When Kirsten Neuschäfer decided to compete in the 2022-23 Golden Globe Race, she searched for a fast, safe and stable boat. She studied designs with a good ballast-to-weight ratio, and sought out a hull and rig that could withstand a hard beat to windward. 

She found Minnehaha in Newfoundland and knew that the tough, sturdy Cape George 36 was the one. The quick cutter with a generous sail plan met all of the official requirements—a production boat with a full keel, less than 36 feet long, designed before 1988—and a few requirements she had set for herself. 

“I wanted a super-secure boat for the Southern Ocean, which was fast as well,” Neuschäfer says. “Minnehaha suffers a little in light airs, but I knew I had a good chance of surviving. It was clear to me that the GGR was a bit of a race of attrition.”

Her instincts, along with detailed preparation, hard work and a bit of luck, served her well. Eight months after 16 skippers set out from the west coast of France to race solo 30,000 miles eastbound around a Southern Ocean course, Neuschäfer and Minnehaha caught one last whisper of wind off Les Sables d’Olonne, ghosted over the line, and sailed into history.

“I didn’t actually know that I’d won until the boats came out to meet me,” the South African sailor said of her historic finish. “I knew I was very close to Abhilash, so I was pushing hard. I knew we were very close.”

Indian skipper Abhilash Tomy battled the same light airs that Neuschäfer faced near the end of the race and arrived a day after, taking second place. Austrian Michael Guggenberger finished third, as the final skipper to complete the race in the racing class.

The Golden Globe Race is a nonstop, solo, unassisted round-the-world race with the start and finish line in Les Sables d’Olonne. Competitors are required to sail small boats using paper charts, VHF radio, sextants and celestial navigation. No modern weather-routing software is allowed, nor satellite communication, electronic instruments and autopilots. 

The route takes the sailors south through the Atlantic before heading east to Cape Town, South Africa, and around the Cape of Good Hope. After crossing the Indian Ocean and keeping Tasmania to port, sailors traverse the storm-plagued Southern Ocean and round Cape Horn. The ­final stretch leads north through the Atlantic and back to Les Sables d’Olonne.

Of the 16 skippers who started the 2022-23 race, 11 retired and two others made a single stop, moving them out of competition and into the Chichester Class. Neuschäfer’s victory made her one of only three people to win the race—and the first woman ever to win a solo circumnavigation yacht race.

“Minnehaha suffers in light airs, but I knew I had a good chance of surviving. The GGR is a race of attrition.”

The race is based on the 1968-69 Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, won by Sir Robin Knox-Johnston aboard his 32-foot Bermudan ketch, Suhaili. Knox-Johnston was the only skipper to finish; in doing so, he became the first person to solo-circumnavigate the globe nonstop. Nine others retired, one was dismasted, and one committed suicide. The race was run once more in 2018, on the 50th anniversary of the original race. Eighteen sailors set out, and five ­finished. French sailor Jean-Luc Van Den Heede won the 2018 edition. 

More people have gone into space than have sailed singlehanded around the world. The small nature of the club means that the sailors, while competing, still look out for one another’s health and safety.

During the first dash south down the Atlantic in the 2022-23 race, Neuschäfer relayed to the race committee the VHF-radio mayday call of fellow sailor Guy DeBoer, who’d hit rocks near the Canary Islands. After a night spent grinding over the rocks, DeBoer abandoned his boat the next morning with the help of a local rescue team.

Two months later, 450 miles southeast of Port Elizabeth, South Africa, Tapio Lehtinen’s Gaia 36, Asteria, flooded after taking on water from astern, and sank in less than 20 minutes. Lehtinen had just enough time to activate his EPIRB, put on his survival suit, and swim to his drifting life raft. “I gave Asteria a last standing salute as she went down,” the Finnish skipper said. Neuschäfer, the closet sailor to his position, altered course and hand-steered through the night to assist in his rescue. 

“The emergency handheld GPS showed Tapio’s coordinates,” Neuschäfer says. “I followed the track, but it was very difficult to spot a small, orange life raft. I was able to reach him on the VHF, but the early morning light was behind him, and I couldn’t see him. He fired off a flare, and I approached him on a beam reach. He’d been waiting 24 hours and was ready. He threw me a line, and I caught it on the first try, pulled him in, tied the life raft to Minnehaha, and helped him aboard.”

The two sailors shared a glass of rum. An hour later, Neuschäfer managed Lehtinen’s dangerous transfer from Minnehaha to bulk carrier Darya Gayatri, a freighter that had responded to the emergency call as well. “When I saw he was on board, I was just relieved for him,” she says.

Neuschäfer’s own heavy-weather plan focused on mitigating risks and staying true to strategies she’d set. When a low-pressure system approached on her way south to Cape Horn, she set a warp off her stern and held on for 12 hours until the storm blew over. In strong winds north of the Falklands, she hove-to, knowing that beating to windward in the extreme conditions risked damage to her boat. 

By this time in her life, she was no stranger to adventure. Neuschäfer’s early years had led her from South Africa to a set of jobs in Europe, followed by a solo trans-Africa biking trip, where she pedaled the continent north to south in her 20s. Her later experience working for Skip Novak on his Pelagic Expeditions exposed her to the wind and weather systems of the Antarctic Peninsula, Patagonia and the Falklands, and built her familiarity with the Southern Ocean.

“You need a great deal of self-sufficiency on these expeditions,” she says. “You need to know which tools and spares to bring. You need to be able to do all kinds of troubleshooting, refit the boats, change out a propeller, or fix a rig under difficult weather conditions.”

Neuschäfer had also done several long-distance ­deliveries, including taking a Leopard catamaran from the South Africa factory to Australia, and completing a singlehanded delivery from Portugal to South Africa on what she calls a labor-intensive boat. “This, that and the next thing needed to be done, and I discovered that I can solve problems out at sea,” she says.

As she followed the 2018 Golden Globe Race, she liked its spirit of adventure. “There are a lot of reasons to decide not to do something,” she says. “Having succeeded and followed my heart in other decisions, I knew that the GGR was something I should do.”

Her plans were nearly derailed early when she left her boat in Newfoundland and flew to South Africa, and then COVID-19 restrictions kept her from returning to Canada. She was eventually able to get back to Newfoundland and sail to Prince Edward Island, where she spent a year preparing for the race. She fell in love with the people there and made lifelong friends. Several were present at the Golden Globe Race finish line in Les Sables d’Olonne.

For her part, Neuschäfer makes light of the fact that the race dubbed a “Voyage for Madmen” was won by a woman. “I entered as a sailor,” she says. “I competed as a sailor and won as a sailor. On the same token, it’s a male-dominated race. If what I did inspires someone, then good will come of it, and I’m happy for that.”

Neuschäfer clearly has inspired the sailing world. On the final night of her race, as Minnehaha made its way up Les Sables d’Olonne channel, thousands of supporters lined the harbor walls, cheering and waving flares. Neuschäfer’s smile lit up the night. When she reached the dock, a friend handed her a bottle of champagne, which she sprayed into the air. Dressed in her sailing bibs and bare feet, she stepped off her boat and onto dry land for the first time in 235 days, and hugged her mother. 

Theresa Nicholson is CW’s senior editor.

