17 November 2006
Buckinghamshire
REFLECTIONS

On 28th October 2005, I set out on the Alpha Global Expedition, the long quest to sail the first vertical, single-handed circumnavigation west-about by way of Cape Horn and the Russian Arctic.

By the time I made landfall on Alaska’s mountainous western shores on 8th August, I had been at sea for 276 days, sailed 26,000 miles and become only the fifteenth sailor to make a single-handed west-about rounding of Cape Horn.

When, at the age of fifteen I read Gipsy Moth Circles the World, Sir Francis Chichester’s account of his epic circumnavigation in 1966-67 and the original inspiration behind my own voyage, a secret ambition embedded itself in my psyche. Sir Francis had sailed over 15,000 miles between Australia and the UK, on his homeward leg, at that time the longest single-handed passage ever made. Two knock-downs within thirty seconds of one another at Cape Horn damaged the mast. When I arrived in Honolulu to make repairs, my log showed a distance travelled of 18,045 miles. I had gone further than Chichester and recorded the first single-handed, non-stop passage between the UK and Hawai’i. It was a seminal moment and with a feeling of relief that I sat down to steak and ice cold beer in the clubhouse of the Waikiki Yacht Club.

I often think back over the 26,000 miles that my boat, Barrabas and I travelled together – the heat, the cold, the storms, the calms, the joys, the fears but it is only with the expenditure of some mental effort that the scratchy clips of mind video are pulled form their neuronal archives and whirr away on the projector of my mind’s eye. The isolation of long sea passages contrasted against the relatively noisy, crowded environment of everyday life serves to quarantine the experience or the memory of it.

On the fourth day of the expedition, in violent squalls which battered the English coast, I was swept off the deck. In twenty foot seas and 50 mile an hour winds and with no life-line, I was completely separated from the boat. I had come on deck to make a quick adjustment to the self-steering vane. The boat was hit by a wave and heeled. A second wave washed up the side deck and bodily lifted me from my ship. It all happened in an instant. I remember feeling quite calm and warm, despite the frigid water. Such was my state of mind, convinced as I was that my death had arrived. How I managed to get back on board is a mystery or perhaps my guardian angel really was with me. I lunged for the boat which, I calculated later, would have been passed me and gone in less than two seconds. I found momentary reprieve when my right middle finger caught the thin shock cord securing the spray dodger. I immediately began to be dragged through the water, my body twisting round awkwardly so that my right shoulder was trying to dislocate itself. Then, a second wave picking me up, taking me round the stern and sitting me gently down on the aft deck.

I thought I was unlucky to be hit by such unseasonally severe Atlantic storms at the start of my voyage, but these conditions were replicated for the start of the 2006 Velux Five Oceans race, with four of the starters having to return to port to repair storm damage, among them Sir Robin Knox-Johnston whose boat, Grey Power rolled 360.
North of the Atlantic equator, I almost collided with a pirate vessel – that was my assessment: an eighty-foot, steel-hulled, rust-streaked boat bristling with surveillance equipment. I armed my weapon, a pump action shotgun and maintained a continuous radar watch for forty-eight hours while the vessel tracked Barrabas.

On Christmas day, south of the Atlantic equator, Sky News scheduled a live interview. I called my parents in South Africa beforehand. When I spoke to them afterwards, they described sitting down to Christmas lunch, listening to me on the television while I was sailing 300 miles off the Brazilian coast. Technology’s reach served the Alpha Global Expedition well. Email dispatches from the boat were picked up on the web and published in more than 40 countries.

Rounding Cape Horn, 50 degrees south on the Atlantic side to 50 degrees south on the Pacific side, a total distance of almost 1,000 miles was a sublime moment. I experienced the full range of conditions from severe storms and vicious squalls to light breezes. At one point I was actually sailing downwind under blue skies. I would have hoisted the spinnaker had I not lost it over the side during a storm off Argentina.

Many people have asked me about the solitude, the loneliness. Solitude I had in abundance, but I was never lonely. With satellite communications, I was able to regularly talk to base: my expedition manager and ex-wife, Louise and Ricardo Diniz in Lisbon, a meteorologist and experienced single-handed sailor who provided weather and routing advice. The toughest challenge was being separated from my two young sons, Benjamin and Gabriel. There were many times when I wanted to call it a day but I knew that being defeated is often a temporary condition. Giving up is what makes it permanent.

Through email, I received many messages of support which were hugely encouraging. It is difficult to articulate how uplifting a message can be, particularly when the writer has been touched in some positive way by the expedition.

But the journey is not yet over. A ‘true’ circumnavigation requires that all meridians of longitude are crossed. To achieve this, my route is dictated by my west-about rounding of Cape Horn – to complete the voyage I must sail through the Russian Arctic. In the days of the Cold War, the idea of a lone, western yachtsman venturing into this area of Russian territory would have been unthinkable. Today, it is an area which is environmentally vulnerable, but remains politically and militarily sensitive. Yet despite this, the Russian authorities did eventually issue the permissions necessary for me to transit. Dialogue between the Alpha Global Expedition and the Russian authorities started many months prior to departure and evolved during the course of the voyage. The highest political offices in both Britain and Russia became involved. I was in Nome, Alaska awaiting developments and fixing a mechanical problem that required the boat to be lifted out of the water by the time these clearances were approved on September 12th.

But with new ice forming along a critical point of the Northern Sea Route at Proliv Vil’kitskogo, I put aside the strong current of emotion, that pervasive tug of challenge (the Russian Arctic has never before been sailed single-handed and no British boat has ever been through), weighed the situation and made an extremely tough decision: to delay the final leg until the summer of 2007. 
Flying back to England was a truly surreal experience. Sipping coffee at thirty thousand feet, the ocean spread endlessly beneath the aircraft’s wings. The idea that I had traversed those spaces in a 40-foot boat seemed almost incomprehensible. And yet at sea, on Barrabas, nothing seemed more natural or normal than to be sailing along, day after day. Then, thoughts of driving to the supermarket, attending school plays, watching the evening news or flying on a plane seemed bizarre, distant, removed, odd. As I stared down through the small oval of Perspex locked in my own world of colliding emotions, I realized I had come know a certain truth. John Ruskin captured its essence when he wrote, ‘There is no wealth but life - life, including all its powers of love, of joy and of admiration.’

My agenda during my time back in the UK is full. Permissions to sail the Northern Sea Route do not carry to next year. The Ambassador of the Russian Federation in London has agreed to provide liaison with the relevant government departments in Moscow to support and facilitate my re-application to transit in 2007. I have teamed up with Steve Sleight, a hugely experienced yachtsman, author and broadcaster to make a two-part documentary of the voyage. Much of the material for the first part will be culled from the twenty hours of footage I shot en route. The second part will cover the Arctic phase which is exciting from the perspective of imbuing the voyage with its unique character. I am on a new quest for sponsorship that will see the Alpha Global Expedition through to completion and drafting ‘Over The Top’, the book of the voyage which I was commissioned to write prior to departure.  

I return to Alaska in June of next year to face the final challenge of the Alpha Global Expedition: to bring Barrabas through the Russian ice and close the loop on the world’s first vertical circumnavigation.