Rebel With a Cause : Presumed Loss at Sea of Single-Handed Sailor Brings Forth Memories of a Man Who Spent Most of His Life Running Before the Wind

Frank Clifford was first cousin to Mike Plant, America’s most renowned single-handed sailor, and grew up with him in Minnesota. Plant was reported missing on a recent trip to compete in the Vende Globe Challenge around-the-world race.

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They called him “Top Gun” in France, where competitive single-handed sailing is immensely popular.

He came by the nickname because of his prowess in the southern oceans, with their boat-eating waves and towering icebergs. In the wild waters between Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope, Mike Plant set the pace. When he lost his edge, it was in the doldrums--in “the slop” as he called it.

He disappeared on a routine sail from New York to France. His empty boat was found floating upside down.

At his memorial service, Mark Schrader, a friend and fellow single-hander, talked about Mike’s place in global solo-sailing.

“There are two kinds of sailors in ‘round-the-world races: those who are content just to finish the race, and those--like Mike--who sail to win,” Schrader said.

When Mike’s boat was found Nov. 22, the mast was broken and the 8,000-pound keel that had held the boat upright was missing. A partially inflated life raft was still on board. All signs pointed to a catastrophe that has yet to be explained.

But for many of us who knew him, the mystery surrounding Mike Plant did not begin with his disappearance in the North Atlantic last month.

Asked to explain his love of solitude, high adventure and the sea, his mother was at a loss.

“I’m not where his adventurer’s blood came from,” she said. “Ancestral genes I guess.”

He grew up on the shores of Lake Minnetonka, in a bedroom community 12 miles west of Minneapolis. The town stresses athletic and academic competition. Mike played hockey in the winter and sailed in the summer. He also chafed and rebelled and, by his own admission, wasted a lot of time spinning his wheels. Not long ago, he told a friend he didn’t grow up until he was pushing 40. He would have been 42 in November.

Although it is inspiring to have a relative like him, it is also more than a little dismaying when you compare your life--as you inevitably do--with his. Gathered to pay our respects recently, a group of us--brothers, cousins, in-laws--mulled over lives insulated by air bags and insurance policies. We wondered what it took to break free, knowing all the while it’s not a choice.

Mike’s boat, Coyote, was aptly named. Coyotes prowl the margins of civilization and taunt us with eerie cries. When house dogs hear them, they fret, whine and occasionally send up a howl of protest against captivity. Then, slowly, they lie down again, giving themselves up to fretful dreams of coyote life.

That’s what a fellow like Mike Plant can do to you.

But there were also times when no one would have yearned to trade places with him.

Several years ago, I joined his brothers and sisters in an effort to win his release from a Portuguese jail. After sailing across the Atlantic in preparation for his first around-the-world race, Mike had been arrested on a 12-year-old Interpol warrant charging him with transporting drugs. It dated to a time when he had been a charter boat operator in Greece.

Two of his passengers turned out to be drug dealers and named him as an accomplice after they were arrested by Greek authorities. Mike had insisted he was innocent, but chose to flee the country rather than stand trial. (Sometime later, his accusers recanted, saying they had implicated Mike in hopes of easing their sentences.)

After Mike’s arrest, his family sought the help of a retired statesman who had close ties with top officials in Greece. The man agreed to intercede if the family would furnish him with a letter attesting to Mike’s character.

I was asked to help draft the letter.

Mike’s life was not easily summarized. There were large pieces of it I knew nothing about. He was a college dropout and something of a nomad, once walking across South America, using a child’s coloring-book map as his only guide. He had worked as an Outward Bound instructor, a carpenter and a charter boat captain.

He had been in a few scrapes along the way. I didn’t think he was a felon. But I was having a hard time fitting his life into what I thought the letter was supposed to be--the literary equivalent of a Brooks Brothers suit.

“Maybe, it would be enough to say that Mike is a character,” someone joked.

We didn’t get anywhere until Mike’s younger brother called to ask where the letter was. He had no patience with our qualms.

Who did we think we were writing about, Captain Kidd? Mike was family. He was in trouble, and he needed our help. As for character, this was a guy who had just sailed across the Atlantic in a small boat, who was preparing to circumnavigate the globe alone. Didn’t that say something about his mettle?

The letter was written. Mike was released. And nine months later, the red hull of his 50-foot sloop flashed onto the horizon off Newport, R.I. He had finished ahead of all the boats in his class--those less than 60 feet long--to win the first round of his first world race.

But the experience had been much more than a boat race, and the celebration of Mike’s victory was bittersweet. He had twice averted disaster, first after his boat capsized in 50-foot seas in the Indian Ocean, then again days later when he came on deck just in time to steer clear of a huge iceberg that his radar had failed to detect.

And halfway around the world, tragedy struck his friend and closest competitor, Jacques de Roux, who was apparently washed overboard as he struggled to sail a storm-damaged boat. An accomplished single-hander who had survived worse, the quiet, disciplined de Roux had been something of a role model for Mike. His death brought home a humbling truth about the vulnerability of even the very best ocean sailors.

Among us landlubbers, there wasn’t much more talk about Mike’s character after that first race. Mike had become an even larger enigma--but now he was an unassailable one.

At his memorial service, however, the character issue came up again. An old family friend said that Mike’s brief six-year career as a long-distance sailor had transformed a combative, quixotic kid into a patient, compassionate human being--and an effective self-promoter. For those of us who had known him as a taciturn teen-ager, it was amusing to watch Mike try to master the chicken-dinner circuit, as he sought to raise the hundreds of thousands of dollars necessary to build and outfit a competitive yacht.

Someone also spoke of his integrity, recounting the time Mike resisted any temptation to cheat after a piece of broken rigging forced him ashore on a remote island. By touching land, he had disqualified himself from a nonstop global race. Still, he could have fixed the rigging and sailed on, no one the wiser. Instead, he radioed his position and declared his disqualification. Then, he fixed his boat, resumed sailing as an unofficial participant and set an American speed record, 134 days, for a solo global sailor.

These were comforting words to those of us who want to believe that heroic adventure is not all derring-do, that a “top gun” must also possess some of those solid virtues that lesser mortals hope to have etched on our tombstones.

Mike’s younger sister brought the eulogies back on track. Of everyone in the family, she might have known him best. She had been living in Greece when Mike was chartering his boat. She knew that the boy and the man were not altogether different people, that the sailor who found peace of mind in his 40s was the same feral kid who had lit out for the South American jungle 20 years earlier.

“Mike burned his way through life,” she told 500-plus people who showed up at the memorial service.

The service was held on a snowy night in a venerable old club on the shores of the lake where Mike learned to sail. By and large, the people who came were fellow sailors, friends and associates of his family. A TV camera crew showed up. So did a U.S. senator.

But among the coats and ties, one group stood out. With long beards and well-worn, homespun-looking clothes, they seemed spectral, like throwbacks to that ancestral generation Mike’s mother referred to when she talked about his genes.

They were buddies Mike ran with in another time, in one of those undocumented periods of his life when he disappeared into one wilderness or another. With their beards and heavy woolens, these fellows looked as though they had just emerged from a snow cave in the north woods somewhere.

And as the crowd left, climbing into cars pre-warmed by valet parkers, you half expected those old boys to lope out across a frozen bay, howling for Coyote and her skipper.