And I like to think now of gender identity itself as a head-of-the-fleet luxury liner, one that deserves to be launched in celebration and revered by all.
The Victorian state supermaxi Skandia, which won in 2003, was also expected to be near the head of the fleet.
Somehow, David had the ambition and the savvy to keep his boat not only afloat but somewhere near the head of the fleet.
Dodging the Staten Island Ferry and tacking through the spectator boats, the Swiss sailor Bernard Stamm, the Frenchman Thierry Dubois and the Briton Emma Richards soon began to maneuver their 60-footers through the pack and toward the head of the fleet.
ON THE face of things, North Korea was supposed to quiver at the presence of a powerful American aircraft-carrier, the USS George Washington, at the head of a fleet of American and South Korean warships off the south-east coast of the Korean peninsula this week.
Navigating Grael into the best winds was the Isle of Wight-based Jules Salter (his brother, Guy, is that media man) and it is he who has also put the boat at the head of the fleet of eight as it streaks towards the finish of the first leg from Alicante in Cape Town.
Ray Davies entered in a taxi, Madness on a lorry, Pet Shop Boys on rickshaws, One Direction on a truck, Annie Lennox on a giant black ship and Ricky Wilson of the Kaiser Chiefs at the head of a fleet of mopeds.
Bick Pratt, head of government fleet sales for Dodge, credits the law enforcement accounts with raising awareness of its muscular cars.
Whatever the truth of the matter, in 608 Africa rose in revolt, and the Exarch's son, Heraclius the Younger, was dispatched against Constantinople at the head of a fleet.
One contemporary writer critical of the scuttling of the Terrible wrote that "she made no more water than she did before [the battle]", and, more acidly, "If an able officer had been at the head of the fleet, the Terrible would not have been destroyed".
