Sailing Magazine
By Richard Crockett
I am sure that most of us remember Scope magazine – not for it’s editorials but rather for the raunchy pictures it used to publish?
But on occasions they would publish a feature that had value and told a good story without being sensational. Today, I am able to share one of those rare features.
It’s sub-head said simply this: “He defected from the communists to pursue the call of the sea.”
The “he” is Richard Konkolski, a yachtsman of some note.
“At the border post on the Oder River between Czechoslovakia and Poland, the guards had hailed him happily. They knew the blond-bearded, barrel-chested sailor well from past voyages. Konkolski, after all, was a hero not only in his homeland but in Poland too. The author of 11 books on his seagoing adventures and on technical aspects of sailing, he was the first Czech ever to sail the Atlantic alone, and the first of his 15 million compatriots ever to circumnavigate the globe. It was his government’s sudden refusal to let him try a second time that had put him on this course from which there could be no return.
READ HIS FASCINATING STORY HERE: 1986 09 26 – scope – John Martin – 008939 – OCR
