Captain Forsyth has sailed about 300,000 nautical miles, a mileage that exceeds the distance to the moon, much of it on his sturdy 42-foot cutter Fiona. His voyages have included, among others, two global circumnavigations, one clockwise and one counterclockwise, several trips to the Arctic and the Antarctic, a trip to the Baltic, and a cruise through the Northwest Passage, returning home to Long Island, New York via the Panama Canal. In 2000, Forsyth was presented with the Blue Water Medal by the Cruising Club of America, which bestows this honor annually on a single amateur sailor world-wide.

During the course of his long sailing career Captain Forsyth has seen countries develop from languorous oligarchies to thriving democracies with a burgeoning middle class. Slowly awareness grew that these developing countries, like the U.S.A., are almost totally dependent on the profligate use of fossil fuel, which is not a sustainable resource. Drawing on his award-winning experience in the power engineering field, Forsyth observes the changes he has seen in his fifty years of ocean sailing, and makes suggestions for drawing attention to this global problem. 

Eric Forsyth grew up in Bolton, England. After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at Manchester University, he served as an RAF fighter pilot in the 1950s. He obtained a master’s degree at Toronto University in 1960 and then worked until his retirement in 1995 at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York. He led the development at Brookhaven of superconducting cables suitable for very high capacity underground AC transmission systems. In 1986 he was appointed Chair of the Accelerator Development Department, which was responsible for the construction and design of several particle accelerators, including preconstruction design and planning of the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, now the largest nuclear physics research tool in the U.S. Forsyth is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (IEEE), and in 2007 he was presented with the Herman Halperin Award for Power Transmission and Distribution development. This is the highest distinction awarded annually by the IEEE for research in this field.