The boat pitches violently, and one by one, the crew succumbs to seasickness.

Only Captain Hank and John remain to face the giant waves, some of them cresting past a height of twenty feet. John follows Halsted’s orders as the relentless seas continuously pound the ship over the next forty-eight hours.

In his haze of fatigue, Captain Hank Halsted fears he’ll make a mistake that could cost the lives of everyone on board.

He turns to the last person still standing, the sailor whose only previous experience is guiding a fourteen-footer through Cold Spring Harbor. “I’m gonna need some help here, big boy,” Halsted barks at John, gesturing for him to take the wheel. “I’ll tell you what to do.”

Lennon fights his way toward the helm, gripping the rails, treading gingerly to prevent himself from being hurled over the side. There is no protection now that the stainless-steel dodger, or windshield, has been ripped apart by the frothing ocean.

“Don’t jibe,” Halsted explains. “Never let the wind cross the back of the boat.”

With that, Halsted withdraws.

“He was thin, but very wiry and strong,” Tyler Coneys recalls of John. “This was a terrifying situation for all of us, but Lennon took responsibility and truly stepped into his role as a leader.”

John is alone. He faces down the waves, as if they are the stage fright that so often gripped him. It won’t go away, he tells himself. You can’t change your mind. It’s like being onstage; once you’re on there’s no gettin’ off.

A huge wall of water breaches the bow and crashes over him as he stands at the helm. John grips the wheel, and the torrent of water buckles his knees. When the swell subsides, he pulls himself up and shakes his fist at the sky.

“I feel like a Viking!” he shouts. “Jason and the Golden Fleece.”

Baptized by the storm, he grows more confident with the passing of each massive wave and each desperate hour.

“Freddie!” he calls in tribute of his dead sailor father.

When Captain Hank regains his strength, he returns to the helm to find signs of a calming ocean and “a man who was just enraptured.”

I was having the time of my life, he realizes. I was screaming sea chanteys and shoutin’ at the gods!

When the sloop glides safely into St. George’s Harbour, Bermuda, on June 11, John races from the dock to place a call to the Dakota. He tells his assistant, Fred Seaman, to book himself and Sean on a flight to Bermuda. John also requests a guitar that for the past five years has been hanging in his bedroom, untouched.

It’s time to launch a comeback.

Chapter 55

Chapter 55

It’s been a long time since I rock and rolled.

—“Rock and Roll”