John Fairfax was in the middle of the Atlantic, scraping barnacles from the bottom of his rowboat, when he spotted a giant mako shark charging at him from below. Pressing himself against the hull, he slashed at the beast’s belly with a knife. However, when he landed in Florida two months later, having become the first person to solo across the Atlantic, a reporter with The Miami Herald questioned his shark-slaying skills. Incensed, Fairfax rented a boat, poured fish blood into the water, waited for a shark to come, killed that shark, then dragged the shark’s dead body to the steps of The Miami Herald and dumped it there. Two years later he tackled an even bigger challenge, when he and his girlfriend, Sylvia Cook, became the first people to cross the Pacific in a rowboat. They set off from San Francisco and landed in Australia after a year of rowing. In the early 1980s, Fairfax settled down in Las Vegas, where he made his living at the game of baccarat. He died on Feb. 8, 2012 at the age of 74.
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| Fairfax and Cook |
