INCREDIBLE story from this month's Esquire

[Pocket Aces]

http://www.esquire.com/features/sailing1207#story


"I remember how I suffered when I was reading your book," my naval architect, Paolo Bisol, wrote to me this summer. He was French but had somehow run across my memoir, A Mile Down: The True Story of a Disastrous Career at Sea, before we met. "I was waiting for the disaster to happen and couldn't stand it. I couldn't believe somebody had actually gone through all that, and kept going. Now I have a similar feeling, only I don't know the ending and I have responsibility in it."

Bisol was pulling out of my project to build a fifty-foot trimaran for a nonstop solo circumnavigation. "This is literally giving me nightmares," he wrote. "I'm freaking out. I am so stressed that I cannot think of anything else."

My project has extreme constraints: I'm trying to spend only $25,000 for a boat that will sail nonstop around the world, covering twenty-five thousand miles in four months. It will have to sail fast in light air in the equatorial regions and also survive fifty-foot seas and hundred-knot winds in the terrifying Southern Ocean as I sail around Antarctica. And I'm building the boat myself, quickly, in a month or two, so it's flat bottomed, with straight sides, and as skinny and light and simple as possible.

Paolo Bisol is a good guy with a conscience, and he had been pushed past his limits. I certainly understood and could sympathize, but now it was July 15, 2007. I was planning to start my circumnavigation in December, which meant I needed a new naval architect.

Yves-Marie Tanton was hesitant at first to take on the design. "The hulls are just beams, basically," he said. Bisol had wanted to make the hulls larger, with more reserve buoyancy, so I told Tanton I'd be willing to do this. I understood that if I wanted a naval architect, I would have to build the boat larger and heavier than I thought it needed to be. We decided on a main hull that would be four feet high instead of two feet, and thirty inches wide instead of eighteen. The two smaller outside hulls, called amas, grew also. The weight of the boat went from fifty-five hundred pounds to eight thousand pounds. I'll be slower now, which means more time at sea, more exposure. But I agreed to the changes because I'm not suicidal. I want to survive the Southern Ocean, and I want at least one naval architect to share the faith.

I'd prefer to build a rounded, smooth carbon-fiber hull, of course, like Ellen Mac-Arthur's seventy-five-foot trimaran, which made it around the world in seventy-one days in 2005, breaking the nonstop-solo record. But this and other boats that race around the world cost literally a hundred to a thousand times as much. They spend more on their communications systems than I'll be spending on my entire boat. With my budget, I'd be able to buy one of their sails, maybe, or part of a mast, and no more. Offshore yacht racing is still an aristocratic sport, but I think a low-budget attempt on a homemade boat is possible.

My inspiration comes partly from Ken Barnes, who was rescued off Chile in January. A man with a pool-cleaning business who dreamed for years of sailing the globe, he wanted carbon fiber, too, but couldn't afford it. So he did what most sailors on a more limited budget would do: He bought a tough old boat -- a forty-four-foot steel ketch -- and outfitted it for the expedition. By the time he set off, he had spent $250,000 and more than three years preparing.

In December, I'll be setting sail on Ken's route from Long Beach, California. My boat will be very different -- twice as fast and a tenth as expensive -- but I'm trying to learn from Ken and his experience.

I had dinner with him in Newport Beach, California, in June. "From the moment you tell your best friend you're going to sail around the world, from that moment you've begun your adventure," he said.

Plenty of armchair sailors have scoffed at Ken and his attempt and rescue, but here's what Tony Gooch told him: "You left." Most sailors never leave their home port. Tony, a Canadian, is the first and only person to circumnavigate nonstop solo from the West Coast of North America. Ken was trying to be the first American to do it. And he was particularly well suited for the adventure.

Ken's a big guy, strong and athletic, and he's spent most of his life working alone. So being at sea for what he projected would be six to eight months didn't faze him. For me, it's the worst part, the part I dread. I can't stand the thought of being away from my wife for that long. One evening on my own and I start to feel a slight uneasiness. Two days on my own and I'm lonely and missing my wife. Ever since deciding to do this trip, I've felt an unshakable dread at the thought of 120 days alone. It feels like I'm going to solitary confinement, and perhaps this isn't far off, since my cabin will be three feet wide, eight feet long, and six feet, three inches high.

