When I flew to Alaska in July for an all-women backpacking trip, I wasn鈥檛 feeling my most confident, centered, or fit. I wasn鈥檛 entirely sure I still liked hiking. Or going places, or doing things, or meeting people. Sixteen months of a global pandemic can do that to you. But I had gotten on the plane, and now I鈥檇 either reconnect with my dormant adventurous self or have a terrible time trying.

I arrived in Anchorage early in the morning on the Fourth of July, a day before my group and I would be shuttled up to Talkeetna by van and then deposited in the backcountry by floatplane. That night, I had dinner at a downtown brewpub. All I wanted was to eat some halibut at the bar and read a book on my phone, but the guy one stool over was determined to chat me up, no matter how many times I pointedly turned back to my reading. After I paid and said goodbye, he jumped up to follow. 鈥淟et鈥檚 go get ice cream,鈥� he said.

鈥淚 can鈥檛,鈥� I said, because that was easier than telling the truth: I don鈥檛 want to. I went back to my hotel room and glumly ate some gummy bears, staring out over the placid Cook Inlet. But because it wouldn鈥檛 get even a little dark until the wee hours, there were no fireworks.

This trip had been on my docket since the fall of 2019. Back then I鈥檇 been looking to do a story on the growing popularity of all-female adventure travel鈥攆or example, women signed up for REI鈥檚 women鈥檚 trips in 2019 as in 2018. Through Instagram, I stumbled upon , a fledgling guiding company. It stood out, especially in Alaska, because its founder and owner is a woman: Kathryn Walsh, then 30. Born in Nome to a gold-mining, bush-flying father and a Californian mother, Kathryn was raised between her parents鈥� home states and returned north for good in her mid-twenties after the stability of a finance job failed to drown out the call of adventure. I was intrigued by a small-group trip she ran called 鈥�.鈥� It鈥檚 five days in the backcountry, building the skills and confidence needed to venture into the wilderness on one鈥檚 own鈥攕omething that, hypothetically, would cancel out the need for exactly what Backpack Alaska was selling.

鈥淚鈥檇 love to cannibalize my entire company鈥攆or people not to need guides,鈥� Kathryn told me. She pointed out that women haven鈥檛 always been welcome on trips like hers or encouraged to engage with the backcountry at all. 鈥淭here wasn鈥檛 that lineage and network to draw you in,鈥� she said. 鈥淎nd when you did get into it, you were always the odd man out鈥攐dd woman out, whatever鈥攁nd that gets tiresome.鈥� She wanted to create a ripple effect of self-sufficient 颅badassery.

The point of all-female travel isn鈥檛 to exclude men, but sometimes a break from the dudes feels right. Years before, I attended a women鈥檚 ski camp in Aspen, Colorado, and I liked how the women in my group encouraged one another without razzing or one-upping or throwing down gauntlets. Sure, lots of women are terrible, and men contain multitudes, but I don鈥檛 think it鈥檚 out of line to say that women, left to their own devices, tend to be more cooperative and supportive than all-male or mixed groups.

I pitched the idea to 国产吃瓜黑料聽and by early 2020 was set to go in July, after which I planned to put my newfound skills and 颅confidence to work on a three-week hike in the Swedish Arctic. You know what happened instead.

So there I was, a year later than planned, buckled into a teensy Cessna 185 floatplane for a half-hour flight next to a hip-wadered, mustached pilot who looked like he鈥檇 been grown in an Alaskan bush-pilot lab. We took off from Talkeetna under an ominous sky and passed over forests that quickly vanished as the foothills rose up, turning to tundra. At this latitude, 62 degrees north, the tree line was well under 3,000 feet. Our landing zone was an alpine lake encircled by barren, snow-streaked mountains, the highest of which was a steep, malevolent-looking 5,800-foot tooth of black rock known as Sheep Back Mountain. Whoever named it that had clearly never seen a sheep.

The post Five Women. One Wilderness. Zero Mansplaining. appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

On July 1, 17 skippers in 17 boats left the French port town of Les Sables d鈥橭lonne and sailed west into the Bay of Biscay. Their destination? Les Sables d鈥橭lonne, but from the other direction, a journey of about nine months and 30,000 miles. The boats are unremarkable. The sailors are a mixed bag: hotshot pro racers, ambitious yachties, ultracompetent old salts, young upstarts, dedicated adventurers, a hopeless dreamer or two鈥�16 men and one woman representing 12 countries, all with a common intention. They鈥檙e racing around the world without stopping, without benefit of modern technology, and alone.

