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Jill’s Son Goes ‘Round the World
(The First Bermudian in the "Around
Alone" Race)
By
Patrick Totty
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.
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.
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 has and 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 nut 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 increase 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.
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 at: http://www.aroundalone.com/