Ken's trip ended with a snap roll. He was naked in the tropics, head shorn, reading books and sweating belowdecks. He made slow time -- two months from California to Chile, going only ninety miles some days, less than four miles an hour. He had a big flat-screen TV but didn't use it because he needed to conserve fuel for the generator. He went through about fifty books. "Normally you give a book maybe one chapter and then go on to another, but out there you give it two chapters and probably three."

As he sailed farther south, though, closer to Antarctica, he hit more wind and bigger seas. "The air is colder and thicker down there," he said. "Twenty knots will surprise you. You'd bet it was thirty. And when it blows fifty, you'd swear it was eighty. You look at your gauge and you just can't believe it."

Ken had to climb his mast once in the middle of the night, in twenty-foot waves and thirty knots of wind, to free a snagged line. "You have to go," he said. "It's that or have your mast come down. Then there are times that are much worse, when you're safe down below, but the conditions are so extreme you think, Nothing can handle this, and you just wait for the boat to break. But a funny thing happens. You get complacent. There's an acclimation that happens out there, where what would seem crazy to most people starts to seem normal. You saw fifty knots of wind and twenty-foot seas yesterday, so seeing sixty knots and thirty-footers today doesn't seem so bad."

Ken was well prepared and knowledgeable, and he had the proper equipment aboard to survive the conditions. But he was also getting impatient. He was catching the edge of a storm to ride it around Cape Horn, sailing at fourteen knots, surfing past his hull speed, which means his very heavy fifty-thousand-pound boat was coming up out of the water like a surfboard. He was sick of the slow sailing, of not making any progress, so he wanted this speed. Sailing around the Horn, at the tip of South America, is the most famously dangerous passage in the world. Whalers and other ships tried for years to get around, only to be stopped over and over.

"The waves were coming from three angles," Ken said, "which happens all the time down there -- a twenty-five-foot wave might be sixty feet high as it combines with others." He had a Jordan series drogue, which is like a six-hundred-foot bungee cord with more than a hundred small parachutes to slow the boat to one knot in rough conditions and keep it stable. If he had deployed this, his boat would've been safe. But he wanted to make time in the wind, and he felt that the conditions were fine. Partly this is the acclimation he talked about, where the extreme starts to feel normal. His advice to me now is to be more cautious: "The minute you think of reducing sail or putting out the drogue, the minute the idea even crosses your mind as a possibility -- that's when you need to do it. Go defensive and live to sail again."

Ken's boat started to go sideways down a wave, and the autopilot couldn't correct it in time. "You think about what-ifs," he said. "I didn't have the gain all the way up on the autopilot. But I didn't have enough battery power for that, even though I had fourteen batteries. There are always consequences out there. Anything you do has a price. So I didn't have the power all the way up, and maybe if I had, the boat would have straightened out."

I have to admit, I can't imagine trusting an autopilot in those conditions. I would want to be at the helm myself. But will I feel the same after I've been at sea alone for a hundred days or more, after I've seen and survived worse conditions? And I'll be sleep deprived in any storm, not able to think well. What Ken says about acclimation is important, I think. So for my trip, I'll have a predetermined wave height or wind speed at which I'll deploy the drogue. That way, even if everything seems fine, I'll have a rule to follow that will take appropriate action anyway.

Once Ken's boat dug in sideways across the wave, the forces became unstoppable. Sails always want to pull a bow up into the wind, so that pressure was locking him into the wave, keeping him from turning away from it. And the boat had momentum to roll, like a Mack truck going fast and then taking a sharp curve.

His batteries had been bolted down, but two of them ripped through the floorboards and flew past him to land in the sink. A shattered piece of floorboard cut a gash in his leg four inches long, though he didn't notice it at the time. Ken had just put on a helmet, and this probably saved him. Both of his masts broke off. He had a very solid hard fiberglass dinghy on deck, and this was cut in half. The large deck hatch beneath it was ripped clean off, either by the dinghy or a piece of line, leaving a two-foot square hole in the deck. "Another roll and I wouldn't have self-righted," Ken said. "I would have down-flooded through that hole and sank. And I had the equipment to repair the hatch -- I had the material and even a rivet gun -- but it just wasn't possible in the storm."