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In the realm of extraordinary adventures, the thrill of a circumnavigation stands tall, offering an unparalleled opportunity to experience by boat some of the most mesmerizing places on the planet. It is a voyage that redefines the boundaries of exploration and leaves an indelible mark on the hearts and minds of all who undertake this amazing odyssey. Combine the allure of such a voyage with the comforts of cruising in a group of like-minded sailors, and you have the Oyster World Rally. Over the course of nearly 16 months, 25 Oyster yachts’ owners and guests traversed ­approximately 27,000 nautical miles, ­visiting awe-inspiring destinations, creating cherished memories along the way, and forging bonds to last a lifetime through shared experiences, laughter, and the pursuit of a common dream. From the vibrant shores of the Caribbean to the secluded islands of the South Pacific and beyond, participants witnessed firsthand the sheer diversity and beauty of our planet, all with the assurance of safety and comfort, knowing that fellow participants were nearby to lend a helping hand or share in the joy of discovering ­remarkable locations. In the pages that follow, we invite you to join us on the ­voyage of a lifetime, as Oyster World Rally participants share the magnificence of sailing and exploration that can be experienced only in a ­circumnavigation.

These were among the most ­beautiful places we have visited, completely remote and untouched by tourism. 

There were so many highlights on this trip ahead of us, but it was the prospect of adventure we were most looking forward to.

One of the magical things about sailing around the world is that you can reach places other people can’t in cruise ships; places that are tiny, with no infrastructure, and you get to experience these things that others simply cannot. 

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Their numbers are impressive: 45,000 miles, a couple dozen countries, islands too many to count, and 16 years with five to go before sailing completely around the world. A life’s accomplishment by any measure, with enough stories and pictures to fill a closetful of magazines.

But when Sherry and Dave McCampbell talk about circumnavigating, what you more often hear is nitty-gritty — “all the mundane stuff for our visits anywhere to be fun and stress-free,” Sherry says. “If you don’t sweat the small stuff, it doesn’t get done.”

Dave adds: “We plan ahead a lot. There are cruisers who say, ‘Oh, we just go.’ But I think you miss a lot if you do that. You end up in the wrong place, the wrong season, you get hit by weather that you wouldn’t if you were just watching what was going on. We have our next year planned out. We know where we’re going, pretty much. We know what the route is, we know when to go, and all of that.”

Sailing the world is not cruising the Virgin Islands. It takes years. It takes a good boat. It takes money. “It takes somebody who knows the boat and can make repairs in out-of-the-way places,” Dave says. “You can’t get too seasick. You can’t get too scared of being a thousand miles from shore. You can’t have a lot of family issues back home.”

Stir in a thirst for adventure and compatibility, and you’ve got the McCampbells. Which explains why the Florida pair will likely join the rather exclusive club of cruisers who have circumnavigated.

Dave, 77, a former US Navy diver, hatched the dream and acquired the boat in 1996. It was a beat-up 1980 CSY 44 Walkthrough Cutter for sale at $65,000. It had been chartered for 20 years, was in “horrible” shape, and needed 10 years to replace virtually everything to cross the Pacific. He named the boat Soggy Paws for a cat that dipped its foot while drinking water.

Sherry, 66, whose US Navy father took his family on a yearlong Caribbean cruise the year she graduated from high school, later led a women’s race team while programming computers and looking for a partner with a well-equipped boat for long-distance cruising. “I dated a few guys who said they were sailors, but they were dock people,” she says. 

Theirs was a quick courtship. They met March 5, 2006, sailed together on May 19, and on June 25, Dave asked her if she would go around the world with him. After working through a neatness divide, they married in 2007 and took off. “About once a month, we invite some people over,” Dave says with a chuckle. “That ends up being a mad scramble to clean up the boat. That works for me.”

As of this writing, they are docked in Malaysia. They make an annual trip home to see family and friends, pick up boat parts, get medical and dental checkups, and take a break from the small floating worlds they’ve occupied 24/7 for 16 years. In 2015, they ­enlarged their world by buying a St. Francis 44 catamaran, paid for with the sale of the CSY and $100,000 that Dave inherited. 

The monohull was, by then, 45 years old and becoming a maintenance black hole. After sailing on a catamaran, they came to admire sailing flat, with a heel of less than 5 degrees—“a huge advantage because you don’t get anywhere near as tired,” Dave says. “When underway, I can do things that I never could before: work on a computer, relax. The equipment is much more modern. It goes faster. It has so much more room for the stuff we’ve got.” 

They transferred the name; furnished a watermaker and refrigerator/freezer; upgraded the electric system (powered by solar panels), saildrives and interior lighting; and extended the hulls at the stern to create a dive platform. They’ve made hundreds of dives in their years afloat.

With her computer and communications skills, Sherry has compiled an online circumnavigation encyclopedia that details virtually every aspect of what they’ve learned. The site has neatly organized “compendiums” with indexes by year, by country, by task. There are 82 “maintenance” entries, 53 under “Indonesia,” and several dozen “passages.” From entry procedures to pirate precautions to how to make wine from rice in Muslim countries to historic World War II battle sites (Dave’s father, David, was a flying ace and Medal of Honor winner), their site is a day-to-day, sometimes hourly, account of what it’s been like to sail halfway around the world. The site has received half a million views.

The high points for them were long, slow island hopping in Micronesia and Fiji, the first with few other cruisers, the second with an active social net. “I used to fall asleep in geography class,” Sherry admits. “But now I’m discovering geography one country at a time, one person at a time. We’ve tried to learn about 10 different languages.”

The lows were slogging passages, upwind, against a current, in midsquall: wet memories that, with time, lose their edge. Oh, and that time on route to the Solomons when one of their engines died.

With good retirement plans that have actually increased in value, the McCampbells have also been able to park their boat and travel to other countries by air. Coming home to Florida has been a culture shock, in terms of politics and wealth. “This crazy United States isn’t where we left,” is all Sherry wanted to say for the record. 

Their view of the world has also changed. “There are little things that we had no idea about,” Dave says. “The number of people who are living just fine with no money at all in some of these out islands. They’re able to survive, do their own fishing and farming with essentially no income, just barely getting by but still having a good time, smiling and very welcoming to us.”

As members of the Seven Seas Cruising Association, they carry a tub of ­supplies to trade or give away. Sherry’s first impulse to carry lipsticks and makeup was ­welcomed in French Polynesia but not in the Solomons. “They want fishing gear, T-shirts, towels, soap, things for their kids: pens, pencils, paper, stuff they could use,” Dave says. And ­eyeglasses. Inexpensive ­drugstore magnifiers. Anybody over 40, because of the sun, had cataracts and wanted glasses.

If their good health holds, Dave and Sherry plan to head for the Mediterranean this December, up through the Red Sea. According to their current plan, by the time they finally get home, 20 years will have elapsed.

“One of our worries is, we’ve been out 16 years and we’re still only about halfway around, and we need to get the rest of the way around before one of us croaks,” Dave says. 

Sherry adds: “We’re still alive. We’re still having ­adventures at our age.” 

Jim Carrier taught himself to sail on Long Island Sound in a $100 Snark he carried atop his Mustang. After it blew apart in a million foam beads on I-95, he bought a 1970 Allied Seabreeze yawl and sailed it 15,000 miles across the Atlantic and Mediterranean.

The post This Ol’ Boat: Halfway Around and Aiming to Cross Their Wake appeared first on Cruising World.

Imagine losing your chart plotter midway through a passage. Now, imagine tossing out your autopilot, compass and all the paper charts too. Navigating thousands of ocean miles without modern navigational equipment takes sailing to a whole new level. 

Or, rather, it returns us to the roots of ancient sailors, using nature to find our way. 

More than a millennium ago, traditional Polynesian explorers voyaged between far-flung islands using a suite of natural clues: the direction of swells, the flight path of birds, the position of stars, the color of clouds. 

