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 As we were planning this water-oriented issue, we realized
that almost everybody who produces The
Cultured Traveler lives near water or has had his life profoundly
affected by it.
Our publisher grew up in Santa Monica, Calif., and had only
to casually turn her head at any time to catch a view of the ocean.
Our editor lives on
the edge of San Francisco Bay, and our webmaster was once a U.S. Navy
submariner and later the owner of a 43-foot ocean-going sailboat that he
kept anchored at Alameda near San Francisco.
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Alan Paris, "Around Alone" Skipper of BTC Velocity
© Billy Black |
Jill Brackstone, our Bermuda correspondent, lives on a small
island hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic, surrounded by water. But
when it comes to leading a water-dominated life, even she can’t match
her son, Alan Paris. Alan, 38, left New York Harbor last September to
sail around the world, solo, on the BTC
Velocity, his “Open 40”
(40-foot) sailboat. The race he is in, which has taken place for 20
years, is called, appropriately enough, Around Alone.
The premise is simple: Solo competitors, manning craft
between 40 and 60 feet long, sail five legs that will eventually take
them around the world. The legs are measured in nautical miles, which
are about 15% longer than statute miles. The shortest leg is 4,350
nautical miles while the longest is almost 8,000.
Alan, who was born in New Zealand but is representing Bermuda
in the race, is one of 13 sailors (now
down to 10), including Emma Richards, a British woman, who are
sailing in the competition this year. Each is vying to be the first to
arrive first in his class (there are two classes) in Newport,
Rhode Island, sometime around May 15. Whatever order he finishes in,
each competitor will have covered at least 33,000 statute miles on the
high seas.
Since he left New York, with the exception of short official
landfalls in Torbay, England, Cape Town, South Africa, Hobart, Tasmania and Tauranga, New Zealand , Alan has lived utterly
alone, surrounded by two and three-mile-deep waters. (Alan also made an
unofficial stop for repairs near
Hobart, Tasmania. His next slated landfall is Salvador, Brazil.)
In the 13,000-mile stretch from Cape Town to Tierra del
Fuego, Alan has been in the Southern Ocean, the most fearsome and feared
waters on earth. If you look at a globe, you will see that only three
exceptions – Tasmania, New Zealand and Patagonia – the ocean waters
at the southern latitudes from 40º to 50º gird the earth with no land
to challenge them. The result is an abyss of maelstroms, high winds and
huge swells. Commercial shipping avoids these latitudes and people who
do challenge them are extreme sportsmen like Alan and his competitors.
 A solitary, Spartan existence
Despite Alan’s remoteness, he is not totally cut off from
human contact. A solar-powered PC and Internet connection allow him to
send brief daily e-mails to his wife, and he uses an iridium phone,
usually on holidays, to make calls to his relatives. But loneliness is
less a problem for Alan than the alternating stretches of vigilance and
tedium, sometimes punctuated by frantic action. “Alan has tons of
books and he reads a great deal,” says Jill, “with a bent towards
non-fiction. So he’s certainly catching up on the all reading he’d
ever want to do.”
Another
thing that occupies some of Alan’s time is responding to questions
sent by e-mail from several of Bermuda’s primary schools. He visited
14 of them before the trip began to describe some of what he might
encounter. The teachers are including the history, geography, sociology
and weather patterns of the countries Alan will be visiting. There is
also an after-school program that includes interactive sessions with the
skipper.
But as appealing as the chance to catch up on one’s reading
without interruption might seem, Alan is compelled by the fact he is
utterly physically alone to pay unrelenting attention to his craft.
“He has routines that he can never abandon,” says Jill. “Alan goes
over his boat, from bow to stern, every six to 12 hours looking for
anything wrong or than might be ready to go wrong.” As he does his
checks, says Jill, Alan encourages his boat and talks to her.
She relates that
after one check, Alan went below to nap but was soon awakened by
horrible noises. “The radar cradle had let loose and was banging into
the mast. He ended up having to climb the mast and cut the radar
cable.” The upshot, says Jill, was that Alan no longer had radar to
rely on. “By that time he wasn’t in too great a danger from
icebergs, which would have been the radar’s most likely targets, but
he could have used it going up the Argentinian coast.” There, she
says, Alan faces increased shipping traffic that may not see Alan or be
inclined to give him berth. Just before we published this issue, there
were many squalls going through the area. After one had passed through,
Alan saw to his consternation a large freighter only a quarter of a mile
astern. Far too close for comfort!
For food, Alan relies
on an array of high-calorie “boost bars,” freeze-dried food and
sardines. “Anytime that he has made landfall, Alan has gone to stores
looking for high-fat foods,” says Jill. “Much of his journey has
been through cold places where the wind-chill factor reduces
temperatures to below freezing.”
Occasionally, flying fish will land on deck, and a
well-wielded filet knife can turn them into a good meal. Jill says the
Japanese competitor, Kojiro Shiraishi, a sushi
lover, sacrificed other amenities on his boat, Spirit
of yukoh, so that he could have a functioning kitchen. “For Koji,
flying fish present a perfect opportunity to keep his cutting skills
fresh.”
For water, he relies primarily on the bottled stuff, although
he has
an 80-gallon water tank that he fills during squalls. That little bit of
extra water allows him the luxury of a shower.