Ken didn't roll again, though, and this is because he no longer had any sail up and wasn't moving fast through the water. He deployed the Jordan series drogue for extra safety. Then he set off his EPIRB, an emergency position-indicating radio beacon that would alert rescuers to his distress and current position. "When you pull that pin, your friggin' life's gonna change," he said. He had no masts, and his steering wheel was bent in a way that prevented him from steering. So he had no choice.

Ken's boat wasn't insured. As he waited for rescue, he thought about towing and repair versus sinking and, in the end, decided to sink it. The repairs would be at least $100,000 and almost impossible to arrange at the remote tip of South America. The towing and possible salvage claim would be outrageous. And he couldn't leave it just floating adrift, a hazard to other boats.

Ken thought about this for what turned out to be fifty-five hours. He was told at first, by satellite phone, that his rescue would be in twelve to fifteen hours. He stayed in his survival suit and cut away the radar arch and rigging to prepare for a helicopter lift.

After fifteen hours, he found out his rescue would be delayed another twelve hours, so he changed out of his survival suit. That's when he discovered the gash in his leg, and although he had everything he needed to treat it and sew it up -- he had a fantastic medical kit -- he thought rescue was imminent, so he only wrapped an Ace bandage around it.

When his rescuers finally arrived, he opened up valves to sink his boat. He was taken aboard a commercial fishing vessel and later flown to Chile. "The Straits of Magellan in a helicopter are unbelievable," he said, and here I thought of when my wife and I were rescued after our ninety-foot boat finally sank in the Caribbean. I felt such euphoria, in shock and thrilled at having survived. Everything was beautiful, every wave we passed over, and land seemed a gift.

Despite his loss, Ken doesn't regret his trip at all. "You're living your life," he said, "not just existing. Most people just exist. And they might think it's crazy, but they don't know what it's like to see stars down to the horizon, a moon bright enough to read by, and waves high as mountains, bright as diamonds. You're too awed to be scared. You look at it and think, Nobody, unless they risk it all, will be able to see what I'm seeing right now."

I plan to name my boat the Tin Can, which will be an accurate visual description and also what the Norwegian fishermen of the Alaskan fleet, in their wooden hulls, called my father's aluminum fishing boat. I'll be setting off at the end of December, and if I finish the route, I'll be the third American ever to sail around the world nonstop solo and the first to do it from the West Coast or on a homemade boat or on such a small budget or limited time for preparation or without an engine or generator. Ken planned to circumnavigate in six to eight months, but I'm hoping to do it in about four.

The first leg, from Long Beach to the southern tip of South America, will be six thousand miles. Ken did it in two months. I'm hoping to do it in one. I'll be in ice fields around the Horn, with the danger of colliding with an iceberg. My chances of colliding with a whale will increase, and it will be very cold. I'll most likely hit fifty-foot breaking waves and hurricane-force winds.

After the Horn, I'll sail more than eleven thousand miles of the open Southern Ocean for about two months, where no land gets in the way of the waves or wind and they simply grow. I'll be passing hundreds of miles south of the tip of South Africa, so I won't notice any effect from it. I may see land in the distance when I pass South West Cape, New Zealand, or I may stay too far offshore, depending on weather. Then I'll sail the last sixty-five hundred miles up through the South Pacific. By the time I hit Long Beach, after four months or more at sea, stepping onto land and seeing my wife and other people will feel strange indeed.

Most sailors would say I'm crazy to attempt this trip on my homemade boat built in a couple months for $25,000. When I told Ken I couldn't afford new sails and would be buying used sails, he told me I shouldn't go. But I'm used to this. My sailing has always been short on time and money and encouragement. My first sailboat was a forty-eight-foot ketch for charters, bought entirely on loans when I was twenty-nine. I learned to sail three months before I bought it, and after fixing it up for only six weeks, I sailed from California to Hawaii, then to Canada. The idea that I was going to do that trip without having earned my stripes first in the yacht club, drinking toddies and discussing wind shifts, drove the naysayers practically insane.

