How a transformative week-long sail in the North Atlantic reignited John Lennon’s creativity

In the summer of 1980, a secret sailing journey across the North Atlantic pushed John Lennon to his limits – and reignited the creativity that would define his final months, says Daniel Pembrey

The only other time he’d felt as ‘centred’ and ‘in tune with the cosmos’ was in 1961, when The Beatles were at their peak as a live band in Liverpool and Hamburg,” wrote the aptly named Fred Seaman, Lennon’s final assistant, in his 1991 memoir John Lennon: Living On Borrowed Time. Seaman was recalling the transformational sailing voyage Lennon made in June 1980, when the former Beatle was, unknowingly, entering the last six months of his life. 

Seaman went on: “Having survived by his own skills and courage, John felt that he had once more tapped into his primal, indestructible, youthful self. I realised that I was looking at the John Lennon I had heard him describe once: a man in the full flush of his power; a man eager for life, not cowed by it.”

By the mid-1970s, those nights in the Cavern Club and Hamburg – some of which Lennon would never forget; some he barely dared remember – felt like another lifetime. After The Beatles’ rancorous break-up, he launched into his infamous “lost weekend” in Los Angeles from 1973 to 1975, having a long affair with May Peng, his (and Yoko Ono’s) then assistant. 

There were bruising fights with the US immigration service over his ability to even stay in the country, and a host of deeper issues related to his upbringing. The birth of his second son, Sean, in late 1975, caused a rethink, yet made him a recluse. He released a covers album (Rock ’n’ Roll) that year, then hung up his guitar, becoming a self-styled “house husband”. 

Ono ran his business affairs while, legend has it, he baked bread and put Sean to bed. Mick Jagger, living practically next door on New York’s Upper West Side at the height of the Studio 54 years all but gave up trying to tempt out his fellow countryman.

Yet something began to shift after Lennon’s father, Freddie, died in 1976. They had never been close and yet the life of his dad, a merchant seaman of Irish descent, now became more significant. Lennon confessed to having been distraught as a child when his father was absent, wrote Seaman. 

To salve the pain, Lennon would dream of the exotic places the ships may have left for; imagining himself as a stowaway, escaping whatever misery afflicted him at home or at school. Sometimes, he was possessed by an overpowering urge to sneak aboard one of these ships in Liverpool’s docks. Fearful of the unknown, he’d never followed through on it.

Lennon’s current family sought to spend more time outside Manhattan, buying a summer house in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, in 1979 – plus a four-metre O’Day Javelin sailing boat, named Isis after the Egyptian goddess  of life and magic who protected women  and children and healed the sick. Ono’s “directionalist”, Takashi Yoshikawa, guided the couple in their decisions during this time, using a belief system based on hidden energies and birth dates – as, for example, when Lennon, now 39, announced he wanted to venture out on the high seas: up in Newport, Rhode Island, Hank Halsted, then a bearded 29-year-old, remembers getting the call from his charter broker in May 1980, requesting his date and time of birth. “Just tell them we’ll get along fine,” was his initial response, with no idea who “they” were.

Halsted was the captain of a beautiful 13-metre Hinckley centreboard GRP sloop, then named Megan Jaye. The connection was via Tyler Coneys of Coneys Marine (near Cold Spring Harbor), who’d sold Lennon Isis and taught him to sail. Now he’d found him a bigger boat.

Halsted had only just returned to Newport from nine months in the Caribbean, arriving at 10pm one night. He was making his way to the customs office the next morning when Paul McCaffrey, his charter broker, asked if he wanted to go to Bermuda – it was a charter for a guy from New York bringing his own crew. Halsted didn’t feel enthusiastic, but asked who the client was. McCaffrey demurred. Again, he needed the date and time of Halsted’s birth. Now intrigued, Halsted gave McCaffrey his digits, and Yoshikawa evidently gave his assent.

On 4 June, a four-person charter party flew in a Cessna 310 low-wing prop plane to Newport. Tyler, who still works at Coneys Marine, was joined by his cousins, Ellen and Kevin Coneys. Discretion was paramount. The crew was under strict instructions not to reveal the identity of the client, travelling under the name John Greene. 

All four of them wore blue T-shirts that also served as compasses, which Ellen, who’d just graduated from college, had picked out. “They were really cool,” Tyler recalls. “If you lay on your back at 12 noon, holding up a piece of string attached to the middle of the T-shirt at a 90-degree angle, another crew member could see from the shadow which way north was. John liked that;  we all did.”

