Fifteen minutes

Though Mooney has been promoting himself all year, appearing at two of the country’s biggest boat shows (New York and Miami), it’s possible that his 15 minutes of fame have already elapsed; he may never again be as famous as he was on May 7, 2006, the day he failed in his first attempt to cross the sea. That morning, camera crews — from the United States, Europe, and Japan — captured him pushing off from Goree in a 1,200 pound rowboat. Three hours later, they redeployed to capture him being pulled from the water. Millions of viewers learned — and soon forgot — Mooney’s name. They may only recall his face, or his big, ill-fated boat, which had been painted red and white by a group of supporters before Mooney left New York.

At the Boat Show, I watched Mooney tell passersby about the abrupt end to his first attempt to cross the Atlantic. He explained that water had begun leaking through a crack in his boat’s keel as soon as he propelled himself from the coastal waters into the open sea. The hull pooled with water gradually, leaving him time to send out an emergency signal and gather as much of his equipment as he could into a waterproof sack, many items of which were now displayed on his tables. To illustrate the position of his boat at the time of his rescue, Mooney held his hand at a 45-degree angle and, tapping an upper knuckle, said, “I was sitting right here.” A helicopter from the Senegalese Navy pulled him to safety, and Mooney declared that he would never again attempt to cross the ocean. Not by boat, at least; he still had to fly home.

Seven months later, having experienced a change of heart, he set up his tables at the New York Boat Show to promote his second attempt to row across the Atlantic, which he refers to as the Goree Challenge II.

Fifteen more?

Mooney’s call for a rematch with the ocean has as much foundation as that of a boxer whose opponent knocked him out in the first round. He doesn’t think in those terms, though. He doesn’t even regard himself as an athlete. Asked how long the journey will take, he says, “It’s not a race.”

He said he began to reconsider his decision after a phone call he placed to his brother when he returned to New York. His brother didn’t pick up, but his answering machine did. Mooney was disturbed by the sound of the voice on the outgoing message. It was recognizably his brother’s, but it sounded slow and painfully groggy. Mooney’s brother has AIDS and had been taking antiretroviral drugs. Mooney now feared that his brother’s health had taken a turn for the worse.

AIDS has devastated Mooney’s family. Another brother died of complications related to the virus in 1983. Rowing long distances is Mooney’s way of responding to the disease. Since his first venture in 2000, he has cited calling attention to the toll of AIDS as his primary mission. 

At one point during my interviews with him, Mooney held his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart, and then slowly widened the gap between them, to illustrate the incremental increase in the amount of column space in local papers that his exploits have garnered. Mooney knows that if he could finally cross the ocean, his fingers would not do justice to the amount of coverage he’d receive.

In Mooney’s best imaginings, everyone in the world will know about his brothers — and the disease that afflicted them — while no one will know anything at all about their lives. Mooney’s brothers are at once at the root of his spectacular feats and ambitions and completely off-limits to almost everyone who celebrates them. He meets any questions about them with one of his trademark pauses. In response to my first and only question about his dead brother, he looked at the ground, shook his head, and said, “What can I say?”

His protective stewardship of his brothers can be frustrating, especially in the absence of any deeper conversation about his motivations. He doesn’t invite the sort of exchange that might contextualize his brazen approach in the larger field of AIDS activism. He simply asks that we understand his ambition to row across the ocean alone as the upshot of this simple equation: I know how to row + two of my brothers have fallen to AIDS. His rowing ventures are, at heart, radical expressions of grief — a grief that can be swelled by a voice on an answering machine.  

Fishing for a boat

To declare that Mooney is not crazy is to take a leap of faith, and that Mooney invites such a leap has been central to his appeal. Over 70 companies signed on to support Mooney’s first bid to cross the Atlantic, including companies as various as Adventure Medical Kits, Chock full o’Nuts coffee, Maptech, and Jerky Hut. Snapple shipped 200 16-ounce bottles of Snapple drinks (mostly iced tea), which Mooney packed, intending the extra weight to serve as ballast. Barnes and Noble gave him an atlas. Wal-Mart donated a fishing pole and the Bible on CD, which he also packed with the hope of listening to on the boat.

Each new sponsorship agreement must have bolstered Mooney’s belief in his mission. A couple of months before he launched his first attempt, he was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “There were so many people who helped, so many people who believed in me … how could I stop?" 

Perhaps Snapple, which wrote Mooney a check for $5,000, was the only company to have truly leaped. No other company donated money, and none would donate the piece of equipment he needed most — a boat.

Mooney built his craft on his own, laboring 12-hour days through the winter of 2006 in an unheated garage in downtown Brooklyn, and relying on photographs documenting the process of building a similar boat to guide his progress — all this while taking an unpaid leave from his job. According to Mooney, he has a “great boss,” who supported Mooney’s mission but couldn’t afford to pay him while he built his boat, or while he rowed it.

He sometimes got so cold that he warmed himself before the flame of the heat gun he normally used for fusing wires on his boat. He hadn’t done any carpentry work since seventh grade. Mooney does not express regret about his decision to build his own boat. As it was being unloaded in Senegal, it was dropped; he blames this accident for creating the hole that caused it to sink.

The last time I spoke with Mooney, in January, he worried that he wouldn’t be able to pull off the Goree Challenge II. A couple of times, he qualified statements about his plans with the phrase “whatever happens,” which he pronounced with a hint of apology. He’d collected many coins and dollar bills from passersby at the Boat Show, but his next trip promises to be much more expensive than the first. He hopes to commission a naval architect to build a lightweight carbon fiber boat — at a cost of $50,000.

When I checked Mooney’s web site in early July, I found on his home page a large image of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan, the first president of the United Arab Emirates, who died in 2004. Then, looking at a bar above the photo, I noticed that the Goree Challenge II had acquired this tag line: “The Spirit of Zayed.” Below the photo was an audio player icon that linked to a melodic Arabic song. A message next to the photo read: “Enshala, the naming ceremony of Goree Challenge II Ocean Rowboat ‘The Spirit of Zayed’ will be held in Abu Dhabi, [United Arab Emirates] UAE.”

On July 16, 2007, Mooney posted a blurry photograph of himself prostrate on a prayer rug in a tank top. This image was juxtaposed with the Arabic and English logo of the airline Etihad. Below this photo, a caption written in the style of a press release read: “Victor Mooney is confirmed on Etihad Airways for the Goree Challenge II — Spirit of Zayed Faith Tour, which will bring him to the United Arab Emirates. For security awareness, Victor’s daily itinerary will not be made public. God Speed .…”

After several failed attempts to contact Mooney and find out the status of Goree II, I called his college.

“Is he on vacation?” I asked.

“Not so far as I know,” the receptionist said.

I never really decided whether I thought Mooney was crazy — that is, whether I believed that he could make it across the ocean, or whether he should rededicate his life to trying again. It bothered me, more than it should have, when broke off contact. I realized that I wanted to hear about the oil magnate who had saved him. I wanted to hear another ocean dream.

Michael Robert Rymer