The Polynesian Voyaging Society is reviving the art and science of wayfinding with replicas of ancient voyaging canoes. Since its inaugural voyage from Hawaii to Tahiti in 1976, the society has inspired people worldwide to embrace traditional navigation and Indigenous knowledge. The voyages made by hundreds of crew members have sparked a cultural renaissance. 

“We use voyaging to inspire other Indigenous communities about reclaiming their culture and how that’s connected to caring for the Earth and oceans,” says Sonja Swenson Rogers, the society’s communications director.

Last week, the society announced the Moananuiākea Voyage, a four-year circumnavigation of the Pacific that will launch June 10 from Juneau, Alaska. Two canoes, Hōkūleʻa and Hikianalia, will carry 400 rotating crew members an estimated 43,000 nautical miles. The plan is to visit 36 countries and archipelagoes, nearly 100 Indigenous territories and more than 300 ports—all using traditional wayfinding.

“Every day, a navigator needs to make 5,000 observations, of a wave or a bird or a star, and make 500 choices about trim, course, steering, and then make two decisions at sunrise and sunset,” says Nainoa Thompson, CEO of the Polynesian Voyaging Society and a master navigator.

Thompson was the first Polynesian in at least 600 years to use wayfinding for long-distance, open-ocean voyaging. He studied under Mau Piailug, a master navigator from the Micronesian island of Satawal, who led Hōkūleʻa to Tahiti on her first voyage. European colonizers believed the native peoples accidentally drifted across the sea, but modern wayfinders have proved that skilled explorers can navigate purposefully and precisely between Pacific islands just as their ancestors did.

During the past four decades, Thompson has dedicated much of his time to training new navigators from Hawaii and other Pacific islands. He says the goal of the Moananuiākea Voyage is to ignite a movement of 10 million “planetary navigators” to help steer “our island Earth” toward a healthy, thriving future. “This is about not just the oceans; this is about taking discovery and moving it towards choices and…action that we believe is going to help build a future that is good enough for our kids,” Thompson says.

Moananuiākea (the Hawaiian word for the Pacific Ocean) will be Hōkūleʻa’s 15th major voyage. Hōkūleʻa will be shipped on a barge from Hawaii to Tacoma, Washington, on April 16, then make its way north to Auke Bay in Juneau, Alaska, the traditional lands of the A’akw Kwáan. On June 15, Hōkūleʻa will begin its circumnavigation of the Pacific after a ceremony with leaders from Taiwan, French Polynesia, the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island, and New Zealand (which the Maori call Aotearoa). Traditional canoes from First Nations will also be in Auke Bay to pay homage to Indigenous peoples and communities in Alaska, Rogers says.

Hikianalia will join the voyage in August in Seattle, and then the sister canoes will navigate south along the west coasts of North and South America. In spring 2024, the canoes will begin sailing through Polynesia, arriving in New Zealand during the first half of 2025. From there, the voyage will move north to Melanesia, Micronesia, Palau and Japan, where the canoes will be shipped to California at the end of 2026. The circumnavigation will wrap up with a sail from Los Angeles to Hawaii, and a round-trip visit to Tahiti in spring 2027. 

“The incredible, beautiful cultural revival—it’s a big part of the voyage,” Rogers says. “We want to share our story and hear others’ stories.”

Follow the Moananuiākea Voyage and learn more at hokulea.com and waahonua.com.

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The short answer: Always bring your sense of humor, and always leave your societal cares and woes. 

The longer, more complex answer starts with a question: How do you use your boat? 

Many folks daysail on the weekends. Fine. They need only the basic tools and supplies to get them back to the dock they just left. However, my wife and I are occasionally at sea for 48 days—and once, in the Indian Ocean, we went four and half months without provisioning because, happily, there is nowhere to provision in uninhabited, blissful Chagos.

Back in the 1950s, when I started out, all offshore vessels were heavy-displacement  craft. They had cramped living space but much cargo capacity, which was good because once America faded over the transom, chandleries were almost nonexistent. International payments were nearly impossible. There was no overnight shipping. We attempted to bring everything with us—weight and space be damned.

On my Endurance 35 ketch, Carlotta, in the early 1970s, besides the usual impeller, zincs and filters for our Four-107 engine, I carried a spare head gasket, prop, raw-­water pump, starter motor, alternator and four injectors—drawing the line only at a spare diesel fuel pump. This was ­perfectly normal. Hell, I’ve known boats that carried a complete set of spare sails while shoving off across the Pacific.

However, there were four problems with this approach. One, the weight of all these heavy spares added up. Two, ditto the cost. Three, they took up space. And four, often when you went to use the spare starter motor that you’d so carefully brought aboard seven years and two continents ago, it wouldn’t work. It would have been damaged by salt corrosion. I’ve probably purchased a dozen expensive head-gasket kits that never actually made it into the engine. One drop of salt water beat me to the punch. 

Today, boats are lighter and have far less stowage. Even if they could afford the weight, modern boat interiors are optimized to sell at boat shows, not necessarily to function well at sea. There’s barely room to stow a few cans of soup; forget such bulky items as starter motors or delicate items such as head gaskets. 

Worst, there’s more and more dependence on electronics and electrical stuff. I’ve happily cruised on vessels with hand-cranking diesels that had no wires going to them whatsoever. My current diesel, however, probably has 20 to 50 electro parts. And, of course, the rusty metal box that houses all these integrated circuits just happens to have ended up directly below our amidships cockpit steering pedestal that gushes water in a full gale like a lawn sprinkler. (I’ve installed an extensive water shed just above the engine to compensate.)

Progress? In terms of fuel economy, perhaps. In other ways, certainly not. And the future is plain: Soon, all injectors will be electronic as well.

I realize that I’m an old fart. Carlotta, along with my 52-foot John Alden schooner, Elizabeth, and my 22-foot double-ender, Corina, all had kerosene running lights. Those Fresnel-lensed Perko units worked pretty well for the 32 years we lived aboard these craft.

Was I unusual in the amount of spares I used to carry? Perhaps. Once, in the Mediterranean, while running late for a wild party on the Italian island of Sardinia, we received a forecast for light airs. We anchored in a Greek cove for a couple of hours to swap out our slipping Hurst transmission. It’s easy if you’ve got the proper tools, and oh, what a party it was! Then again, a DIYer like myself can get carried away. I don’t have a welding machine or a metal lathe aboard, but I envy circumnavigator Tom Lemm of the pinky schooner Le Papillon, who does. 

So, what should a prudent modern mariner carry aboard today? If well-heeled, not too much. There are well-stocked chandleries in the Bahamas, Caribbean, Panama Canal, Tahiti, New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, Thailand, South Africa and Brazil. Marine service outlets are everywhere, for a pretty penny. 

And, of course, luck plays a part. My buddy Woody was nearing the end of his circumnavigation when lightning struck his boat in the mid-Pacific. After putting out the numerous fires (including paperback books that ignited where they touched chainplates), he happily announced to the crew that he carried a spare electro everything—GPS, VHF radio, depth sounder, alternator and more. Alas, despite each of these units being bone-dry, unconnected and stowed in sealed plastic-foam containers, none of them worked. The force of the lightning strike had been that strong.

Poorly funded or work-as-you-go circumnavigations have to carry far more spares and tools. My stand-up, vise-equipped tool room bristles with mechanical, electrical, plumbing and woodworking tools. I don’t have just an adjustable wrench or two; I have sockets from tiny to inch-and-a-quarter in both imperial and metric sizes for quarter-, three-eighths- and half-inch drives. Plus, a long breaker bar. Open-end and box-end wrenches. Short and long extenders. Torque wrench? Of course. Three sizes of crowbars? Why not?

Do I use these often? Yeah, I do—especially on the boats of friends who don’t know their Loctite adhesive from their Never-Seez lubricant. 