That was eleven years ago. I've sailed forty thousand miles offshore now and have a two-hundred-ton U.S. Coast Guard master's license. I've made it through storms and disasters at sea and always remained calm, and I believe I can build a boat that is appropriate for the conditions. Ken's boat was not appropriate for the Southern Ocean. It was a tough steel-hulled boat, but it was heavy, and what I learned from the sinking of my own heavy steel boat in 2001 is that the boat's own weight and heft are used against it once the waves become high and steep enough. The Coast Guard has a saying, "There's no replacement for displacement," but I would change this to simply, "There's no replacement for positive flotation." Big heavy boats break themselves up. Large ships disappear every year, and it's most likely from hitting sixty- to one-hundred-foot waves, which are supposed to happen statistically only once every ten thousand years but in fact occur regularly.

My boat will be as light as possible, fifty feet long with three skinny hulls spaced far enough apart so that my overall beam will be almost thirty feet. And the hulls will be filled with closed-cell foam for positive flotation. They'll be unsinkable except through fire, and I'll have no engine or generator on board that could catch on fire.

Each hull is just a long rectangular box, with the sides curving in to a point at each end. Most boats have frames every two or three feet that touch all the plating to support it, but Tanton is letting me put the frames inside the stringers, so that only the stringers touch the plate. I asked for this with the ninety-foot catamaran I designed and built in 2004 for charters in the Caribbean, but I was told it couldn't be done. Tanton is much more open-minded, though, flexible and smart.

Building that larger boat, which weighed ten times as much and had ten staterooms and ten bathrooms, I learned to weld, grind, cut, and fit, and I figured out how to get by with no infrastructure. A shipyard usually has a jig for a boat, a platform that holds the pieces in place, but I used five-dollar car jacks from the junkyard, cheap clamps from Home Depot, and scrap steel pipe welded into stands. I'm a low-budget builder, and I can't build pretty, but I can build strong.

I'm building this time in my carport and backyard in Tallahassee, Florida. I began in mid-August. I bought some steel tubing, which I welded into a platform fifty feet long and five feet wide. I cut all the aluminum plates with a forty-dollar circular saw from Home Depot, using a four-dollar wood blade with carbide tips. I bought a welder and spool gun for $2,000, a chop saw for $90, a grinder for $70, and a backup grinder for $30. A few clamps, pliers, measuring tapes, and pens, and that was it. If you keep the design simple, everything goes quickly. I have one friend, Mark Stafford, helping me on days when I tack pieces into place, and the other days I work alone. Mark is a poet and potter who instantly can see the shapes in his head and catches my errors in measurement or planning before there are consequences. He never complains as we wear our full jumpsuits in the Florida summer, soaked in 100 degree heat and 90 percent humidity, and he's not even being paid. Incredible. Always build with poets and potters, never with tradesmen.

We're building the two amas first, then the main hull. I took the axles off my landscaping trailer and plan to tow the three hulls cross-country to California with my old F-150. I'll weld the crossbeams in place in a boatyard in the San Francisco Bay Area, make the mast, fill the hulls with foam, and do some test sails on the bay. Then I'll sail down to Long Beach for my shakedown cruise.

I realize my design and schedule seem scary, but the truth is, I wouldn't be willing to sail this route in any production sailboat available on the market today. They're all too expensive, of course, even used, but more important, almost all are sinkable, most are far too slow, and they're just not strong enough.

I have an enclosed helm. My seat is the head of my bed and also has a toilet underneath. So I'm always at the helm if I'm not on deck. I won't be far belowdecks, as Ken and others often have been when something goes wrong. No production boat offers this. I also won't have an exposed cockpit, as most racers do, some of them swept overboard by large waves. I'll go out on deck as little as possible, always clipped in with a double harness to solid attachment points, not to lifelines, which can break, and I'll deploy the drogue in rough weather and just go one knot until conditions improve. I'll be faster than Ken through the light air of equatorial regions, because my boat will weigh a sixth as much, have almost as much sail area, and have less wind and wave resistance with its skinnier hull forms. It's also six feet longer, with twice the overall beam, so I'll be more stable in heavy seas. And the rigging will be stronger, built for more extreme conditions.

