Racing the Light

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Father would know what Archie was doing, of course—traveling three hundred miles in the wrong direction. Morning Lark still sailed close enough to land for her AIS data to show his position at sea. Father said that the Automatic Identification System would become the new standard, constantly transmitting the boat’s position to land and soon to satellite, and he had equipped the Lark with it.
Three hundred miles backward.
Archie had sailed down from Boston, where Father had built the sixty-foot racing yacht, to the Ambrose Light before starting his run. He did it because this was where trans-Atlantic crossings were meant to begin.
The schooner America had first sailed by the Ambrose Light to deliver harbor pilots to sea-going vessels. She’d crossed the Atlantic from here in 1851 to win the Royal Yacht Squadron £100 Cup—renamed the America’s Cup in her honor after she brought it from the Isle of Wight to New York.
The HMS Titanic had fired more boilers, to increase the steam pressure driving the engines, shortly before striking an iceberg as it raced to set a record not to New York but rather to this exact marker.
Trans-Atlantic sailboat races and records were marked from abeam the Ambrose Light to due south of The Lizard—the peninsula at the southern tip of Cornwall.
His trip would be far more leisurely than the nine-day record for a solo sailor—or so he’d told Father. He had three weeks to deliver the boat to England. But the Morning Lark had been designed from the keel plate up for deep-ocean solo racing and Archie planned to show that Father’s design was up to the task.
The Lark had been built to the IMOCA 60 standard. She had a wide flat hull that planed over the water rather than some full-keel boat that sliced through the waves. Her narrow fin keel extended fifteen feet into the water for the primary purpose of holding the massive lead bulb at the bottom, counterweighting the great cloud of sail on her towering mast. It made her twitchy as hell, able to spin on a dime with so little keel, but it also made her fast.
The boat amenities were all about the cockpit. Belowdecks there was little more than a hanging cradle to sleep in, facing a full second set of electronics to keep track of the boat’s status between catnaps. Other than spare sails, a locker for dry clothes and freeze-dried food, and an engine for getting in and out of harbor, the interior of the hull lay bare. This made sleep nearly impossible to any but the most seasoned sailor; with no sound insulation, the hull rang like a great carbon-fiber gong at every wave strike.
As Archie circled the light one last time, he couldn’t help looking east. Twenty-eight hundred and eighty nautical miles to The Lizard. Farther than New York to San Francisco—at thirteen knots, fifteen miles per hour, if the winds were favorable.
You sure, son? Father hadn’t wanted him to make the crossing alone. But at eighteen Archie had been sailing the boats his father designed and built since he could first reach the tiller of the kid-sized dinghy Little Archibald at two.
I need to do this, Dad.
Twenty-eight hundred and eighty nautical miles between here and…
That was the problem—the other end of his destination.
Not The Lizard or delivering the boat to the new owner in Portsmouth, England.
It’s what came after that struck fear into Archie’s heart.

Initial Publication: September 21, 2024 (Thrill Ride Magazine #1: Adventure)
Re-release: January 1, 2025
Print pages: 64
Audio length (h:mm): 0:35
Narrator: Read by Author