It would be hard to find a better, or more experienced, seaman than Dag Pike, a salty Brit with a great sense of humor but who’s all business when he’s behind the wheel of a sailboat, a powerboat or a RIB. Pike first went to sea in 1950 as an apprentice in the Merchant Navy when he was a teenager. In the years since he’s made more trans-Atlantic record attempts, power and sail, than anyone else (six, if anyone’s counting); he’s won the Offshore World Championship once and the Round Britain Powerboat Race twice, the last time when he was 75. Pike also claims “extensive practical experience in rescue operations, having been rescued at sea 12 times and having rescued others 13 times.”
The first time I met Pike was at least 30 years ago when he wrote about one of those rescues in the Atlantic that almost was fatal. The cargo ship that was trying to rescue him sucked his sinking sailboat toward its prop – 28-feet in diameter – and sliced off its bow. In James Bond fashion, Pike was able to jump onto a lifeline dropped from the ship at the last second and pull himself up to safety.
Between all his boating activities, Pike has written 50 books about navigation and seamanship, the latest, Taming the Atlantic, is just out. It’s a history of people who have crossed the Atlantic for trade, war, racing or emigration, with more than a dash of his own experiences.
Not long after he wrote about that cargo ship rescue, Pike was in New York for his first attempt at a trans-Atlantic powerboat record on Virgin Atlantic Challenger, a twin-hulled 65-foot race boat with two 2,000-hp engines sponsored by Richard Branson, who was chairman of Virgin Records at the time. (While they were still dialing in the boat, I was able to drive it on Long Island Sound; it was a monster.) That effort did not end well, however, since the boat hit something and sank 138 miles short of its goal, the Bishop Rock Lighthouse at the tip of Britain. Pike, Branson, Chay Blyth, the adventurer who once rowed across the Atlantic, and rest of crew were rescued from their life raft by a passing British banana boat. Next year they came back with Virgin Atlantic Challenger 2 and set the record.
Today, Pike’s professional CV goes on for seven pages, single-spaced. During his career, Pike has become known as one of the best navigators in the world, as well as an expert on fast powerboats. Pike also was a captain in the Lightvessel Service and an inspector of lifeboats for the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. He’s still testing boats, and recently wrote the Fast Boat Seamanship Manual for the U.S. Coast Guard. Pike lives in Bristol, UK, and spends time as an expert witness in manslaughter at sea trials, which he says is a fast-growing area.
Here’s the opening of book number 50, Taming the Atlantic:
“The wind was screeching through the rigging, the note rising higher and higher as the storm grew in strength. Out to windward, the white-crested waves were advancing in relentless fashion, rising to the height of the top of the funnel. The wind was going off the scale in the fierce gusts causing the ship to heel under the hammer blows of the wind. It was a typical day on the Atlantic in the winter…” The book is available on Amazon in the UK and Barnes & Noble.
