“Billy, I have all your records!” Lennon shouts toward the Piano Man’s modern glass mansion.

“I’d like to go say hi to Billy Joel but I don’t want to bother him,” John tells his assistant, Fred Seaman. Ironically, Billy Joel feels exactly the same way. “We both respected each other’s privacy,” Joel says ruefully. “And due to that, we never got to meet.”

John loves the freedom of sailing. Out on the open ocean, fans can’t grab for a piece of him, drag him down.

At the Dakota, photographers are a particular nuisance, especially Paul Goresh, a twenty-one-year-old student of criminal justice at Middlesex County College who once faked his way into John’s apartment by posing as a TV repairman.

Goresh is no longer allowed on Dakota property.

When John sees him snapping photos from across the street, he confronts Goresh.

A young woman is taking photos of the tense exchange. John grabs her camera, threatening to smash it on the ground—right after he smashes Goresh’s.

“Okay, John, I’ll give you my camera roll,” Goresh says. He pulls out the film from his Minolta XG-1 and hands it to him. “We’re good now, right?”

*  *  *

Yoko consults Takashi Yoshikawa, a Japanese expatriate whose New York clinic advises on macrobiotics—the Lennons’ principal diet—and the ancient Chinese divination method ki-ology. The system holds that “energy numbers,” derived from an individual’s birthday, open the way to a harmonious existence. To clear the clouds that are “casting a shadow over his life and creativity,” Yoshikawa prescribes that John sail southeast—a straight course to the island of Bermuda.

*  *  *

They set sail out of Newport Harbor, Rhode Island, on June 5, 1980, for a voyage expected to cover 650 nautical miles over five days.

Tyler Coneys is aboard the Megan Jaye, a forty-three-foot Hinckley sloop, along with two of his cousins, a small but experienced crew whose birthdays Yoko all finds auspicious. The captain of the vessel is a sailor close to John’s age named Hank Halsted.

“John, since you’re the least experienced sailor on board, I’m appointing you ship’s cook,” Captain Hank announces.

Captain Hank knows the ocean, but he also knows rock ’n’ roll music. In his twenties, he was a concert promoter for the Allman Brothers and Big Brother and the Holding Company.

The captain isn’t afraid to ask tough questions. “You just affected 50 million people there to the positive, big boy,” he says to John. “What are you going to do to follow that up?”

“I’m going to raise my son,” John says.

That plan is in for a drastic shift.

*  *  *

John is performing his duties in the galley when a powerful mid-Atlantic storm barrels down on the Megan Jaye. As thunder cracks, the crew joins John belowdecks to don their severe-weather gear.

While Captain Hank steers the small yacht through a force 8 gale, John straps himself to the cockpit rails.