Although there are sophisticated distilling machines that
would allow him to desalinate seawater, their weight and complexity make
using them a gamble. The lighter Alan can sail, the faster he can move.
To save weight, he has deliberately left much of his boat’s interior
unpainted, although in his small living area he has painted portions a
bright yellow to keep his spirits up on dark days.
Alan, who was born in New Zealand but is representing Bermuda
in the race, is one of 13 sailors, including Emma Richards, a British woman, who
are sailing in the competition this year. Each is vying to be the first to
arrive first in his class (there are two classes) in Providence, Rhode Island,
sometime around May 15. Whatever order he finishes in, each competitor will have
covered at least 33,000 statute miles on the high seas.
Since he left New York, with the exception of short official
landfalls in Torbay, England, Cape Town, South Africa, and Tauranga, New Zealand, Alan has lived utterly alone, surrounded by two and
three-mile-deep waters. (Alan also made an unofficial stop for repairs in
Hobart, Tasmania. His next slated landfall is Salvador, Brazil),
In the 13,000-mile stretch from Cape Town to Tierra del
Fuego, Alan has been in the Southern Ocean, the most fearsome and feared waters
on earth. If you look at a globe, you will see that only three exceptions –
Tasmania, New Zealand and Patagonia – the ocean waters at the southern
latitudes from 40º to 50º gird the earth with no land to challenge them. The
result is an abyss of maelstroms, high winds and huge swells. Commercial
shipping avoids these latitudes and people who do challenge them are extreme
sportsmen like Alan and his competitors.
Strict itinerary, flexible
Aussies
The race itinerary is
pretty strict. Participants are limited to where they can make harbor
and any deviations are penalized. For instance, at the beginning of the
race, many of the boats sought shelter from a huge Atlantic storm, by
taking shelter at ports in the Bay of Biscayne, off of
France and Spain, a decision that cost each of them a 48-hour penalty.
However, so many of the competitors took shelter that the net effect was
a penalty that wound up applying to all.
For Alan, a problem near Tasmania forced him to dock near
Hobart, seeking emergency repairs. Unfortunately, the closest
help was in Melbourne, several hundred miles north, and Alan lacked the
proper papers to even be in Australia. “Fortunately,” says Jill,
“the officials at Hobart saw a fellow sailor in trouble and cut
through the red tape by looking the other way as he flew up to Melbourne
and back getting assistance.” With swift help from the accommodating
Aussies, Alan was able to leave Hobart in short order and head to his
designated landfall in New Zealand.
This isn’t the first long solo race for Alan. He’s been
on five others, but none as long as this. Jill says he first got the bug
to circumnavigate the globe back in 1993 and even bought a boat and took
a year off to make plans. Within a few months, though, he met Becky, the
woman who is now his wife, and the dream went on temporary leave.
“Then, sometime in 2000, I came back from a trip and Alan said,
‘Guess what? Becky and “I have decided to sail around the world and
Becky has given me the OK!’” Jill recalls.
In 2001, Alan commissioned construction of a boat at the Jon Sayer’s
Allspar Boatyard in Brisbane, Australia. “The problem is that
Brisbane is almost 12,000 miles from Bermuda,” says Jill. “Just to
sail home to begin an around-the-world race would require him to sail
halfway around the world.” Alan’s dilemma was solved when an
Australian shipping line agreed to carry the BTC
Velocity for free to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Alan met the boat
there in January 2002 and sailed her the relatively short distance to
St. George’s, Bermuda.
“He arrived to an enormous welcome,” says Jill. “The
whole island knew what he was planning, plus he was a local resident of
St. George’s, which is also our port of entry and customs station.
There was plenty of hoopla and noise when he came in. Even
Michael Douglas, whose mother is Bermudian, and his wife, Catherine
Zeta Jones, showed up.”
While Alan has been reasonably lucky, experiencing no major
damage or life-threatening situations, other competitors have had a
worse time of it. Skipper Derek Hatfield, sailing the Spirit
of Canada, along with Alan was the last of two competitors to round
storm-ridden Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America. Hatfield
began having keel problems, this in the midst of 70 mph wind gusts, when
he radioed to his associates in Ushuaia, the southernmost city in the
world, that he had become dismasted. A fierce blast of wind had pitchpoled the boat and toppled the mast,
which began
crashing it as it dangled against the side of the boat. Hatfield had to
sever the mast to save his hull, and that action eliminated him from all
contention.
When Hatfield originally began reporting keel problems, Alan
had deliberately lingered in the area, refusing to transit Cape Horn and
make a northward turn into the South Atlantic until he could be certain
that Hatfield’s dilemma had been solved one way or the other.
Alan is now heading north, South America off his port side,
hoping to make Newport by mid-May. Jill says that as rugged and
determined as Alan is, he’s not a hyper-competitive soul, and that
even if he were to limp in last among all the competitors, it’s not a
outcome that he’ll spend a second ruing in years to come. “When he
gets home to Bermuda,” says Jill, ”he will become the Director of
the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institution, a position he’s
looking forward to.”
Chances are, says Jill, it will be awhile before Alan gets
the urge again to solo.
Visit the Around Alone
web site
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