetts, and attended the Governor Dummer Academy in nearby Byfield. His father, a pharmacist, died when he was 3, and his mother remarried. Threatened with flunking out of college, Morgan enlisted in the U.S. Air Force as a teenager and learned to fly fighter planes. Upon discharge, he attended Boston University, earned a journalism degree and moved to Alaska where he found a newspaper job. He also dabbled in public relations and lobbying work, saving money to buy a boat and sail—a goal he soon realized.

Controlonics, a high-tech company in Weston, Massachusetts, that Morgan founded with three employees in a garage, steadily grew to employ more than 300. It was sold in 1985 as part of a $32-million stock deal. The sale allowed Morgan to fulfill his dream of solo sailing around the world. In 1985, he cast off. At the time, he was living in Portland, Maine. Only six weeks before embarking on his historic voyage, he bought the Maine Times, an alternative weekly newspaper. Morgan later purchased the Casco Bay Weekly. He published and edited the influential Maine Times until 1997.

During that period, Morgan wrote a book about his solo sailing experience, The Voyage of American Promise, and a movie was later released called “Around Alone.”  The film contained footage captured by the six automated cameras aboard, three on deck and three below.

In 1991, Morgan was inducted into the Single-Handed Sailors’ Hall of Fame. That was the same year American Promise, which Morgan had donated to the U.S. Naval Academy as a training vessel, sank to the bottom of Chesapeake Bay after the midshipmen collided with a coal barge and tug.  The boat was later salvaged and sold to the Rozalia Project, an environmental group that removes marine debris from the ocean.

A savvy businessman, Morgan used the proceeds of his ventures to buy Snow Island off Harpswell, Maine, in 1998, where he built a small cottage. In his later years, he was often seen cruising aboard his schooner Eagle, when not sailing to the West Indies on his sloop Wings of Time. By then, a French sailor had bettered Morgan’s round-the-world record by 41 days, his story of  “American Promised” continued to inspire sailors worldwide.

Morgan once remarked that it takes three things to sail around the world alone: a good boat, an iron will and luck. --David Liscio