But back to the practical advice: You need to carry the stuff that will break. The top of this list is electrical autopilots. If I’m in Auckland, New Zealand, and a friend sails in from the Lesser Antilles, I always say, “I heard you had autopilot problems.” Chances are, it’s true (unless they have a Monitor or other dependable mechanical-steer device like we do). 

Next is watermakers. One popular brand eats so much money that owners joke that they should switch to Dom Pérignon because it would be cheaper. Freshwater-pump systems also regularly fail unless you follow their strict maintenance schedule to the letter. Doing so would leave you little time for anything else. 

Heads, of course, are crappy to work on. It is everything I can do to not deep-six my two; the only reason I don’t is because I have such a sizable investment in their spares. I carry two complete pumps and a half-dozen joker valves, as well as every moving part, gasket and O-ring in the whole stinkin’ mess. 

My engine requires the most spare parts. I now carry a single spare injector and a spare raw-water pump, plus the usual impellers. I carry six each of the primary and secondary fuel filters in case I get a batch of bad fuel. Luckily, neither rusts. However, I carry only two spare lube oil filters because they do rust. (How counterproductive can you get?) 

Fluids are another problem. I carry enough oil and five-year coolant to replace what’s inside my engine, plus a few quarts so that I don’t have to deal with gallons in a seaway to top off. Yes, I carry 2 gallons of distilled water for our batteries as well. 

We carry a spare prop and carburetor for our wonderfully dependable, ultralight Tohatsu 10-horse. Ditto, a spare meter of Hypalon and extra glue for our Caribe dinghy. (We keep our inflatables carefully covered from the sun at all times, and we get 12 to 14 years of hard, daily use out of them. An amazing value.) 

My wife, Carolyn, has a 1950s Pfaff sewing machine that has circumnavigated numerous times aboard various boats. We stock all the threads, grommets, snaps and DOT fasteners to do almost anything fabric-related aboard. Our dinghy cover, sail covers and dodger are all in good nick. Do we make our own sails? No, but when our staysail blew apart in a Pacific gale south of the Cooks, we managed to stick it together long enough to get to New Zealand. Ditto when the entire head of a (used) jib pulled out off the Cocos Islands.  

Thanks to our humidity-controlled dry boxes, we don’t have moisture problems with our 12 hard drives, six lenses and two DSLR cameras. 

Our Para-Tech sea anchor and Jordan Series Drogue don’t require any spares, and we’re careful about chafe on the 1,200 feet of cordage and spare anchor rode that relates to them. Yes, I carry a spare windlass motor; no, I’ve never used it. 

Sadly, the tools I use most often these days are contained in my two small electrical toolboxes. These contain my ohmmeter, test lamps and terminal crimpers. I’d say that I work on my rig about one minute for every hour I work on my too-needy electrical system; those modern conveniences don’t come cheap in terms of weight, space, money or time. Example: I just installed double USBs in the aft and main cabins, as well as at the nav table and fo’c’sle. 

The hardest part of preparing for an ocean crossing or circumnavigation is to keep in mind that my life as an offshore sailor is not about the boat; it’s about the voyage. The boat is just a tool. It’s the experience a wise sailor seeks. One reason that I and my lovely bride of 52 years are still on our honeymoon together is because we understand that ease is a false god. 

To each his own, of course. Our idea is to sail to Chagos and enjoy Chagos—not to work on our vessel in Chagos. Not to update the autopilot’s firmware. Not to drunkenly shop online from paradise. Do you really think air conditioning improves the cruising experience? I don’t. Electric hatches and davits? Sheet and halyard winches? Vacuum-packed freshwater toilets? 

Really?

If you take it all with you, then you’ll never be able to get away from it.

Once, I received a gift of a state-of-the-art satphone from an editor. I politely attempted to refuse, but the publication firmly insisted. One perfect day in midocean, that same publication called me and hollered because of a misplaced comma or something equally trivial. My perfect day wasn’t perfect anymore. I brooded for an hour or two, then told to Carolyn to get our video camera. 

“Are you ready?” I asked. 

“Yes,” she said. “I’m recording.” 

“Excellent,” I muttered as I Frisbee’d the satphone into the 20,000-foot-deep blue sea. At the next port, I sent off a letter. I enclosed the SD card with my resignation letter. 

Ah, much better.

The post What Should You Bring With You When Packing for a Circumnavigation? appeared first on Cruising World.

Barry and Sue Parkin had already lost one sail. They were really, really hoping that they wouldn’t lose another as they screamed toward the finish line.

Their No. 3 jib tore straight across and blew apart the second time they took the helm of their recently purchased Oyster 625, Papillon. It was a 2013 build, and the sails that came with it were probably a decade old, with levels of wear and tear that they were still sussing out during September’s Oyster Palma Regatta off Spain’s Balearic Isles. 

“Every time we did a sail maneuver, it was the first time we’d done it on that boat,” Barry says. “We were working on how to get these sails up.”

Now, it was the last of three days of racing, and Papillon was in a battle for first place with the Oyster 625 Peregrine Falcon. With their résumés as Olympic sailors, the Parkins certainly had their competition worried, but what had started out as a 5-knot breeze had whipped up to a 20-knot blow. As they pushed the boat on the last leg of the course, they didn’t know if the old genoa would hold.

“These were laminate racing sails,” Barry says, adding that they had deteriorated just by being stored. Still, the Parkins kept the pressure on. “They have some good crew on Oysters. Some of the other boats had professional sailors on board.”

If you had asked the couple a few decades ago whether they would likely find themselves in that kind of a race, aboard that kind of a sailboat, they both likely would have said no. But now that they’re both 58 years old, with three of their four children out of school, they’re starting to think about sailing a lot differently. 

Back in the 1980s and ’90s—when you didn’t have to be a full-time sailor to compete in the Olympic Games—Barry and Sue were both good amateurs. He’d grown up in southwest England, in Falmouth, while she was raised in Brightlingsea on Britain’s east coast. They both learned to sail and race as kids and continued racing through college, until they graduated and got jobs. Sue became a math and physical education teacher, while Barry became a graduate trainee as an engineer with Mars Inc., building and designing production lines.

“We both then carried on racing at the highest level we could, using all of our vacations and weekends,” Barry says. “Sue went to the Olympics very young. She went to the 1988 Olympics in the 470, then again in ’92 and ’96. She did that while continuing to do women’s match racing in keel boats between each of the Olympics while still working full and part time.”

It took him a bit longer to get to the Games, but while working his way through different jobs with Mars and ­racing all over the world, he kept at it. “I really had a serious attempt at the Olympics at the end of ’94, when I was 30,” he says. “I got together with a team, and we went to the Olympics in ’96 and 2000.”

It was during the run up to the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta that Barry and Sue became really good friends as teammates. They married soon after. 

Meanwhile, Barry’s career at Mars kept advancing, all the way to global head of procurement and sustainability, the job he holds today. “I’ve worked for them for 37 years now,” he says. “During the period when I was training for the Olympics, I was at director level, and they supported me by giving me a lot of time off to train. But the week after the Olympics finished, I went back to work and carried on with my career.”

Still, both he and Sue have continued to race—now for Uncle Sam, as US nationals who split their time between Connecticut and Florida. Ahead of the Oyster regatta in September, Barry competed in the International Etchells Worlds in Cowes, England, and he’s planning to compete in the Etchells World Championship in April on Miami’s Biscayne Bay. Some of their kids too have caught the bug; 24-year-old Jack was a world youth champion who’s now an investment banker at JPMorgan in New York, sailing in his spare time, while 16-year-old Freddie—still in high school—became world youth champion on the 420 in July 2022 on the North Sea.

