The Sociable Ocean

TINKERBELLE by Robert Manry. 254 pages. Harper & Row. $5.95.

For 30 years, along the course of a newspaper career that carried him to the copy desk of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Robert Manry nourished a secret dream. In 1958 he paid $160 for a sailing hull rotted by age and neglect. Repaired, refitted and baptized on fresh-water shakedown cruises, Tinkerbelle slipped her moorings at Falmouth, Mass., on June 1, 1965. Seventy-eight days and 3,200 miles later, the 13 1/2-ft. sloop touched shore in Falmouth, England, the smallest sailing craft ever known to have crossed the Atlantic.

Manry is the most unprepossessing sort of adventurer. He was so much the non-hero that he told no one but his family about his plans and was genuinely astonished by the hero's reception that met him on the other side. The cruise cost him less than $2,000, a figure that includes the premiums for $50,000 in life insurance and what he put into Tinkerbelle. His most ambitious hope was to recover the cost of the trip by publishing its log.

Moving steadily along what he found to be "an exceptionally sociable ocean" teeming with curious ships, Manry began to feel that he was along mainly for the ride. Tinkerbelle was slow--seven knots an hour top speed--but she was also uncapsizable and unsinkable. "I'm sure," he writes, "she could have crossed the ocean entirely on her own, without any help whatever from me." Manry fell overboard seven times, but since he was secured to Tinkerbelle by a lifeline, these adventures amounted to nothing more than unscheduled baths.

He arrived 40 lbs. lighter--down from 200 lbs.--and with 13 gal. of water still in the hold. To the adventurer, the climax was the saddest part of the voyage. "Only twelve miles to go," he tells Tinkerbelle, whom he regarded throughout as "my dearest companion," and then he adds: "The thought brought on a faint stabbing of pain."

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