ANCHORED in a aqual lagoon, surrounded by a necklace of thin coral beach, the 32-foot cutter Saltbreaker has a tight below-decks cabin that smells like mildew, body odor, and, just now, a strip-mall dollar store. The space is a catastrophe of new T-shirts, cheap baseball hats, sunglasses, ballpoint pens, disposable lighters, aerosol string, flashlights, nylon rope, and four liters of Jack Daniel’s, the duty-free maximum.
“I heard you can get anything here for a bottle of Jack Daniel’s,” says Alex Kleeman, Saltbreaker’ 29-year-old co-skipper.
It’s a balmy afternoon in June 2012. Alex and his 27-year-old brother, Nick, are floating inside a sparsely populated atoll called Fakarava, part of the Tuamotu island group in French Polynesia. The plan is to trade this dime-store gear for food and supplies as they head…