The stranded sailors watched for hours in the middle of the night as rescuers searched for them, but their radio had sunk so they had no way of alerting them.

"It was absolutely the most helpless feeling and the longest night I have ever spent," Van Dam said at the time. They both suffered hypothermia and were exhausted but otherwise fine. "Shivering away for six or seven hours takes it out of you."

Van Dam has sailed again, worldwide even. That experience pushed him to learn the sport "in earnest," he said. He has since sailed from Hawaii to Tahiti, and last year, he decided to pursue political office again — "once every decade," he jokes — while cruising around the Caribbean on his new 38-foot Catamaran.

Though not life-threatening per se, Van Dam faces an ominous political situation as he attempts to dethrone Bennett, who leads by a lopsided margin in the polls and in the pocketbook. The latest Deseret Morning News/KSL-TV poll by Dan Jones & Associates showed Bennett leading Van Dam by 37 percentage points. The last check of campaign finances revealed Bennett had about $2 million to campaign with compared to $100,000 for his challenger.

But if hitting the campaign trail harder counts for anything, then Van Dam appears to be leading in that category. Since announcing his candidacy last year, Van Dam has been a grassroots guru. When not pedaling, he has talked to "thousands of people" on the street, in restaurants, in schools, at "every senior citizen center in every small town . . . (and) every service club that'll hear us." He says he's waging it like "guerrilla warfare" and calls it a "door-to-door, person-to-person campaign."

"We're working as hard as we know how," Van Dam said, "given the substantial disabilities that exist in Utah for a Democrat, which equals the wrong party, the wrong religion and only about a million eight hundred thousand dollars disability in financing."

Van Dam, a product of the University of Utah law school (J.D., 1966), has played the role of underdog before — and he beat overdogs who led pre-election polls but were shocked on election night.

"When I ran for county attorney in 1974, the first thing my campaign manager said is, 'You haven't got a snowball's chance in hell,' " he recalls. Van Dam was first pitted against John Avery, who he says was "Mr. Democrat in Salt Lake County. He told me himself he could crush me like a bug because he had all the party's support." Van Dam earned 69 1/2 percent of the vote at the county convention, and he won the primary. "So," he said, "I didn't crush very easily."