OCEAN SPEED: A True-life Journey to Rescue and Revelation

Captain Bob Krieg’s teenage years were fi lled with adventures on the family sportfi shing boat off the Jersey shore and then a twin-engine cabin cruiser on the Chesapeake Bay. He earned a BS degree at the University of Delaware after serving as a corpsman with the Fleet Marine Force in Vietnam and as an instructor at a navy training center. Employment with General Motors required frequent transfers to where he could sail his nineteen-foot Flying Scot. He sailed it on the Great Lakes, Inland lakes, and to islands off the California coast. Accumulating sailing competence, he traded the Flying Scot for a thirty-foot Hunter sloop. In Michigan, he competed in Detroit Regional Yacht-racing Association regattas to repeated sail club boat of the year honors. He participated in the Port Huron to Mackinac Island Challenge and other Great Lakes Singlehanded Society events. His appetite for ocean adventures led him to discover a seasoned forty-eight-foot Amel Maramu ketch. Retired from GM, he delivered the ketch through the Erie Canal and down the Intracoastal waterway to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. There he earned an International Yacht Training Worldwide Yachtmaster Offshore certifi cate achieving his desire for maritime professionalism. With that knowledge, he obtained a
USCG Master Mariner license with sail and tow endorsements and American Sailing Association certifications to instruct sailing, skipper charters, and deliver yachts. Before departing on his global quest after the loss of his wife to cancer, he made extensive upgrades to the ketch to ensure reliable singlehanded operation under
adverse ocean conditions. His memoir speaks to ocean cruising preparation, learnings from professional maritime training, daily life under sail, singlehanded ocean sailing, immigration entry and departure requirements, maritime duty, societies different from his homeland, and failed sailing romances.