Dodge Morgan, Who Sailed Around World, Dies at 78
Dodge Morgan, the first American to sail solo nonstop around the world, a feat in which he cut the previous record time nearly in half, died Tuesday in Boston. He was 78 and lived on Snow Island in Harpswell, Me., a 30-acre sanctuary that he owned and where he moored six sailboats.
The cause was cancer, his fiancée, Mary Beth Teas, said.
Aboard the 60-foot sloop American Promise, Mr. Morgan slipped into the port of St. George, Bermuda, at 1:31 p.m. on April 11, 1986, completing the 27,000-mile circumnavigation in 150 days 1 hour 6 minutes. He had sailed out of Bermuda on Nov. 12, 1985. The voyage — often through roiling seas and occasionally past icebergs — shattered the previous record of 292 days set by a British sailor, Chay Blyth, in 1971.