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Peter Gibbons-Neff, of Annapolis, self-deployed to France for the summer to prepare for the Mini Transat race. (Paul Todd/Outside Images/)
“Why not?” There’s a phrase that leads to trouble. So too does its problematic next of kin: “If not now, when?”
Those were the sorts of thoughts rattling around the mind of Peter Gibbons-Neff last year as he considered his future on the verge of transitioning from active duty after a 10-year stint in the Marine Corps.
A captain and US Naval Academy graduate, he’d survived two deployments to the war-torn Middle East and a divorce, and was back on home waters last year, working at the Pentagon and living in Annapolis, Maryland. With the rest of his life looming large, he wondered, what next?
It turned out the answer lay around the corner from his place in the Eastport section of the quaint old sailing town. It was a boat, of course—a life-altering, slippery little beauty designed to the Mini 6.50 class of tiny, trailerable race boats in which every other year a gaggle of grizzled Frenchmen charge alone into the tempestuous Atlantic on a 4,000-mile sleigh ride to the Caribbean. And, of course, it was for sale.
“I got a test ride,” Gibbons-Neff says, “and I fell in love with the boat. I loved the speed, the size, and what you can do with it. The timing was just right.”
This was 2020, the year of COVID-19, and he figured that by September 2021, if he hurried, he could get ready for the start of the biennial Mini Transat in France, the premier event on the global calendar for the 21-foot sleds. Out there alone on the ocean blue, he wouldn’t have to worry about quarantines, masking or hand-sanitizing. That sounded good. And at 32, in the prime of life, he was fit and ready for anything…
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