The arriving party made its way to picturesque Murphy’s Dock (now the Newport Yachting Center Marina), and the Megan Jaye. “I’d no idea who I was looking at,” recalls Halsted, clearly bemused at this point. “They were wearing these T-shirts – the four of them. He was carrying a guitar, which he said he’d purchased from a pawn shop on the way up.” 

Now five, the group spent an hour looking over the yacht. Halsted perceived something unusual about the client, who’d presented himself simply as John. From a leather satchel he was carrying, Lennon produced some chopsticks. Halsted showed him his own set, adding that he had a Japanese girlfriend. The numerology was proving auspicious.

Halsted had more practical concerns when Lennon announced that all the food they needed for the trip was contained in his satchel. He said, “D’you mind if I go to the store and fill in a little around the edges?” Lennon went too, and while he filled his basket with food, Halsted watched as Lennon’s samurai hair bun darted away to unusual produce sections, featuring, say, nori – seaweed sheets. 

His curiosity getting the better of him, he phoned his broker: “Hey, what would you say if I told you I had John Lennon on my boat?” McCaffrey laughed, before replying, “I’d tell you you’re full of shit.”

At 8pm, approaching sunset, they set sail, leaving behind the gunmetal-grey clouds gathering over Newport and the north-western sky. “This is cool; I’m moving out of the clouds; moving forward into a clear horizon,” Lennon told Halsted. Soon they passed Block Island, east of Long Island. 

More than 1,100 kilometres of open ocean lay between them and their destination. Halsted had drawn up a watch system based on four-hour shifts at the helm. Tyler and John made up one watch, Ellen and Kevin another, while Halsted took the solo “dog watch” during the night.

Despite the relatively calm conditions, all three Coneys quickly succumbed to seasickness. “Only time I’d been seasick in my life,” says Tyler ruefully. “The disequilibrium in the inner ear causes the body to think it’s being poisoned; no one’s immune to that.” Halsted adds: “We were in about a 20-knot breeze and a good quartering sea. It was a ‘go-to-sea’ sea, which will bring many people right into sickness. Then the breeze came a lot closer to the bow, and we were pounding into it. The waves kept building.”

The watch system was already faltering. “I was so cheap with the owner’s money, I refused to pay Hinckley $10,000 for an autopilot,” Halsted goes on. “So, 24/7, someone had to sit at the steering wheel.” The burden of responsibility now fully dawned on him. “I looked at myself – without a mirror – and said, ‘Holy shit, you’d better not fuck this one up, I sense you’ve got valuable cargo aboard.’”

Lennon, who’d once famously gone cold turkey to kick his heroin habit, was seemingly unaffected by the seasickness. Despite his near-total lack of experience aboard ocean-going yachts, he began to play a pivotal role on board. “That is what these yachts are really about,” says Halsted, “a life-support system for living where we’re not supposed to.”

Halsted was closer in age to Lennon than the Coneys were, with his own experience of rock ’n’ roll and drugs during the 1960s. He’d promoted concerts in Colorado (one for Janis Joplin’s Big Brother and the Holding Company) and set up a drug clinic there too. Only now did Lennon confirm he was a former Beatle, which Halsted was having trouble getting his head around. He surmises, “If I’m not wrong, this trip was designed as a kind of psychic cleanse. Only, I’m not sure he was expecting all he’d get.”

At night, the myriad stars of the Milky Way pulsated. Lennon watched Halsted use a sextant to plot the yacht’s course, observing, “That’s what Yoko does every night to figure out how we should best be living.” Halsted says, “In John’s vernacular, the other Beatles were great but never truly in touch with such a powerful woman. He’d found a soul alter ego in Yoko, which any man would find to be an absolute delight.” 

The two men talked on, Lennon’s trust in Halsted deepening. “We had these conversations about how the planet is powered: not by flesh, blood or oil, as is our reality, but rather by energy.” Halsted goes on: “If you get into quantum physics and reduce everything to its rudiments, there’s no matter on the planet, only energy.”

A gnawing concern was their passage through the Gulf Stream – the 100- to 200-kilometre-wide warm water current coursing through these westward reaches of the North Atlantic. “People talk about the Bermuda Triangle, but that’s just the name given to a big warm river running through cold ocean,” Halsted says. 

Abrupt temperature changes can bring startling transformations in conditions. Sure enough, on the night of Friday, June 6 – just two full days into the trip – the clouds began to darken ominously, and kept doing so. The wind speed, surface chop and rainfall all increased, then whipped up into a Force 8 gale.

