As a marketing initiative the 2004 Nordhavn Atlantic Rally was audacious, far riskier than fully appreciated then or since. Not because the crossing was all that dangerous: Nordhavn’s Jim Leishman and rally planners had chosen the best months for the crossing, May and June; they had screened the participants and their vessels, hired a weather router and planned thoroughly for contingencies. What they could never guarantee was good luck. The Luck Factor explains why mariners down through the centuries have developed so many superstitions, including a fear of “Jonahs,” vessel name changes, women aboard, Friday departures and many, many more. Ultimately 18 vessels—most of them trawlers and most of them Nordhavns— crossed safely from Florida to Gibraltar. But what if the rally had lost a boat or suffered a fatality among the participants while under way? Surely, the dockside commentary would have taken on the intensity of Fox News on the trail of Natalie Holloway.

Nordhavns, if you are not familiar with the brand, are traditionally styled trawler yachts, mostly single-screw, designed for offshore passagemaking. In 2001-02, a Nordhavn 40 made history, becoming the smallest powerboat to circumnavigate the globe; the crews were professional mariners from the staff of Nordhavn’s builder, Pacific Asian Enterprises. A range of Nordhavns participated in the Atlantic Rally, the most numerous being five 46s and the smallest being a 40. Many of the same staffers who participated in the Around the World event were support crew for the Atlantic Rally.

“Oceans Apart” is how Nordhavn sells itself—and quite successfully. Success breeds resentment, and a gaggle of commentators surely would have broadcast their negative conclusions about Nordhavn and its customers, if an accident had happened, let alone a disaster. How can you be certain of that? Because the trawler community got a whiff of this impulse even before the fleet had cast off lines.

One boat scheduled to participate had an accidental death—the owner’s wife—while the boat was anchored in Florida waters. The rally was still weeks away. Her death was a terrible accident entirely unrelated to the fact that the vessel was a Nordhavn. Her devastated husband withdrew from the rally as comments began appearing on various web forums questioning the sea skills of rally participants. That negative buzz quickly died, but imagine the shadow that would have been cast over Nordhavn, had something similar occurred, say, between Bermuda and the Azores.

Bermuda-to-Azores—that was my leg, the middle leg of the voyage. I had a berth on Atlantic Escort, the Nordhavn 57 serving as rally flagship. The fleet came to Bermuda from South Florida and from the Azores the boats continued on to Gibraltar, where they made a triumphant “photo-op” entry to “The Rock.” Bermuda-to-Azores turned out to be the Luck Factor’s chosen leg as well.

We were three days from Bermuda when the call came. Douglas Seaver, skipper of the Nordhavn 50 Four Across, hailed Atlantic Escort over the VHF. A group of us were in the pilothouse and heard the call. We knew something was wrong because of the tension in his voice and the fact that he did not ask for Jim Leishman; he asked to speak directly to rally medical officer, Dr. Kevin Ware.

Seaver said he had a crewman aboard, 50-years-old, suffering a “terrible pain” in his belly. “It would be nice if we could take a look at his abdomen,” Ware said. “Let’s do it,” Leishman said, pushing forward the throttles to achieve a speed of 10 knots. Jim Leishman instructed his son James to see that the dinghy was launched; Dr. Ware would be making a Hypalon house call; by inflatable RIB, that is. As luck would have it, we were still enjoying benign sea conditions, but it wasn’t flat calm either.

As our doctor tended to his patient in the saloon of Four Across, the rest of us waited for word in Atlantic Escort’s pilothouse. No one said much. In the absence of information, it is surely a natural impulse to imagine the worst. Jim Leishman drummed his fingers on the console. Back in Atlantic Escort’s pilothouse, Dr. Ware gave us all an education on kidney stones, the occurrence of which, he said, was “painful not fatal.” He said he had fed the patient painkillers and antibiotics, along with a quart of water an hour. With any luck, he said, this combination would help pass the “stone,” which is actually the size of a coffee ground. The antibiotics would take care of any secondary infection or provide back-up treatment in the event that kidney stones were not the problem, and the patient was actually suffering a gastro-intestinal infection.

