DVD Thoughts: Deep Water

[krpalmer]

A little while ago, I borrowed a book from a coworker with the intriguing title A Voyage for Madmen, by Peter Nichols. It happened to be about a race developing in the late 1960s to try and sail around the world single-handed without putting into port along the way (after Franchis Chichester managed to sail around the world alone with one stop on the way and was knighted for doing it), and despite some of the nautical terminology going over the head of this landlubber and passenger I found it very compelling reading. After finishing the book, I started looking into the race a little more, and discovered there'd been a documentary made a few years ago about it, focusing on Donald Crowhurst, an inexperienced English weekend sailor with a small, struggling naval electronics company and very possibly the most unusual story of the varied competitors. I decided to get the DVD in advance of any books of my own, and once I'd watched Deep Water I wondered about writing a post about it... the only problem with that being not wanting to give too much away. While I had in fact already known the outlines of Crowhurst's story from Lawrence David Kusche's The Bermuda Triangle Mystery--Solved (an excellent skeptical book on that particular subject), some of the other details of the race were interesting enough to discover from Nichols's book that I find myself being somewhat vague about my additional comments.

The documentary features interviews with Crowhurst's wife, one of his four children, and some of his friends and acquaintances, and as such seems sympathetic towards him. At one point I had to shake off the feeling one competitor was being accused of having had the bad grace to sink and precipitate a final crisis. Still, the documentary was well-done and made good use of what little onboard footage Crowhurst filmed with the movie camera he'd been given.