“We only have the storm jib up, we’re cruising at 4.5 knots,” records Ellen, still stricken by seasickness. “Most people don’t like to be down below in bad weather – they like to be up in fresh air.” It is where the sight of a horizon can help restore our sense of balance. And yet, she continues, “John would be down there cooking a meal, everyone else thinking, ‘I can’t believe he wants to cook.’”

Preparing the food, Lennon managed to open an overhead cabinet just as a big wave slammed into the yacht. The cabinet emptied, its contents clattering everywhere. Despite his history of contrariness, he took it in his stride. “The man was blessed with exceptional antennae,” says Halsted. “If he’d seen me flinch or just waver an eyeball, he may have rightfully freaked out. But as long as I was happy, he was too.”

Tyler wasn’t so relaxed, as unnervingly large waves took control of the boat. “We’d be sliding down these liquid mountains,” he recalls. Soon, the screeching wind destroyed the canopy protecting the cockpit and the companionway leading from the cabin to the helm – “three stainless-steel bows supporting the canvas there, all flattened,” laments Halsted. “I’d never seen that before. It’s also the only storm where I was on deck and my coffee cup was swept clean out of my hand; smashed to pieces against that companionway.”

These weren’t the only things to be sacrificed that day. “I tore one of the reefs out of the mainsail, and didn’t have an appropriate sail wardrobe to hang something out, so we virtually ran with no sails at all for 24 hours,” Halsted says. This was another first. “I’d never run under bare poles before.” 

Then came the apex challenge: the exhaustion of Halsted.  “I was cooked,” he says. “OK, big boy,” he had said, turning to Lennon. “As you know, I’ve been driving here for quite a while. I need sleep. And guess what, there’s no one else to drive.”

“Well, jeez, Hank,” replied Lennon, as if joshing with his former bandmates, “all I’ve got are me skinny little guitar-playing muscles.” Due to his poor eyesight, Lennon was a notoriously bad driver. Despite having owned a blue Ferrari 330 GT and a more psychedelically painted Rolls-Royce Phantom V, he’d rarely been seen at the wheel since learning to drive in 1965.

“That ain’t the strength I’m looking for,” countered Halsted levelly. “Come here and drive this puppy.” The “dog watch” was now Lennon’s. Still resisting, beneath his bright yellow oilskin sou’wester hat, he only relented when the captain told him, “Look, I’m connected to this boat. If a noise occurs while I’m sleeping, I will know in my sleep whether I need to wake.”

They spent another hour going over what was required. “There was so much wind, he didn’t really have to think which way it was coming from,” says Halsted. “It was very rough. I told him you don’t jibe; you don’t let the wind get across the back end of the boat or it will cause some violent changes we don’t want to deal with. Then I gave him the course. He picked it up fast. His intuition about this kind of stuff was remarkable.” Halsted gave in to sleep, closing the companionway hatch after him, leaving Lennon up there, alone.

Saltwater dripping from his glasses, Lennon clung to the knurled wheel in the gathering darkness, now and then forced to his knees by the propulsive onrushes of stinging water causing feet to slip and lips to bubble; almost buried by the cold water and the danger and insignificance out there in the cosmos; such a tiny speck on a vast, now violent ocean. Still he held fast, screaming up at the swirling fat raindrops and thundering sky, “Take me away, God; I don’t give a shit!”

At the height of the storm, he began shouting out sea shanties. Triangulating recollections of Halsted and the Coneys with the prompts of Gerry Smyth – a Dublin-born musician and professor of Irish Cultural History at Liverpool John Moores University – the most significant song he sang that night may have been Molly Malone, “an Irish street ballad, not a shanty, but well known to the Liverpool-Irish community and probably performed at some point by his mother, Julia, on her banjo,” says Smyth. 

After the famous “Alive, alive, oh” chorus, the second verse tells of how Molly was a fishmonger just like her father and mother before her – speaking to the potency of ancestry. The third verse goes, “She died of the fever/And no one could save her... Still her ghost cried, Alive, alive, oh!”

Might Lennon have sensed what was coming at year’s end? Was that why the “directionalism” and numerology had become so important? Might he equally have sensed, that night, what lay “on the other side” – and that it would all be OK? Halsted says, cryptically, “I got the feeling it would be a great celebration in the end, and it was.” 

What’s beyond doubt is the transformation in him once the storm eased up. “I met a different guy,” Halsted marvels. “He was washed, exuberant, ecstatic; singing at the horizon and the sea, in a state of rapture with his environment.”