Sometimes, just for fun, they all head out on Long Island Sound to race against one another.

“Riverside Yacht Club in Connecticut, where we live in the summer, has the biggest frostbiting fleet in the country,” Barry says. “These are singlehanded, and on any given Sunday in the winter, you’ll have about 50 boats on the start line. It’s all weight-equalized, so we can all race each other. We’re very competitive. [My sons] generally beat me now—not always, but generally. I say, ‘Sure, you can beat me in a 10-foot boat, but maybe not in a 30-foot boat.’”

The couple did have boats of their own before buying the Oyster 625, with their biggest previously being a 36-foot Sessa powerboat for cruising in the Northeast (because, Barry says, “there’s not a lot of wind in the summer up there”). But with Freddie now looking at colleges and the other three kids well into adulthood, they have a vision of setting a course much farther into the distance. 

“Susie’s always had this dream that once the kids are gone, we’ll head off and do some cruising, see parts of the world we’ve never seen,” Barry says. “We have this idea of sailing around the world.”

Hence, the shopping began for a boat that would let them do it. Oysters are built near where Sue grew up in Britain, and the couple knows people who work for the yard. They always liked Oyster yachts—a premium brand made for shorthanded, comfortable, bluewater cruising—but what really sold them was the Oyster owners’ association and the company’s Oyster World Rally, a fully supported, global circumnavigation that starts and ends at the Caribbean island of Antigua.

“You’re cruising in company with the technical support and the peer support,” Barry says. “They train you, and you have great social events. So it lowers the bar on doing that trip considerably, versus heading off on your own. It makes it accessible to people who don’t have a lot of experience, which is us.”

The biggest challenge, he says, will be learning to make sense of such a complex boat. He’s learning all the Oyster 625’s systems—generators, watermakers, ice makers, air conditioning, navigation equipment—that never factored into the Parkins’ racing lives. 

“Then there’s the challenge of being on a boat day after day after day,” he says. “All of that is completely different from the challenges of racing on a small boat, where you’re on the water for maybe six or eight hours, maybe an overnight race, but it’s a sprint. You’re concerned about what might break on the boat, but you have very different safety considerations.”

So far, they’re happy with their choice of Papillon. Buying Hull No. 5 (previously Lady Mariposa) substantially reduced their required upfront investment, and they’ve put the boat into the Oyster Yachts charter fleet at a weekly base rate of $22,000 to help offset their expenses. This winter, Papillon will be in the Caribbean, where they plan to cruise in between charter use. For summer 2023, the boat will be in New England, and they hope to do the Newport Bermuda Race in 2024. 

Somewhere along the way, they’re ­eagerly anticipating spending their first-ever night aboard while sailing offshore.

“I’ve spent many days and nights on boats in the past, but an Oyster is ­pretty luxurious,” Barry says. “You’re not ­slumming it. The owner’s cabin in the back is full width. It’s really, really nice.”

And, of course, they’ll be racing Papillon when the opportunity arises, as it did in the Balearic Isles shortly after they took delivery in fall 2022—when they were in a battle for first place aboard their boat that they barely knew, and weren’t sure if the genoa would hold.

Despite their best efforts that day, the old sail gave out on them after about five hours of racing, just before Papillon got to the finish. Peregrine Falcon took the top spot. 

“We had to put up a different one. It was just another older sail, but that cost us the win,” Barry says. “But we were there to have fun, so we weren’t that upset. We learned a lot about the boat, which sails great. It will do 9½ knots upwind and 12 knots off the wind with an asymmetric up.”

Barry, Sue and all their friends who were on board that day are eager for another shot at a win. Their next opportunity against the Oyster fleet will be the Oyster Antigua Regatta in April, based at Nelson’s Dockyard in English Harbour.

There’s likely to be a sizable roster of skilled competitors there too, given that the regatta will include a celebration of Oyster’s 50th year in business, as well as a welcome home for boats completing the 2022-23 Oyster World Rally. 

Fair notice to all: By then, the Parkins will have Papillon’s new sails. 

The post Learning to Fly: Longtime Sailboat Racers Discover Cruising On Their New Oyster 625 <em>Papillon</em> appeared first on Cruising World.

Ginger and Peter Niemann were recently awarded the 2021 Blue Water Medal by the Cruising Club of America for their inspirational efforts and achievements during two sailing circumnavigations. Their circumnavigations took them to the Arctic’s northern latitudes and Patagonia’s southern latitudes; their second trip around the world included several rigorous, non-stop passages due to COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.

The Niemanns’ first voyaging boat was Marcy, a 47-foot sloop they converted from a schooner. From 2006 to 2010, Marcy took them west-about from Seattle almost 50,000 miles around the world, including rounding the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn.

In 2017, they departed Washington State on Irene, a 52-foot fiberglass ketch. Taking the opposite direction, east-about, through the Northwest Passage and staying in the northern hemisphere, they never crossed their first circumnavigation’s track. They sailed to Greenland, Newfoundland, and the US East Coast before crossing the Atlantic to Ireland.

After touring the U.K., Atlantic Europe and the Mediterranean, they found themselves suddenly stranded in Turkey when the COVID-19 pandemic began. Like many other international cruisers, they were stopped in their tracks. Unwilling to leave Irene, they considered staying in Turkey; sailing back home across the Atlantic; or heading home to the Pacific Northwest through the Suez Canal. They chose the third option and sailed for two months and 6,000 miles non-stop across the Indian Ocean during the monsoon to Batam, Indonesia.

When they arrived in Batam they found their previously negotiated permission to stay in Indonesia revoked. Nearby Singapore let them stay, but they were required to stay onboard their boat. They lived onboard at the Changi Sailing Club for five months; in all, they spent nearly 300 days unable to go ashore. On February 2, 2021, they departed on the long cruise home to Washington State via Japan and the Aleutians. Despite the challenges posed by the pandemic, Peter and Ginger persevered, cheerfully adapting to a seemingly endless onboard quarantine and undertaking lengthy sea passages under difficult conditions. CCA found their persistence and ingenuity truly inspiring. CCA recognized their teamwork, courage, good humor, flexibility and innovative spirit as evidence of their exceptional personal and sailing mettle and awarded them the 2021 Blue Water Medal.

The Blue Water Medal has been awarded regularly since 1923 to reward  seamanship and adventure upon the sea displayed by amateur sailors of all nationalities that might otherwise go unrecognized. Past winners include Eric Tabarly, Sir Francis Chichester, Rod Stephens, Webb Chiles and Eric and Susan Hiscock.

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“Reeves, you are a beacon on the shoals of life,” a man yelled from up the dock. All morning I worked on deck. The weekend had emptied the boatyard, quieting the bustle of lifts and cranes. Today there would be no interruptions from passersby, and I could happily focus on the present task: preparing Moli, my 45-foot aluminum cutter, for her second figure-eight-voyage attempt. Then the voice: “I am thrilled to follow your adventure,” the man said. “You show me places I never wish to go; you have experiences I never wish to have. You are a warning to others: ‘Pass not this way.’”

Such sentiments, I had found, were not uncommon, and even I had to admit that the first figure-eight attempt—a solo circumnavigation of the Americas and Antarctica in one season—had not exactly gone to plan. The plan, in brief, was to sail the Pacific south from my home port of San Francisco, and, after rounding Cape Horn, to proceed on a full east-about trek of the Southern Ocean; after rounding Cape Horn again, the course would proceed up the Atlantic, into the Arctic, and then would transit the Northwest Passage for home. Admittedly, it was a challenging goal.

