Into the Atlantic: The Artist Who Sailed Inside His Own Artwork
On 9 July 1975 a thirty-three-year-old Dutch artist cast off from Chatham, on Cape Cod, in a boat twelve and a half feet long. The vessel was a modified Guppy 13 pocket cruiser, a fibreglass daysailer of the kind normally kept on a trailer and used on a lake. He had named her Ocean Wave. His destination was Falmouth, in England, roughly three thousand miles across the North Atlantic, and he expected the passage to take somewhere between two and three months. He was not attempting a stunt for a sponsor. The voyage was the middle section of an artwork called In Search of the Miraculous.
His name was Bastiaan Johan Christiaan Ader, known as Bas Jan Ader. Radio contact broke off about three weeks out. He never reached England, and no trace of him has ever been found.
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