By the following day the patient was well on his way to recovery. It is a tribute to the Nordhavn Atlantic Rally’s planners that they had briefed skippers specifically about the likelihood of kidney stones. In fact, one of the risk factors was dehydration. Ware said the crew of Four Across had suffered seasickness, which is a quick way to become dehydrated.

The next encounter with the Luck Factor—with the Azores still three days over the horizon—was potentially more serious. Seas were running 8 to 10 feet at a short interval.Justin Zumwalt, a young project manager for the Nordhavn company, jumped into the North Atlantic and started swimming. A couple hundred feet away, the Nordhavn 40 Uno Mas was rolling through 60 degrees, her active stabilizers non-functional.

Justin had volunteered early on to swim over and repair Uno Mas’s problem, but Leishman had hesitated to give the go-ahead. He was weighing the risk of putting a swimmer into an angry sea merely to restore the crew of Uno Mas to comfort; that’s what he initially believed.

I think it was something in their voices that changed Leishman’s mind. He had tried to talk the crew of Uno Mas through the repair, which required bypassing the inverter and connecting the pump directly to the generator, but they weren’t grasping what they needed to do. Obviously, they were suffering mightily from the boat’s roll. Over the VHF, they sounded rattled.

Putting a dinghy into the water was out of the question, but Justin insisted he’d had to swim in far more threatening surf on his native West Coast. Within minutes, he had horsed himself onto the 40’s swim platform. Two hours later, he had rewired Uno Mas so that all systems were functioning on the generator, enabling Uno Mas to get back under way.

The general conclusion was that paravane stabilizers were essential to ocean voyaging under power. Indeed, the two vessels in the fleet using only flopperstoppers were doing just fine. By contrast, Uno Mas was one of three rally vessels that had experienced problems with their active-fin stabilizers. Leishman said the experience taught him that each new boat should come with a switching system to bypass a bum inverter.

Next day, same weather, and the Luck Factor strikes again, only to be trumped again by Nordhavn’s swimmers. Unless you have made a crossing, you might never imagine that you could get a line wrapped in your prop in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, which is exactly what happened to Autumn Wind, a Nordhavn 62, with the taverns of Horta just a half day away.

Autumn Wind had switched to its auxiliary, or get-home engine, and was chugging along in heavy seas at 4.5 knots. At that speed, if we stayed alongside, we wouldn’t be pulling into Horta until midnight. Zumwalt, the crew member that had made a tactical swim to Uno Mas the day before, and James Leishman, son of Jim, insisted that they be allowed to hack the line off Autumn Wind’s prop.

If sending a swimmer over to Uno Mas yesterday was dicey, putting divers beneath a heaving, pitching, rolling 62-footer looked to be crazy. As Justin and James, clad in wetsuits, swam over to Autumn Wind, Jim Leishman carefully instructed Autumn Wind’s crew to keep the vessel into the seas, using only the bow-thruster to hold her in place.

After our swimmers were able to ascertain that the culprit was a half-inch line wrapped several times around the prop, James Leishman timed his move. He waited for a period of relative stability to avoid being whacked on the head by the hull, then dove under the stern with a knife in his hand. He made three cuts before coming back up again.

At this point Jim Leishman asked that Autumn Wind restart her main engine, and, contrary to all conventional wisdom, instructed the crew to give her a blast of reverse. When they shifted into forward gear, the mean vibration that had been caused by the line was gone. Reversing the prop apparently finished the job that James had started with his knife. Autumn Wind had her legs back and would be on the dock at Horta before dusk.

These three incidents alone give a distorted view of the Bermuda-Azores leg. Most of the time was spent peaceably, even tediously. Crews fished, prepared meals, read books and listened to music. At the halfway mark, the fleet stopped for a party that included swimming, hijincks and a water skiing display behind a RIB. As always, however, the real glory was arriving at an exotic new port—for most of us the first arrival to the Azores.

For me, the voyage confirmed a couple of old truths. The village elders are valued for their ability to anticipate events and plan, but often it takes the sinew and boldness of the young to carry the day. And when it comes to crossing the Atlantic Ocean under power, it is far easier for a fleet to employ the variety of talents needed to vanquish the Luck Factor. With its professional leadership, fleet doctor and swimming engineers, the Atlantic Rally was the best way to go.