Mo and I departed for the first time via the Golden Gate Bridge on September 30, 2017, but heavy weather knocked Mo flat west of Cape Horn and then again in the Indian Ocean. The former incident dealt fatal blows to both self-steering devices; the latter broke a window in the pilothouse, drowning most of Mo’s electronics. Both required unscheduled stops for repairs, by which time it was too late in the season to continue. The only logical solution: Sail home and start again.

RELATED: My Seventh Circumnavigation

On July 10, 2018, Mo and I returned under the Golden Gate Bridge, closing the loop on a 253-day 26,453-mile solo circumnavigation, which some had dubbed, and not by way of a compliment, “the longest shakedown cruise in history.” Three months later found me in the boatyard readying Mo for her second attempt when the stranger’s words broke my solitude.

Departure day came on October 1, 2018. Indian summer in San Francisco is warm but windless. Mo motored under full sail out to sea—and with an escort fleet of exactly one vessel. On departure the year before, I had looked to the horizon from under a cloud of foreboding, but now I felt relaxed. Now I knew what lay ahead, and I had a plan.

Our first test of this second attempt came in the Pacific at 49 degrees south, in the form of a Force 8 and 9 northwesterly blow lasting four days. My assessment of the previous year’s ­failure was that I’d not sailed fast enough. From the beginning, I had intended to follow the example of heroes such as Vito Dumas and Bernard Moitessier and keep moving through the worst of blows, but as conditions eased and seas stood up, I made the repeated mistake of staying on the tiny storm jib for too long. Counter to all intuition, speed is safety for a heavy boat in heavy weather because it provides the rudder with needed corrective power when the extremities of motion are making control a precious commodity. Thus, my vow on this second attempt was to keep up speed, to carry more sail—to leave the damned storm jib in its bag.

By day two of this blow, we were surrounded by great blue heavers with long troughs and cascading tops. On a deeply reefed working jib (over twice the sail area I’d carried on previous occasions), Mo rushed along with a steadiness that thrilled me. Several times she surfed straight down a massive wall, throwing a bow wave whose roar rivaled that of the gale. But she never faltered. Standing watch in the security of the pilothouse and amid this orchestrated chaos, I felt my satisfaction growing. Now we had a chance at a full circuit of the south, I thought. Soon I found myself whistling happily with the whine in the rigging. Only later did I recall with embarrassment that whistling in a blow is terribly bad luck, and forthwith, I scrawled instructions on a piece of duct tape fastened to the companionway hatch by way of reminder: “No Whistling Allowed!”

And then it was time for the Cape Horn approach. Out of prudence and heartfelt respect, I had planned this rounding to pass south of Islas Diego Ramirez, a group of rocks 20 miles below the Horn and on the edge of the continental shelf. South of these is open water of true, oceanic depth, but between Diego Ramirez and the Horn, the bottom quickly shelves to as little as 300 feet. Here, seas unmolested by land since New Zealand can pile up dangerously when weather is foul. In this case, however, a low sky brought only a cold and spitting rain. We had a fast wind but an easy sea, and on November 29, 56 days out of San Francisco, Mo and I swung in so close to the famous Cape that we could kiss her on the shins.

By morning, the headland could still be seen as a black smudge on the gray horizon astern. Mo creamed along under twin headsails in a brisk southwesterly, and as the water of the Pacific blended into that of the Atlantic, so my pride at the summit just attained was quickly cooled by thoughts of the challenge ahead.

My Southern Ocean strategy was simple: to stay as far south as I dared. There were two reasons for this. One was that at my target latitude of 47 degrees south, the circumference of the circle from Cape Horn to Cape Horn again was almost 2,000 miles shorter than at the more-typical rounding latitude of 40 degrees south. Secondly, Mo would wallow in fewer calms. The monstrous lows that march endlessly below the capes tend to hoover up everything around them, leaving vast windless spaces in ­between. The farther north of the lows one sails, the longer the calms last; the farther south, the more ­consistent the wind.

As it turned out, a lack of wind would not be a problem during this passage. By early December, we were above the Falklands and had turned to an easterly course when our first major low approached. Its winds built during the day but really came up to force overnight, with the anemometer touching 45 knots and gusting higher. The main had been doused, the boom lashed to its crutch, and the working jib was deeply reefed. The sea continued to build. Near midnight, I was dozing fitfully in my bunk when I felt Mo lift sharply, then there was a heavy slam of green water hitting the cockpit and companionway hatch. The boat rolled well over, and I rolled with her from my bunk and onto the cupboards. Then she righted, and I could hear the tinkling and splashing of water in the pilothouse.

I groaned at the thought that we’d yet again broken something vital. Grabbing a flashlight, I crawled into the ­pilothouse but found no shattered glass. In the cockpit, the dodger’s plastic door had been ripped open and the windvane paddle had been pulled from its socket. We had been badly pooped, but all that streaming wet below was from nothing more than the wave squirting in between the ­companionway hatch’s locked slide. “Keep the water out,” was Eric Hiscock’s advice for those making a Southern Ocean ­passage. As it turns out, this is rather more ­difficult than it sounds.

Two weeks later and halfway to Good Hope, we’d already ridden out three gales, and two more were in the forecast. My log was a succession of “large low arrives tonight”; “winds 35 gusting 45″; “chaotic seas—wind continues to build”; “the ocean is like a boulder garden”; “another low on the way.” By Christmas, we were well past the prime meridian and into the Indian Ocean. So far Mo had averaged a fast 140 miles a day, and the storm jib hadn’t budged from its position lashed onto the rail.

The most dreaded of questions an adventurer can face is why—why pursue such long, lonely, tiresome, risky voyages? At first, such inquiry caught me off guard, and my responses were halting. Wouldn’t anyone, given the opportunity, put at the top of his priorities list a solo sail around the world?

To me the answer is an immediate “yes.” But to others, and when the endless days of discomfort are weighed in—the sleepless nights, meals eaten from a can, the perpetual, clammy damp, hands so raw that the skin sloughs off, the gut-gnawing fear of an approaching storm, the inescapable wrath of a heavy sea, and months of exposure to a remoteness that makes the crew of the space station one’s nearest neighbors—when all that is known, most would choose not to go to sea and regard as crazy those who do.

But here’s the attraction: Sailing the Southern Ocean is like exploring an alien world. Down here, there isn’t the evidence of civilization that one finds in other oceans. Down here, there are no ships on the horizon, no jet contrails in the sky; no plastic trash ever clutters one’s wake. For months on end, there isn’t so much as a lee shore, and the waves, freed from all confinement except gravity, roam like giant buffalo upon a great, blue plain.

Moreover, down here, the animals one encounters live in such a purity of wildness that you could well be their first human encounter. Many days Mo and I were visited by that absolute marvel, the wandering albatross. As big as a suitcase and with a 12-foot wingspan, this bird lives most of its life on the wing and beyond the sight of land. It can glide in any direction in any strength of wind; so adapted is it to this environment that it can even sleep while aloft. When my little ship is struggling to survive, this bird hangs in the air with an effortlessness that defies understanding. There, above that crashing wave, it is poised so still as to seem carved out of the sky.

Or take the stars. Out here, on a clear and moonless night, the heavens shine such that our brother constellations recede into the melee of twinkling and are lost. On such a night, looking upward with binoculars is like dipping one’s hands into a basket of pearls. Look down, and galaxies of phosphorescence spin in your wake.

By January 18, Day 105 out of San Francisco, we were nearing the opposite side of the world and the halfway point in our circuit of the south. After dinner, I noticed that the barometer had dropped from 1,010 to 1,002 mb in a mere four hours. What had been an easy 20-knot westerly soon veered into the north and hardened. At midnight, I dropped the poled-out twin headsails and raised the main. Winds continued to build, and by 0200, the main was down again and lashed to its boom.

