“Underwater in the Southern Ocean”
This was more than thirty years ago, so I’ll tell it the way it lives in me, the edges blurred a little, the feeling not at all.
I sailed with Jim once, a long way from anywhere.
It was the 1993–94 Whitbread Round the World Race, on a boat called Tokio, and we were deep in the Southern Ocean, some of the wildest, loneliest water there is, where the swells build for thousands of miles with no land to break them and the wind doesn’t blow so much as bear down on you, day after day after day. It was blowing thirty to forty knots. The seas ran twenty feet and higher. The water that came aboard was a hair above freezing, and it came aboard constantly. The boat shuddered and groaned and felt, more than once, like it was right at the edge of coming apart.
That was the ocean we were in when the mainsail got to be too much for the wind.
We had to put in a reef, pulling the sail down smaller before it tore itself, or the rig, to pieces. But something fouled in the reef lines, and the only way to fix it was for someone to climb out along the boom, all the way to the end, out over open water, with the boat bucking and plunging beneath him.
Jim said he’d go.
We clipped him onto a halyard and out he went. The boat was charging, surfing down the face of one sea at full speed until the bow drove straight into the back of the wave ahead. Each time it did, the ocean came over everything: a wall of near-freezing water sweeping the length of the deck, the boom buried beneath it and Jim buried with it. We were moving so fast, and there was so much water, that he stopped looking like a man out there and started looking like something the sea was playing with, a ragdoll, a flag snapping on a pole. One second he’d be under it, the next flung on top of it; one second gripping the boom, the next just flailing on the end of his line with the water tearing past beneath him. There was a moment, every single time, where you couldn’t be sure he’d still be there when it cleared. Then the bow would lift, the boat would climb the next wave, and he’d come back up into the air, soaked through, half-frozen, hanging on, working the line with his bare hands as though the whole murderous ocean were a minor inconvenience.
He cleared it, climbed back in, and, knowing Jim, probably made a joke about it.
It wasn’t the only time. The Southern Ocean handed us moment after moment like that, where something had to be done in an impossible place, up the mast, out on the boom, somewhere on the ragged edge of the boat where the sea was waiting. Most people, however experienced, would think hard before going. Jim was the one who raised his hand. He saw what needed doing, decided it might as well be him, and went, without much thought for himself.
I can still feel exactly what it was to watch him out there, the fear, and right alongside the fear, something close to wonder. I’ve sailed with a lot of brave people. Jim has never been the one to hang back.
That’s Jim. That’s always been Jim.
Code Zero: Another Unique Idea and Perspective
It was a long time ago, and I won’t swear to every detail, but the shape of it is true, and the feeling truer.
I’ve sailed with a lot of clever people. Jim is one of them, quick, creative, a little relentless, the kind of person who can hold an entire problem in his head and turn it over and over until it gives up its secret. Some of us joked he had a photographic memory; I never saw much to argue otherwise.
On Tokio, everyone owned a piece of the boat. We were a competitive bunch, fiercely so, even with each other, and each of us answered for our own corner of it. I had the food and the medical kit. Other guys had the rigging, the boatbuilding. Jim had the sails.
He read the class rulebook the way other people read a thriller, hunting for the angle, the inch nobody else had spotted. The rules were strict about sails. A downwind sail was only allowed if it counted as a spinnaker, and it only counted as a spinnaker if it was full enough through the middle, a set percentage of its width down low. So Jim drew a sail cut almost flat, the shape you want for reaching, for speed at a tight angle to the wind, fast exactly where the rules were meant to slow you down, and yet it still measured, on paper, as a spinnaker. It was one thing on the certificate and another thing entirely out on the water. The other boats were playing the game. Jim had found a game inside the game.
But a clever idea on paper was only ever half of it. Jim was a real sailmaker, and he spent hour after hour in the loft chasing the other half, the right shape, the right construction, material after material, until the sail on the floor finally matched the sail in his head. Some of his ideas looked downright goofy at first, like they’d never work. He didn’t care. He just kept at them until they did.
And we kept it a secret. We built it and tested it in private, sailing it hundreds of miles offshore for months before the race, far from any eyes that might report back. When we finally turned up in Cowes just before the start, the other crews pieced it together fast, that we had something, a real innovation, and they were not happy about it. They went to the race committee to get the Code Zeros banned.
We won that protest. The sail was legal, and the committee couldn’t say otherwise. So they simply changed the rule instead, rewriting it to outlaw the Code Zeros altogether. When you can’t beat an idea on its merits, you make it against the rules.
Jim’s answer to that was perfect. He ran the big masthead Code Zero up the rig right there at the dock, in plain sight, a cheeky last salute to the very thing they’d just legislated out of the race.
