Carleton Mitchell, 96; writer, sailor won 3 consecutive Bermuda Cups

Carleton Mitchell, 96, who won three consecutive Bermuda Cups and wrote extensively about sailing, died Monday at his home in Key Biscayne, Fla.

With his aggressive racing style and talent for assembling the finest crews, Mitchell and his boat, the Finisterre, won the 635-mile race from Newport, R.I., to Bermuda in 1956, 1958 and 1960.

“No 20th century man can really escape, but a boat gives a man the opportunity to get away from the turmoil and into direct contact with nature,” Mitchell told Gay Talese, then a reporter for the New York Times, after winning the Bermuda Cup in 1958. “Somehow the detached life on the sea gives me the ability to think. It’s a life of action, yet contemplation,” the Times said he told Talese.

“Carleton was a giant of our sport,” Gary Jobson, a sailing journalist, told the Capitol newspaper in Annapolis, Md.

Mitchell was raised in Louisiana, where as a boy he learned to sail on Lake Pontchartrain. He attended Miami University in Ohio but dropped out to join a sailing crew. During World War II, he served in the Navy as a photographer. His writing and photography appeared in an array of publications, including National Geographic and Sports Illustrated. His books include “Passage East” (1953), about ocean racing, and “Islands to Windward” (1948), about sailing through the Caribbean Sea.