By 0400, pressure had reached 998, and brought with it a freight train of wind from the northwest. Now there was just enough light to make out the cement-colored sky pushing down upon the water. Seas were smack on the beam but manageable.

The front hit at 0600 with winds of 40 gusting to 45 and a pelting, horizontal rain. Crests of waves were blown off; the barometer dropped another 2 points. When it passed, the gale settled down to do its business. Long, wide crests of sea broke together and stained the black water with city-block-size patches of cream and ice blue. The barometer kept on sliding. At each two-hour log entry, it was down another 2 points. Four reefs in the working jib, Mo laboring.

At 1400, we reached the bottom of the low, and the barometer flattened out at 989. The wind roared. Mo shuddered in its force. The log read: “Seas massive; some plunge-breaking.” Two hours later: “A crazy, mishmash heavy sea. Pyramidal.” At 1700: “Long gusts to 50. Working jib down to a hanky.” Later that night: “Our first screaming surf down a wave I cannot see.”

To this point, Mo had been sure-footed. Always at the center of the surrounding chaos, her decks seemed as still and solid as Mother Earth. Yes, there were times when she stumbled, fell off a breaker and was thrown over to the windows, but she came back to rights and shook off things so quickly that the fall seemed hardly worth mentioning. Only when I went on deck did the fierceness of the gale become apparent.

On deck, I moved aft to adjust the windvane when I heard a crashing from the blackness astern. But I did not look aft, I looked up—and there a white wall hung for a moment. I leaped for the rail as it consumed the boat. Mo rolled. She was under. Immediate cold down foulies and boots. And then she was up. Cockpit a bathtub. Sheets trailing in the water. The main halyard was wrapped around my leg. Amazingly, there was no damage.

By 0100, I had been working the boat for 20 hours, was achingly cold and beginning to feel undone. Wind had eased significantly, and with its diminishing, so too the sea subsided. The moment had come to start adding back the sail we’d withdrawn so long ago, but this time I did not. I left Mo with but a handkerchief of a jib, tore off my foulies, and hit the sack. I didn’t even set an alarm.

On and on like this goes the Southern Ocean. By February 12, we were below New Zealand; by March 5, we were 5,000 miles due south of San Francisco; and as we descended for the second Cape Horn rounding, Mo and I were weary but battle hardened. This approach proved more tempestuous than the first, but now even dangerously foul weather couldn’t keep us from spying that great rock, that Everest of the watery south. Another gale came on. Mo pointed steadily onward and to within sight of our goal. The seas built. The wind roared. And then all cleared. Cape Horn came out of the abyss—gray, hulking rock not so much barren as raw, and with breakers throwing themselves at her feet. Then we were around, and yet on we raced. On and on and on…

On March 20, 2019—and as part of the figure-eight voyage—Mo and sailor-adventurer Randall Reeves completed a 15,343-mile 110-day circumnavigation of the Southern Ocean but continued north for a first stop in Halifax, Nova Scotia, after 237 days at sea. Coming next month: Mo and Reeves heed the call of the Northwest Passage. For more, check out Reeves’ book-length account of the voyage, available at figure8voyage.com.

The post Sailing the Southern Ocean appeared first on Cruising World.

The age of miracles has not passed. I am 80 years old today. Few, if any, including me, expected I would reach such an age. “Almost dying is a hard way to make a living,” I once wrote, and I have almost died more times than I can easily recall. It goes with the territory of pushing beyond the edge of human experience. Either I was very good or I was very lucky. Perhaps both.

I now mostly live in a condo on South Carolina’s Hilton Head Island overlooking Skull Creek, which is part of the Intracoastal Waterway. Gannet is docked 500 feet away. I can see her mast from our windows and deck.

Hilton Head Island has a wonderful climate from October to May, but is too hot in the summer with heat indexes routinely of 105 degrees F. So I am considering sailing somewhere cooler next summer. Iceland sounds cool.

Carol and I will spend the day quietly. I’ll go down and sit on Gannet for a while and consider what I’ve done with my life and what I might still do. This evening we will go out to dinner and when we return I will pour some of my favorite liquid, Laphroaig 10 year old single malt Scotch, and raise my glass to you and to me and to our dreams and to the passion to fulfill them.

To life.

Editor’s note: You can read more of Webb Chile’s writing at his website, inthepresentsea.com.

The post Webb Chiles Remarks on Turning 80 appeared first on Cruising World.

I have been called a serial circumnavigator. Among other things. I do like to go around in circles, and so at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday morning in late February, I walked down from our condominium on South Carolina’s Hilton Head Island overlooking Skull Creek Marina, where my Moore 24, Gannet, is docked, to prepare her for another epic voyage: my seventh circumnavigation. Well, really not so epic. The first six were around the planet. My seventh would be somewhat more modest: around Hilton Head Island. § Getting ready took a while. Gannet is no longer self-sufficient. When really voyaging, I can leave and return to the little boat with nothing more than the devices I carry in my messenger bag. No longer. I’ve removed as much from her as possible, including the Jordan drogue, clothes and most food. I had to fill water containers, stow equipment and food, fit the Torqeedo and check that it started. It did. I needed to fit a tiller pilot. Put the Velocitek in its mast mount. Move the anchor and rode-deployment bag from the bow to beneath the forward hatch. Remove the mainsail and the tiller covers and the covers for the compass and the depth finder. It takes almost as long to prepare for a daysail as to prepare to cross an ocean, which is one of the reasons I cross oceans more

than I daysail. In all, it took me more than an hour, but at 10:30, I was ready. I undid the line to my new pile float and realized that I had placed the bracket on which I intended to hang the line too high on the piling. I tried tossing it up there two or three times and gave up and dropped the loose end in the water.

I pushed Gannet out of her slip. The wind was northwest at 8 knots, pushing her back in, but the tide was ebbing, which partially neutralized that. I leapt on board and put the Torqeedo in reverse until we were clear enough to go forward.

We were heading around Hilton Head Island counterclockwise, roughly a 32-nautical-mile loop. The northwest wind was behind us and perfect. I unfurled the jib, feeling resistance from one of the lead blocks on the furling line that I needed to replace. I set the Autohelm to steer, stopped the Torqeedo, and tilted it out of the water. It had been on for seven minutes, and its work for the day was done. Water began to ripple past the hull as I brought in fenders and dock lines.

Past the marina, Skull Creek runs south for almost 2 miles. I’ve sailed this way only once before, and that was when I left Hilton Head for Panama two years earlier during my previous circumnavigation. I was careful to stay between the Intracoastal Waterway markers. The water in the channel is 20 feet deep. In places just outside the channel, it’s only 1 or 2 feet deep.

Familiar restaurants on the shore seemed to fly past. Dockside. Hudson’s. The wind was on the beam and gusty, ­heeling and rounding up the little boat sometimes more quickly than the Autohelm could respond. At the turn at the marker at the bend to the west, we came hard on the wind. I sheeted in the jib and took the tiller myself. Two powerboats had just come under the bridge and were heading toward us. I hoped they understood sailboats well enough to know that if I were headed by the breeze, I would have to cut across their bows. I had no room to tack away. But I was not confident that they did.

Gannet was heeled well over and making 6 knots under her small jib alone. Smooth water. The wind held steady. Fine sailing, but I was relieved when I could ease the sheet and fall off for the opening beneath the center of the bridge, which is the only way on and off the island. The mast height on Gannet is not a worry. A small powerboat was tied to a bridge piling with a man on board fishing. After a brief lull in the bridge’s wind shadow, we were through.