Then he got to work. It was ten days before the start. In a small loft in Cowes, Jim hand-made an entire new wardrobe of tight reaching sails, every one of them built to the new rule, against a clock that was running down. The boat itself had to change too: all the inline locks we’d developed for the zeros had to come out of the rig, and the mast reinforced everywhere they’d been. He had, in his own words, a bit on. He did it anyway, and he did it in time.
And on leg one, that work paid off. We built a big lead early, right up until the equator, where the wind simply quit and the whole fleet reeled us back in. We ghosted across the line in almost nothing. But as we worked south and the breeze filled back, Jim’s reaching sails began their quiet work, a little here, a little there, then more and more as the wind built, until the distance we’d lost turned into open water behind us. We won that leg by the better part of a day. Plenty of things win a leg like that. Jim’s sails sat near the top of the list.
They could ban the sail. They couldn’t ban the thinking behind it. Jim had drawn something on Tokio that the rulebook hadn’t even imagined yet, and the proof of how good it was sat in the fact that they had to write a new rule to stop it.
I’ve spent the years since building companies, and I understand now what that kind of thing really costs: the nerve to chase an idea nobody believes in, to keep at it when smarter-sounding people tell you it can’t be done, to hold your ground when the whole field is lined up against you, and to keep building even when they change the rules to stop you. I learned a fair bit of that watching Jim, all those years ago. I carry it with me still.
That’s Jim, too.
He Really Did Give a Fuck
I got on the phone with Jim not long ago, and we talked for a good while. He did most of the talking, which was perfect, because he remembers everything, story after story, half of which I’d completely forgotten until he handed them back to me. I laughed the whole call. Start to finish.
The best of the ones I’d lost went all the way back to before the race, when he and I were new teammates still sizing each other up. A group of us had gone up to Taupo, a big lake in New Zealand, and somewhere on that trip Jim met a woman named Julie. The way he told it, and I’ll have to take his word for the whole thing, because I don’t remember a second of it, Julie had taken a bit of a shine to me. So Jim, who had his own plans for her, leaned in and told her, in strict confidence, that I was gay. Cleared the field in a single sentence, quietly took his own teammate out of the running, and never said a word about it to me for thirty years. It worked, of course. He married Julie. They’ve built a whole wonderful life together.
He was still delighted with himself telling it, and I laughed until it hurt, partly at the sheer nerve of the thing, partly because it’s such a perfect little window into how his mind works: quick, crafty, a half-step ahead, pointed straight at what he wants, and not above a little friendly sabotage to get there.
And running underneath that story, and a dozen others, is a phrase he keeps coming back to. He’ll tell you about stepping up for some hard or risky job and wave it off the same way every time: “I didn’t really give a fuck, so I said I’d do it.” I don’t give a fuck. I’ll do it.
Here’s the thing, though. I don’t believe him. Not for a second.
Because a man who genuinely doesn’t give a fuck doesn’t climb out to the end of a boom in a freezing gale. He doesn’t spend a hundred hours in a sail loft chasing a shape that exists only in his head. He doesn’t hand-build a whole new set of sails in ten days because somebody moved the rules on him. He doesn’t scheme his way to the woman he’s going to marry. He doesn’t remember, thirty years on, the small particular details of the people he sailed with across half the planet. That isn’t what not caring looks like. It’s the exact opposite.
The truth is that Jim gives a fuck about nearly everything that matters, about the people around him, about sailing, about adventure, about winning, about staying tied to a whole fleet’s worth of people scattered over thousands of miles of ocean. “I don’t give a fuck” was only ever the line he delivered right before doing something that proved he gave a great many.
And the more I sit with it, the more I think that’s the whole of it, not just the truth about Jim, but the truth about a life worth living. A life worth living is one you actually give a fuck about: where you care, hard, about what you’re doing, about what you’re trying to pull off, and most of all about the people you get to do it with. That’s how Jim has always lived. He cared enough to go out on the boom. He cared enough to chase a sail nobody else could see, and to build it again from nothing when they took it away. He cared enough to win the people he loved and hold onto them. The bravado was only ever the cover story.
So I’ll say the thing he’d never say about himself, and he can grumble at me all he likes: Jim gives a fuck. A great many of them, about far more, and far more deeply, than he’d ever let on. It’s the truest thing about him, and it’s why an hour on the phone with him still leaves you laughing and somehow a little more alive than when you picked up.
“That’s Jim. That’s always been Jim.”
T.A. McCann, apart from being a great, bloke, and true straight shooting friend, is one of the few people on the planet who can claim astronomical success in not one but two areas; in his case, sailing AND entrepreneurship. But are they that different? I sat down with the tech company founder and America’s Cup winner about both bouncing back from failure and tips for achieving success. Above all, TA is a devoted family man, which is hard to find in this modern world we live in. Finding a work-life balance between work and family in this day and age is hard skill to master…TA has managed to achieve this…