This is the second-ever . The original, which has been immortalized in several books, including Peter Nichols鈥� classic account, , as well as the documentary Deep Water and the recent Colin Firth film The Mercy, began in the summer of 1968 and, by its end, turned into an epic blend of historic triumph, human tragedy, and utter shitshow. Nine sailors started and one finished. One killed himself. This race marks the 50th anniversary of that event, and besides some allowances for safety, the rules limit the racers to technology available in 1968. Sextants, not GPS. Radio, not sat phones. Film cameras and Super 8s, not DSLRs and GoPros. No digital anything. No high-tech materials like Kevlar or carbon composite. No electric autopilot, desalinization, or refrigeration. No blog posts, no video chats, no selfies at sea.

Such restrictions might seem suspiciously like pedantic hipster nostalgia for all things analog, but the throwback nature of the race is an earnest attempt to reclaim radical simplicity in a world addicted to interconnectedness. Just think鈥攏o email, no texts, no news alerts for the better part of a year. But no family or friends, either. No human touch. Just one person, one boat, one planet. This is a race about intangibles. The skippers will sail a very long way to see pretty much only a disc of water and a dome of sky, their progress marked by changing angles in the sextant mirrors, lines drawn on charts. Whoever wins won鈥檛 even win money鈥攎ore on that later鈥攂ut will be symbolically awarded a perpetual trophy.

Not all will finish. If half the fleet succeeds, everyone will be pleasantly surprised. Following , as the skippers are obliged to do, means sailing down the Atlantic, turning east around the bottom of Africa, passing below Australia and New Zealand, rounding Cape Horn, and crossing back up the Atlantic. This, in turn, means spending something like four or five months in isolated latitudes known as the Roaring Forties and Furious Fifties, in the ring of water around Antarctica that sailors speak of, with caution and respect, as the Southern Ocean. Strong and reliable westerly winds, unimpeded by land, make for fast sailing but also build into severe gales and massive seas that will break anything on a boat that can be broken and wear on the physical and mental fortitude of any sailor. Boats will fail. Injuries will happen. People will decide they鈥檝e had enough. It鈥檚 a war of attrition.

The obvious question is why. Why choose to sail alone in a small boat through the world鈥檚 most furious seas, far from comfort or help, guided by the stars? Why attempt such a journey knowing full well that at times you will be horribly lonely, at others frustrated beyond measure, sometimes bored, sometimes afraid, that death by drowning out in the middle of big blue will be a constant possibility?

If you have to ask, you鈥檒l never really understand the answer. In a way, there is no answer.

Les Sables d鈥橭lonne has a broad, curving beach edged by a well-strolled, almost supernaturally shadeless embankment and presided over by a long row of blocky apartment buildings interspersed with elegant Belle 脡poque villas. It鈥檚 a sailing town with a steady breeze, best known as the start and finish of the , an extravagantly high-tech singlehanded circumnavigation race that happens every four years. Faded posters from the 2016 iteration still hang in windows.

For the second half of June, the Golden Globe boats were tied up at a floating dock, les pontons, in Les Sables d鈥橭lonne鈥檚 densely occupied marina for final preparations and inspections. Flags flapped in their rigging. A steady stream of well-wishers, gawkers, and autograph seekers walked up and down the row of boats, chatting in French to the skippers, even those who spoke no French. The French are big sailing fans, and many clustered around the boat of Jean-Luc van den Heede, the oldest racer, a 73-year-old French sailing hero with five solo circumnavigations already under his belt, including two Vend茅e Globes. Nearby was Susie Goodall鈥檚 red-hulled sloop of the same design, a Rustler 36 called Starlight. Goodall, at 28, is the youngest skipper and the only woman. Kevin Farebrother, a firefighter from Perth, Australia, christened his boat Sagarmantha, the Nepalese name for Mount Everest, which he has summited three times.

Mark Slats, a strapping Dutchman, had two gigantic oars on the deck of his boat, which he planned on using to row through calms. (Dread of calms and a strong preference for storms was universal among the sailors. Calms are boring and leave you too much time to think.) Slats thought he could row for about ten hours a day, getting maybe 2.5 knots. This past December, he rowed solo across the Atlantic in 30 days, 7 hours, and 49 minutes, smashing the .