RELATED: Upgrades for a Circumnavigation

A curving half-mile past the bridge, the channel turns south again. I don’t know where Skull Creek ends and Calibogue Sound begins. Perhaps at the bridge itself. With the wind now on the starboard quarter, I set the mainsail, and our speed rose again to 6 and 7 knots. And then Gannet went out of control, rounded up, and headed for a nearby shoal. I glanced down and saw that the plastic end fitting on the tiller-pilot arm had broken. I grabbed the tiller, got us under control, and when the sound opened wider, turned Gannet into the wind, loosely hove to. I slipped into the cabin, where I grabbed another tiller pilot, returned to the cockpit, and swapped out the old one. Back on course, the sailing was glorious. Good wind. Smooth water. Warm sunshine. February.

My plan had been to anchor somewhere near the south end of the island, but we were off Harbor Town at noon and no sailor wants to waste good wind, so I decided to keep going.

We passed Hilton Head’s South Beach at 12:30. Evanston, Illinois, where we also live, also has a South Beach. At that moment, it was covered by 2 feet of snow. A woman walking on the beach waved at Gannet. I waved back for Gannet, which was busy sailing and unfortunately has no hands.

Hilton Head Island is 11 miles long and shaped like a shoe running northeast-southwest. We were rounding the toe and heading up the sole of the shoe, which is an almost continuous white-sand beach that is perhaps Hilton Head’s chief tourist attraction. However, you don’t make a sharp turn and you don’t sail close to the shore. Shoals extend out 2 to 3 miles. The channels are marked, but I kept close watch on the depth sounder and our position on the iSailor chart on my iPhone. Finally, we were able to make the turn to the northeast 3 miles offshore. As soon as we did, the wind went behind us and died.

We drifted for a few minutes before a slight exhalation filled the sails, and Gannet began to slip along at 2 to 3 knots. At least there were no waves to collapse the sails. The Atlantic was as flat as the sheltered water on the landward side of the island. I wished for more wind, but at least we were moving. There are worse places to be on a sunny winter afternoon than on a small sailboat gliding across smooth water.

As the hours passed, I watched the shore a couple of miles to port and saw two ships a few miles to starboard heading for the Savannah River, and I began to consider where I would spend the night.

Gannet’s outboard is an electric Torqeedo. I like it for several reasons. It breaks down into three parts, and is easy to mount and remove from the transom. It is quiet. It is clean. It precludes my having to carry gasoline and oil on board. Its battery can be charged from Gannet’s solar-powered electrical system. But it has drawbacks too. It’s expensive and has limited range. Just what Gannet’s range was at that moment I did not know. I had three Torqeedo batteries on board. One was 10 years old, which hadn’t be used in a long time and might be dead. The other two were probably good for 6 to 8 miles, each powering at 2.5 to 3 knots in smooth water and not against wind or tide.

At 5 p.m., we were nearing the north end of Hilton Head Island and the entrance into Port Royal Sound. Sunset would be at 6 p.m. I could certainly lower the Torqeedo back into the water, power into the sound and anchor there for the night, but the Atlantic Ocean was as smooth as a good harbor, and I was reasonably certain that the night would be calm.

Ten minutes before sunset, we were in 35 feet of water, 1.5 miles off the northeast corner of the island and a half-mile south of a buoy marking the dredged channel into the sound. I went forward, pulled the spade anchor and deployment bag onto the deck, and anchored. As I made my way aft, I was facing east. The nearest land was Bermuda, 800 miles away. I figured it would provide sufficient shelter, so I went below to turn on the masthead anchor light and pour myself a drink, which I took on deck with my Boom 2 speakers, and sipped and listened to Bach.

Dinner was freeze-dried beef stew, bought three years earlier, with the water heated on the JetBoil stove. Old times.

At sea, I sleep on the windward pipe berth. Well, we were technically at sea, but neither berth was to windward, and I had removed the berths to have the covers replaced. So I retired for a quiet night on the V-berth. A few years earlier, the eye of Category 5 Hurricane Matthew passed near where we were anchored. Timing is almost everything.

Secure in the lee of Bermuda, which had an unusually long wind shadow that evening, Gannet barely moved during the night, and I slept well. I woke a couple of times and went to the companionway, where I saw Hilton Head where it should be and the green buoy where it should be.

The sun came up, but the wind didn’t.

I ate my invariable sailing breakfast in the cockpit. I had brought a bottle of grapefruit juice with me, but my other provisions—instant coffee, uncooked oatmeal, whey protein power, trail mix, dried fruit and powered milk—had been on board since at least before I had Gannet trucked from San Diego to Hilton Head the previous Labor Day weekend, and probably much longer. They were all as tasty as ever, though some might disagree.

Through a bright, sunny, pleasant morning I waited, mostly reading Jonathon Raban’s Bad Land in the cabin to stay out of the sun, going on deck from time to time to watch bubbles drift past on the outgoing tide and to futilely look for any sign of wind.

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I decided that if there were no wind by noon, when the tide would turn in our favor, I would lower the Torqeedo and power into the sound. While my course the previous day had lots of curves and turns, I calculated that I had covered 24 miles and that I had 10 more to go to reach Gannet’s slip. I had no pressure of time. No need to be back in the marina that day and could anchor in the sound and wait for wind on Thursday. I just didn’t feel like staying where I was any longer.

A few minutes before noon, I was kneeling at the stern, preparing to tilt the Torqeedo into the water, when I felt a breath on my back. I turned and saw a line of darker wind-ruffled water to our south. I left the Torqeedo as it was, and made my way forward and raised the anchor. It came up clean. Hilton Head’s long white-sand beach must extend offshore.

After lowering the anchor and rode-deployment bag onto the V-berth, I raised sails, and Gannet began to gather way.

For the first mile, our course was north; then in the sound, northwest. Wind on our beam steadily increased to 12 and 14 knots, and moved forward when we turned. Still smooth water, only 6-inch ripples. More glorious sailing at 6 to 8 knots.

Several rivers pour into Port Royal Sound and the tides have carved out 40- and 50-foot depths, but there are isolated and mostly unmarked shoals. I am beginning to know these waters, but I continue to pay close attention to the depth sounder and the charts on my iPhone.

Gannet dashed along. The contrast was great between this and the afternoon before and the 18 hours we sat at anchor becalmed. Gannet sails so well in almost any wind, but she does need some.

As we neared the red and green markers at the mouth of Skull Creek, the wind was blowing 14 knots directly out. I didn’t feel like short-tacking the last 1.8 miles in the Intracoastal’s channel around a bend in the creek, so I furled the jib, lowered the Torqeedo into the water and started it, and lowered the main.

A sand spit to the north of the creek entrance was covered with birds: sea gulls, cormorants and one pelican. While Gannet’s 2-foot freeboard does not offer much windage, her ultralight weight does not carry far, and the headwind slowed us.

A few other boats passed, mostly power but a few sail. Those on board waved at the old man on his little boat. I’m sure they thought how nice it is that he still gets out on the water. The old man waved back.

As we rounded the curve and pointed at the marina, I put out fenders and dock lines, and we powered slowly into Gannet’s slip, tying up at 2:30 p.m. Circle completed.

Gannet’s second circumnavigation and my seventh was by far the most uneventful and the most pleasant. Amateurs seek ­adventures; professionals seek to avoid them. We had no ­undesired adventures. We did have a fine time.

Webb Chiles is a writer and sailor, and has solo-circumnavigated seven times, on a variety of boats. You can follow his adventures at ­inthepresentsea.com.

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