"Good Lord!" scribbled Alan Eddy in his diary. "Why the heck did I do this?" At the time, Eddy, a systems analyst from Scarsdale, N.Y., was alone in mid-Pacific aboard his 30-ft. ketch Apogee, heaving through heavy seas on a 39,000-mile voyage around the world.

Eddy returned home recently and he still has no ready answer to the question. Seven years ago, the young bachelor, then 31, spent $18,000 for a new fiber glass Seawind sailboat that is advertised by the Allied Boat Co. of Catskill, N.Y., as capable of "crossing an ocean if you will." After a year of preparation, Eddy decided he was ready to do just that. So he set sail in the wake of Joshua Slocum, the retired trading-ship captain who took off from Boston in a 37-ft. converted oyster boat back in 1895 and returned three years later as the first man to circumnavigate the world singlehanded.

Only two dozen sailors have duplicated Slocum's feat--and many of them like Britain's Sir Francis Chichester, made the most of the resulting publicity. Eddy belongs to a different crew. For him the most satisfying sport in the world is to shrink his world to the size of a cruising sailboat and to enjoy that world at leisure. Unlike Sir Francis, who made only one stop on his 275-day voyage, Eddy spent 51 casual years visiting some 400 ports.

The Spice of Danger. The pleasures of such a trip were well described by British Writer Eric Hiscock in Cruising Under Sail. He wrote of "the spice that a suggestion of danger lends; the satisfaction of working the winds and tides to the best advantage; the feeling of achievement when a strange coast or harbor has been reached under sail; and the never-ending fascination of handling and looking after a seaworthy yacht and her gear."

Responding to such satisfactions, cruising sailors are how taking to the high seas in unprecedented numbers. During his stopovers at various ports, Eddy estimates that he met an "international community" of more than a hundred people sailing their boats around the world. In the port of Durban, South Africa, he docked with 15 other globe-girdling boats. The varied squadron included a 38-ft. ketch out of San Diego sailed by Photographer Fred Davenport, his wife and 10-year-old daughter Circe; a 24-ft. sloop captained by Robin Lee Graham, a Honolulu teenager who is making the voyage alone; and a 36-ft. ketch built and piloted by Ron Smith, a young carpenter from Long Beach, Calif. Smith, who took aboard a female passenger in Sydney, Australia, stopped in Durban long enough to marry her. All the travelers knew or had heard about each other. They belonged to a very special fraternity that has sailed away from the workaday world.

Diverse Diversions. Alone at sea, Eddy wrote letters to keep his mind occupied, baked bread in a pressure cooker, and read everything from racy novels to heavy tomes on advanced mathematics. There were other, less pleasant diversions. One night off the Fiji Islands, he ran aground on a coral reef, but his hefty little ketch survived to limp 150 miles to the nearest shipyard for minor repairs. On another occasion, an entry in his ship's log recounts how he was rousted from below deck by a "tremendous bang which shook Apogee from keel to masthead." He rushed to the cockpit to discover that he had been butted by a whale. "As I watched, steaming through the seas came a dozen more, bearing down on Apogee like torpedoes." Again and again, "the brutes" struck the hull with great, shuddering thumps; then, after 20 harrowing minutes, they swam off. Remarkably, reports Eddy, the boat was undamaged, "which is more than I could say for my nerves."

Despite such perils, Eddy recommends a transoceanic jaunt to any sportsman who has the time, the means and the "dream of snug, palm-lined anchorages where you can fall off the boat, swim ashore and bask on the white coral sands." A singlehanded world cruise may sound romantic, he says, but he learned that it is far more enjoyable if shared with a friend. As an antidote to his own loneliness, he took aboard blonde Bianca Lavies, a freelance yachting reporter, in Durban, South Africa, and she accompanied him on the last 7,380 miles of the voyage.

Though he shunned publicity for his trip, Eddy finds that he has set a record of considerable interest to other yachtsmen: as far as he knows, he is the first man to circumnavigate the world in a fiber glass boat. More important, his feat has demonstrated something that many a daydreaming small-boat sailor has" told himself for years: for a modest price he can pick up a stock model of a well-designed boat like the Seawind and, with no extra investment for special gear or refitting, sail it anywhere in the world.

Now, confronting the prospect of returning to his job in the research labs of Technical Operations, Inc., Eddy wants to become one of the first men to shake a case of sea fever. "I've talked to people who go back to work after being at sea," he says, "and they can't stand it. I hope this won't happen to me. I think it's out of my system."

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