Wilbur Hubbard wrote:

Right you are. These liberal minded folks who think other people deserve a
lot of credit for trying and FAILING have no idea of what it means to
succeed at a task. The equate FAILURE with success and actually give kudos
for failure (trying and failing). What's next? are they going to be giving
kudos for people who don't even try and then fail? Probably.

The way I see it, the poor girl never had a chance. Her so-called team did
her a great disservice. The first indication was when she had to put into La
Paz in order to ship greater electrical generating systems. Duh! Didn't
anybody on her so-called team have half a brain and could sit down and
figure amps required vs. amps available?

Then there was the autopilot debacle. Double Duh! What morons allow a
circumnavigation to be compromised because they rely TOTALLY on two electric
autopilots? What were they thinking?

Then they routed the poor girl into the roaring forties in the wintertime.
One has to wonder if maybe mom and dad had a multi-million dollar life
insurance policy on the girl and needed some income desperately. Excuse me,
but wasn't this a circumnavigation? Why the need for speed in dangerous
latitudes? Somebody is very confused.

If this is what sailing has been reduced to in this day and age and people
think the sailor deserves kudos then there is little or no hope for
seamanship anymore.

Failure? Depends upon how you define success. She failed at one of her
goals, but certainly succeeded at a few others. For example, she
survived. That right there is surely a huge success. The main success,
really. She also has generated massive publicity for herself that she
can and probably will use if she wants to, as a springboard to other
great things for herself.

Anyone attempting great things should be doing it for the journey, not
the destination, and she had one hell of a journey, including some
pretty amazing saves she accomplished in very hairy conditions, like
when the sail got snagged on the spreaders and she had to go up the mast
in heavy weather to free it. Huge success right there. There were many
others.

No, anyone who views success and failure as you recommend, who sits home
instead of going for their dreams as you told Skip to do, because they
could be better at this or better at that, because they might fail in
their ultimate goal, because they even might die; well those people are
the ones who will be miserable failures, bitter and jealous of almost
anyone accomplishes anything. They miss their chance at a good life due
to their irrational fear of failure and hate almost everyone who is
doing what they should be doing.

Stephen