On the downside, I can afford only used sails, no roller furling or travelers or other standard racing gear, no engine or generator, and I'll have a small and uncomfortable cabin. No air-conditioning or TV, obviously. My entertainment will be reading and memorizing Old English, starting with "The Seafarer" and then the first part of Beowulf. I'll generate electricity by solar and wind power but also by pedal power, to keep my legs from atrophying, and my water maker will be manual as well as electric, so that I have regular upper-body exercise. I won't have a fancy chart plotter or other luxury electronics, or even basic ship's instruments for speed, depth, and wind, all of which are unnecessary. I'll have a compass, radar, two VHF radios, two GPS's, a satellite phone, and two EPIRB's. I'll have the most minimal equipment I can imagine going with -- certainly more minimal than anyone else goes with -- but I'll have backups, such as an emergency rudder.

I'm building this boat for battle, not for comfort. A day in the life will look something like this: Try half a dozen times to sleep for an hour, go out on deck to change jibs and adjust the wind vane (a mechanical autopilot), inspect the boat and all equipment and fittings several times, fix whatever is broken, make electricity and fresh water by cycling and pumping, call once a day for weather updates (if the satellite phone works) and once a day to speak with my wife, inspect odd noises and behaviors in the boat, dream of rocks that aren't on the charts (something I always do at sea, waking in a panic, convinced I'm about to hit), and try to remain healthy, keeping up with brushing my teeth, saltwater showers on deck, etc. When conditions are rough, I may not sleep at all. When there's no wind and seas are flat, I may sleep and read and shed actual tears of boredom. I've tried to think everything through carefully, but the experience will be fundamentally new, and I may be wrong about important things. We'll just have to see.

I think of this voyage every day. I'm busy with many other things, but I don't think of any of them. I think only of the end of December, of heading out and the impossibility of imagining what that's going to be like. I have far more experience than Ken had when he set out, but I also know that nothing I've done before really prepares me for this.

When I decided to do this trip, my wife and I went out to a celebratory dinner, through which she cried. But she's been cheerfully supportive ever since, which I have to believe is unusual. We've been in storms together, sank together, and also had our best times on the water, and I wish I could be sailing with her. Nonstop solo is a cruel invention.

When I told my uncle Doug I was doing the trip, I was surprised by his response. He was a commercial fisherman in Alaska for a year with my father. They fished the March halibut opening in the Bering Sea, one of the most dangerous fisheries in the world. Doug has spent a life on the water, had many boats, and after fishing with my father has also crossed several oceans with me. He hated this circumnavigation idea so much, though, that he tried at first to pretend I was joking. Then he said it would be devastating if something happened. He already lost my father to suicide. He made it clear he'd rather I didn't take this kind of risk.

My mother and sister were horrified by the idea, as was everyone else. No one is happy I'm taking this trip, and I hate to cause them anxiety. But for some reason, the idea of not going just isn't possible. I can't even get myself to consider not going. I'm not sure why that is. Some have suggested it's my father's suicide: I'm finding my own way toward suicide, or at least testing the idea. But I don't think that's true. I don't think the trip is going to be fun, but it does feel like who I am and what I'm doing. I feel fully engaged, which is the best part about living. This is the biggest thing I've ever done, and the boat is just very cool. The mounts on the amas for the crossbeams are so strong, I want to grab them with both hands and say, "Aargh!" in my pirate voice. I feel dread, it's true, because this will likely be the most dangerous and grueling and lonely time of my life, but it's also my time to step out into the world. A seafarer is who I am. =

David Vann will chronicle his attempt to sail around the world nonstop in a subsequent article that will appear in late spring or summer 2008, depending upon his return. You can track his progress periodically at esquire.com/tincan.