Lennon joined in the repairs required around the boat with zeal. They were still mid-ocean, and a priority was reattaching the reef to the mainsail, which meant making new holes. Over the stove, he heated a galley utensil that doubled as a poker. 

Halsted used this to make fresh holes in the sail, with a sizzle. “I’m looking down the hatch,” recalls Halsted. “He’s looking up through those glasses, with this bright red poker utensil, handing it to me. It’s a primal connection: him, and the boat. Yet we’re all parts of this integrated system. In some very real sense, we’re a family.”

On June 11, a week after leaving Newport, they reached Bermuda. “It was a beautiful crisp afternoon,” records Halsted. “I was so glad he got the full cycle: smooth sea; tumultuous ocean; flattened sea again.” Colours seemed brighter; sounds, more acute. They puttered through Town Cut, a narrow natural passage leading to St George’s Harbour, in turn sheltered from the ocean by islands to the north and south. 

Greeting him were enticing pastel colours and dazzling whites, shaggy palm trees, the British place names, the people’s warmth as well as the weather, plus the sound of warbling birdsong. Also, from radio sets, soft reggae and Paul McCartney’s new single, Coming Up, which Lennon considered a fine piece of work.

Lennon couldn’t have landed in a better spot. This British Overseas Territory, settled by the English in 1612, felt like a return to his homeland, which he hadn’t set foot on in nine years – only a fantasy, sensorily heightened version of it. 

His recent exposure to the raw elements in mind, he entered in the logbook, “Dear Megan, there’s no place like nowhere, and thanks, Hank. Love, John Lennon.” He added a sketch of the yacht on the high seas, a smiling sun behind her and, to the side, his bearded, bespectacled face.

One place calling to him was the 36-acre hilltop botanical gardens just outside Hamilton, the capital. Perhaps it reminded him of the 36-acre Wavertree botanical gardens in Liverpool. The Wavertree area was where he’d grown up with his parents until the age of five, until, after a tumultuous period, he went to live with his Aunt Mimi. 

Walking through these exotic gardens, he came across a rare freesia, the Double Fantasy. It wasn’t yet in flower but the name fascinated him. “I thought, that’s a great title because it’s got so many meanings that you couldn’t begin to think what it meant,” he’d recount in an RKO radio station interview, the recording of which would wrap up at his New York apartment on the afternoon of Monday, 8 December.

“I was so centred after the experience at sea that I was tuned into the cosmos,” he explained meantime. “And all these songs came... After five years of nothing. Not trying, but nothing coming anyway; no inspiration; no thought; no anything, then suddenly voom voom voom.” He rented a waterfront villa called Undercliff, in Fairylands – a neighbourhood spread across two peninsulas in Hamilton’s westward outskirts. 

It was an enclave of winding lanes and homes surrounded by stone walls and hedges filled with fragrant hibiscus blooms. Sean joined him there. On one shopping trip, he bought some tape recorders and speakers from Stuart’s electronics store in Reid Street (since closed). The demo songs he recorded at Undercliff – complete with background noises of crickets and frogs – guided the production of the Double Fantasy album back in New York.

Ono and Lennon were mixing her disco-influenced track Walking on Thin Ice on the night of 8 December, having just learned that Double Fantasy, released three weeks prior, had gone gold. They skipped a meal at a nearby restaurant in favour of seeing Sean before he went to sleep. Their limousine pulled up to their apartment building towards 11pm, dropping them at the kerb outside the front entrance rather than driving them into the safety of the inner courtyard. 

Ono walked to the lobby while Lennon gathered their session cassettes from the car. “Mr Lennon,” a 25-year-old man who had been hanging around called out, pointing a snub-nosed pistol at him using a two-handed grip, feet planted firmly apart – seeing his own, feverish fantasy to completion.

Lennon’s senseless murder brought a jarringly premature end to a life with new-found resolution and vitality. It’s hard to watch McCartney perform without wondering how Lennon’s rediscovered creativity would have co-manifested with that of his former bandmate. Instead, we are left with Double Fantasy, which won the Grammy for Album of the Year in 1981, and a tale about Lennon’s visceral connection to the ocean, focusing not on limitations, but rather on possibilities.

With thanks to Scott Neil for the helpfulness of his book Lennon Bermuda (2012).

First published in the September 2025 issue of BOAT International's Life Under Sail. Get this magazine sent straight to your door, or subscribe and never miss an issue.