The Loneliest Race

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should be burned out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry rot...the proper function of man is to live, not to exist....I shall use my time.  - Jack London

It wasn't a race. Not really.

It was the 1994 BOC Challenge, a 27,000 mile 'round-the-world-alone sailing race.

Yeah, the professional sailors like Christophe Auguin, Josh Hall, and Steve Pettengill sailed the usual heavily sponsored rocket sleds. The horribly-named 60-foot Gartmore Investment Bankers smashed into a submerged shipping container and ended up 20,000 feet below the surface of the Atlantic.

But there was also Giovanni Soldini, a 28 year-old from Italy, who enlisted the help of people recovering from drug dependence to build his 50-footer. Sixty-year old Minoru Saito survived a 1988 heart-attack and drove Shuten Dohji II ("Son of a Drunk") to finish 110 days after the winner. Neal Petersen from South Africa, the 27-year old skipper of Protect Our Sealife, was born with a bone disease that left him without a ball and socket joint in one hip, and had been unable to walk until he was seven. 

Twenty sailors took part in the voyage they call "Around Alone". One of them, Nigel Rowe, said, "People who need an audience don't do this sort of thing. You're out there on your own and there is no one to bullshit."

There was the only woman in the fleet, Isabel Autissier. Dismasted when a shroud failed, she jury rigged a mast from a spinnaker pole and a mainsail from her storm jib. She set sail for an island 1,200 miles away. "Thirty knots of wind, sea dark, sky crying...nothing left of my dream." She made it, got a new mast, then was dismasted again and almost suffered the additional ignominy of being billed by Australian air-land-sea rescue for taking her off her yacht (she did get to wear a T-shirt captioned "I spent New Year's Eve with 200 Aussie sailors").

"They all have this dream. It's an epic adventure. The problem is they might die doing it"

Then there was septuagenerian Harry Mitchell, who as author Paul Gelder notes, was taking a voyage around his soul. He was old enough to have watched clipper ship sailors return to England, and see the golden earrings they wore after a Cape Horn passage. He sailed a 40-foot Panic Class cutter he campaigned himself, without sponsor.

Why it will bend your brain:

Because it's several tales of people who still want to live rather than just consume.

Harry Mitchell told students before he set out from Sydney, bound for the Roaring Forties and Cape Horn, "For the rest of your life don't waste any time. Make the best of what you may before you turn into clay."