Reprinted from Outside magazine
Since 1894, when Joshua Slocum departed from Gloucester, Massachusetts, on his way to becoming the first person to sail around the world alone, 37 others have made the lonely trip. Slocum’s voyage lasted three years; today the record is 313 days. But if it’s now faster and more commonplace, solo circumnavigation is still considered the ultimate sailing test. And yet there is nothing that the spirit of competition can’t make harder.
Hence, the BOC Challenge—a transglobal single-handed sailing race sponsored by the British Oxygen Company that is touted by some as the first major international competition of its kind. That may be stretching the point—there have been similar competitions in the past—but this is the first real race, and the first to begin and end in the United States.
Plans call for the field of more than 30 entrants to set forth from Newport, Rhode Island on August 28 and log 7,100 nautical miles to Cape Town, South Africa. The next leg is 6,900 miles to Sydney, Australia, then 7,800 miles to Rio de Janiero, the a final 5,300 miles back to Rhode Island. The winner is expected home sometime next spring.
In the meantime, it’s likely to be a long 28,000 miles. “there is not going to bed when you’re tired,” says Robin Knox Johnston, the race committee chairman. “The boat’s needs come first. A mountaineer can amp when conditions get bad or he is tired. A lone yachtsman must keep nursing the boat until the storm passes.”
Johnston knows what he is talking about. He is the only person ever to have sailed nonstop around the world by himself. In doing so, he set the current world record.
Snipers and Grannies
With their three scheduled layovers, the BOC racers will have an easier time—if you want to look at it that way. During the long, lonely stretches at sea, they’ll have to subsist on freeze-dried food and bottled water—and hope that they don’t run out. And they’ll have to worry about the worst part of the trip: the passage around South America’s Cape Horn. At that latitude, waves have been known to reach 120 feet in height—vertical walls of water that can approach without warning in the night. Sailors call the region the “Roaring 40s.”
As you might expect, the race has, in the words of one entrant, “attracted all kinds.” For instance there is Australia’s “Sailing Granny,” 60-year-old Anna Gash, who recently sailed alone from Sydney to San Francisco and back. Also entered is Yuko Tada, a Japanese solo sailor who says he divides his time between Arctic expeditions and driving a taxi in Tokyo (both dangerous professions).
One of four French entrants is Jacques de Rous, commander of the French Navy School for Submarine Navigation. An Englishman, Ben Johnston, also has a military background he thinks might prove valuable against loneliness and fatigue: He was a sniper in the Black Watch Regiment during the Korean War. Johnston’s big problem right now is locating the yacht he spent two years and $150,000 building. It was stolen last spring from its berth in Florida.
Others have put second mortgages on their homes to come up with the minimum $50,000 needed to prepare for solo circumnavigation. Former Los Angeles Times editor Dan Byrne got so tired of people asking him why he quit a secure corporate job and sold off real estate holdings to compete hat he now passes out an explanatory brochure. For one thing, Byrne says, it’s the fulfillment of a life’s dream. For another, he wants to produce a book and film about the adventure to help offset its costs.
That is not very different from what Joshua Slocum did back at the turn of the century. (His book, Sailing Around the World, was published shortly after his trip.) The BOC racers will, however, be aiming at another goal: the 313-day record. Most agree that with recent innovations in nautical design, a new record is almost assured.