Victor Mooney dreamed of the ocean a few days before I met him. We were sitting together in a downtown Brooklyn, New York Au Bon Pain when he closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and revisited the dream. He was in a boat, he told me, that suddenly, yet peacefully, elevated on a giant wave above the water’s surface. Mooney raised both of his arms to indicate the height to which he’d been lifted. As I watched him, I noticed that he was sweating; his forehead gleamed.

A little while later, Mooney asked me, indirectly, if I thought he was crazy. We were discussing the relative popularity of ocean rowing — specifically, trans-Atlantic rowing — in Britain and the United States. England’s ancient ocean rowing societies have sent generations of athletes on trans-Atlantic crossings — generally in teams, on long boats, and often with the goal of breaking speed records. The best rowers in the United States, meanwhile, tend to content themselves with routes that hug the coast, or with workouts on fresh water. “Here, when you’re doing something like I am,” Mooney said, drawing an index finger to his temple to make the universal symbol for crazy, “people tend to think …”

Like many people who speak slowly and pause before completing their sentences, Mooney sometimes calls on his interlocutors to help obviate conversational logjams. As he looked at me now, with his finger pointing toward his temple, I understood that he was calling on me.

Hercules or Mitty?
   
Victor Mooney is one part Walter Mitty and one part Herculean hero. Like Mitty, he spends most of his time working his middlebrow job. He is a public affairs officer at ASA: The College for Excellence, a private college with campuses in Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn. He even has a wife and family that he lives with in Forrest Hills, Queens, New York. Unlike Mitty, Mooney’s fantasies of what he could do and who he could be have some basis in what he has already done. In 2000, he rowed from the Queensboro Bridge to the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in a sports canoe. Two summers later, he circumnavigated Long Island — a 300-mile loop that he completed in 13 days (he docked each night to sleep). In 2003, he rowed around Long Island, and then paddled west to circumnavigate the island of Manhattan. While traveling along the East River, he encountered a police boat whose captain encouraged him to row further on his next venture. A few weeks later, he began planning to row across the Atlantic Ocean, from Goree, a former slave port island off the coast of Senegal, to the Brooklyn Bridge, in a one-man boat. He has been preparing for a trans-Atlantic crossing — training, boat building, and fundraising — ever since.

I met Mooney by chance, stopping at his booth at the 2007 New York National Boat Show, an event that fills the Javits Convention Center with half-million-dollar yachts and ruddy yacht salesmen at the beginning of each year. Mooney’s booth stood on the periphery of the showroom, pinched between the towering portside of a Sea Ray 48 Sundancer and a cinderblock wall. A scattershot display that included press clippings (Mooney was awarded the Brooklyn Paper’s annual Don Quixote Award) and a waterproof medical kit was arranged on three small tables. Behind them was a metal scaffolding draped with forlorn-looking marine equipment — a poncho, a wet suit, and a rope. In contrast with the slick presentation of the yacht manufacturers, Mooney’s setup looked as though it might have been tossed off the side of a boat.

So did he: Though he has the bulging shoulders of an oarsman, Mooney lacks the endorphin-rich aura of an endurance athlete. He has a round, lightly freckled face — and even a modest gut that belies his avocation (this May, Mooney’s web site boasted that he had lost 30 pounds). He is neither tall nor strapping, and his chin bunches into folds. The afternoon I met him, he was wearing a dark, rumpled suit and a worn tie with a slipshod knot. He paced slowly, with his hands clasped behind his back.

Michael Robert Rymer