That same curiosity brought a hundred other Coast Guard Auxiliary members from Flotilla 43 (Flotilla 43 roughly represents the area from Palo Alto to Sunnyvale) to hear Vihlen. The flotilla organizes speaker events with extraordinary men who have defied the challenges of the deep seas. Two years ago, it was Captain Larry Brudnicki, a Coast Guard hero who had rescued two vessels that were caught in the "perfect storm" of 1991 off the coast of New England. And this year it was Vihlen, a man who had defied the U.S. Coast Guard to set his world record--not once but twice.

"I was totally fascinated when I saw Hugo Vihlen's boat displayed in a shopping mall in Key Largo in Florida," says John Gordon, commander of Flotilla 43. Gordon was on vacation at that time. "At first I thought 'It can't be right; it has to be a toy or some kind of model for the real thing.' The whole boat was the size of the front seat of an old Volkswagen Beetle. Imagine sailing in that for a hundred-odd days with no place to stretch," says Gordon.

But when Gordon invited Vihlen to speak, he was not sure if the world-record holder would accept the invitation. After all, it was the U.S. Coast Guard who had tried to stop Vihlen's voyage both times, citing the reason that the boat was too small to handle the tumultuous waves of the Atlantic.

"Safety is the bottom line for the Coast Guard and for us here at the voluntary wing of the Coast Guard. Even under the most favorable circumstances, crossing the Atlantic in a sailboat is a very risky business. So I was amazed that this man would put himself through such an ordeal to set a record. I was curious to find out what provoked him to do this and what plans he'd made to survive that journey," says Maddox.

But Vihlen did speak in Mountain View. The 72-year-old looks more like a warm, somewhat round grandfather than an adventurer who has conquered the mighty waves of the Atlantic. And he tells his story in a monotone. So his dry sense of humor catches the audience off-guard.

Vihlen says he was captivated when he heard about a young Japanese boy who had crossed the Pacific Ocean from Osaka to San Francisco in a 19-foot boat in the early '60s. "And I thought to myself: 'Why can't I do the same in the Atlantic?'" says Vihlen. He'd grown up in Southern Florida and had always enjoyed sailing and the challenges of the water. "Having grown up in the countryside where my nearest neighbor was miles away, I was comfortable being alone, and I was mentally prepared for the solitary voyage," he says.

Vihlen was no stranger to danger. He'd flown several state-of-the-art fighter aircraft during the Korean War. So he began constructing his boat with the dedication and precision of a soldier. He called his craft April Fool. It was a 5-foot-11-inch boat in a basic submarine design and made out of marine plywood and fiberglass.

For his voyage in 1968, Vihlen had decided to sail from Casablanca, Morocco, to Miami, Fla. But soon after he started, a storm on the seas sent him right back to shore. After a few more attempts, Vihlen was on his way.

"The first five days, I traveled only about 44 miles. There was hardly any wind pushing at the sails," he says.

But the pace of his journey was the least of Vihlen's worries. He was more concerned about another storm brewing up 20-foot waves or whales that could ram into and sink his boat or huge ships with propellers that could tear his tiny craft to pieces.

"The scariest part was the first night. The sun goes down and you are all by yourself, and you don't know where you'll be when you wake up the next morning or even in a month's time," says Vihlen. For his first voyage, Vihlen used a sextant--an instrument used to determine the latitude and longitude at sea by measuring the angular distance of the sun, moon and stars--to navigate. The sextant was more popular in the '60s.

For food, Vihlen had packed just the right mount of canned food, including such epicurean delights as MREs, the "meals, ready to eat" used by the military. He took cans of Nutriment, Franco-American Spaghetti, fruit cocktail, corned beef, health-food bars, two gallons of M&Ms and three small bottles of rum. That would last him for a few months.

But his constant companion through the whole trip was BBC radio. "It was during this period that Martin Luther King was assassinated. So for several days all I listened to were obituaries and talks about the funeral--it was very depressing," says Vihlen.

His first encounter with the Coast Guard came as he headed closer to the Miami coast. His radio failed. While he could receive information, he was unable to transmit. "So everybody panicked and thought I was lost at sea. When I was just 22 miles from the coast and I could actually see the land, the Coast Guard surrounded me. No matter what I said--that I was not lost and I could continue sailing--they were bent on 'rescuing me,'" says Vihlen.

He gave in to the Coast Guard. However, since he had gone past the Bahamas, just below Florida, he'd officially crossed the Atlantic and had created a world record.

At least for some 15 years he held that record. Then in early 1993 Englishman Tom McNally snatched Vihlen's record when he crossed the Atlantic in a boat that was just 5 feet 4¹/2 inches long.

But at about that same time Vihlen was working on a new boat to cross the Atlantic again. This time he would leave from the U.S. coast and head for England.

"The North Atlantic is far more challenging," Vihlen says. "It is very cold and the waves are terrible." But when Vihlen heard about the size of Tom McNally's boat, he chopped one-half inch off his vessel, so it would be smaller than McNally's.

Vihlen's tiny craft this time was called Father's day. It was a sophisticated bathtub of a design with an onboard GPS system, a water maker--for drinking water--a VHF radio and even an SSB/ham radio and backup solar panels to generate power from the sun. (Vihlen later found out that the solar panels were of little use, as the sun hardly came out that close to the Arctic.)

This time Vihlen ran into trouble from the U.S. Coast Guard at the beginning of his trip. He tried to convince them to allow him to leave in U.S. waters and that his boat was specially designed to withstand the ravages of the North Atlantic. But the Guard was unwilling to listen to any such argument. After a few botched attempts to set sail without the permission of the "Coasties," Vihlen changed his starting point. He would leave from Newfoundland, Canada.

Vihlen soon realized this route was going to be much more difficult than the first one. "It was so cold all the time. Despite wearing layers and layers of clothes, it was just never enough to feel warm. And the waves were huge up in the North. They were at least 30-foot giant ones."

But this time Vihlen's greatest worry was whales. "One morning I woke up to find that I was surrounded by whales everywhere. They probably thought my boat was a whale, too. I don't know. But it was very scary. If they had rammed it and I had been tossed over, not any number of lifejackets would have been sufficient. The water was so cold that I would have died in 20 minutes," Vihlen says.

But the whales and the waves were outside concerns. There were those inside himself that he struggled with, too.

The lack of proper sleep and the solitary confinement began to play havoc with Vihlen's mental faculties. "I remember waking up one day and thinking about death. I did a lot more crying than laughing out there in the seas."

And this time his journey took 105 days compared to the 85 days the last time. "I lost close to 34 pounds during the trip and was so glad to reach England," he says.

"To me crossing the Atlantic has never been about setting a record," Vihlen says. "It's all about the mental challenge of it, to see if you can survive it mentally."

But few in this world take on such a mental challenge, though all of us are fascinated by the stories.

And after hearing Vihlen, even with all the hair-raising adventures Maddox has experienced in his volunteer work with the Coast Guard Auxiliary, he says he doesn't understand why Vihlen did what he did.

"I'm amazed that Vihlen put himself through such an ordeal. Even under the best circumstances, I will not even consider doing anything like that," says Maddox.