Aside from the sponsor logos on hulls and sails, the boats were decidedly basic鈥攃ruisers you鈥檇 see in any marina. Race rules required them to be single-hulled, mass-produced, designed before 1988, and between 32 and 36 feet in overall length. Farther down the dock, their masts towering over the rest, were a handful of , the boats used in the Vend茅e Globe. Recent designs resemble 60-foot-long squared-off Star Trek insignias and are capable of levitating above the water on retractable foils, reaching speeds over 30 knots. If they are the monohull equivalent of Formula One race cars, then the Golden Globe boats are modestly tricked-out camper vans. Get six knots out of one and you feel pretty good. The Vend茅e Globe record is 74 days. Golden Globe sailors are planning for 300, even if the speediest hope to shave more than a month off that. But modesty is part of the point.

鈥淎ll the other races are incredibly expensive,鈥� said Golden Globe race director Don McIntyre. 鈥淭hey鈥檙e great to watch, but it鈥檚 now got exclusive, very exclusive, and it鈥檚 going more so that way.鈥� A competitive Vend茅e Globe campaign costs millions of dollars, but the Golden Globe requires only a fraction of that. According to McIntyre, $100,000 would be enough to get in the race, and at the end you鈥檇 still own your boat, which, he pointed out, you could live in. Some might have to. While a minority of the sailors were comfortably covered by sponsors or personal wealth, five sold or mortgaged their houses to fund their circumnavigations. Others, lacking houses to sell, have had to hustle hard.

鈥淚 had no money and no boat,鈥� said 31-year-old Irishman Gregor McGuckin. 鈥淚 did an overseas in the Caribbean to help get a bit of capital to buy a boat, or at least help trick banks into thinking I had a steady income so they鈥檇 give me a loan to buy a boat.鈥� Just a month out from the start, McGuckin was still relying mostly on blind faith and dogged determination when, after much pavement pounding, he secured a sponsorship. But costs still loom for when he is away鈥攑ayments on the boat loan, for example, even if the repo man wouldn鈥檛 have an easy time tracking him down. Taking advantage of a technological recourse unavailable to the 1968 skippers, he has set up a .

As of the start, the race itself was also short on funds. The original plan was for a purse of 75,000 euros (around $87,000), to be split among the four fastest circumnavigators, but without a major sponsor, pride and a sense of accomplishment would have to suffice. (Banners on each of the boats, beneath the sailors鈥� names, had a blue place-holding rectangle that read simply 鈥淪ponsor?鈥�) According to McIntyre, only 35,000 euros in sponsorship funds had come through, and while the local government of Les Sables d鈥橭lonne had contributed the cost of the race village and each entrant had put in a start fee of just over $10,000, he said he鈥檇 personally invested nearly three-quarters of a million dollars.

McIntyre, an Australian, has made a colorful career for himself seeking out and facilitating adventure. In the 1980s, he started marine equipment importing and yacht-building businesses to fund his own participation in the BOC Challenge, a solo circumnavigation race with stops. McIntyre was second in his class in 1990. After that, he started running and guiding tourist trips to Antarctica; currently, he and his partner have a long-term lease on an island in Tonga, where they run . McIntyre鈥檚 initial concept for the Golden Globe reboot, which first occurred to him in 1995, had been simpler: He would sail around himself for the 30th anniversary. At the time, he was spending a year in an 8×12-foot hut on Antarctica with his then wife. 鈥淚 was sitting there in the box in the middle of winter thinking, what鈥檚 next, what鈥檚 next?鈥� McIntyre said. He made plans and designed a boat, but life got in the way. He missed the 40th anniversary as well when he chose instead to recreate Captain Bligh鈥檚 in a 24-foot open boat. These things happen.

鈥淔inally,鈥� McIntyre said, 鈥渨e were in Tonga, treasure hunting鈥攖his is in 2014, long story鈥攁nd I thought, jeepers, four years to the anniversary.鈥� The timing had come right. Then he thought, Why not make it a race?

In 1968, no one had ever sailed around the world alone and without stopping. This may not seem like a problem, but to rivalrous sailors from France and the UK, it was. People had sailed around the world singlehanded, but they鈥檇 always come ashore at some point for repairs or supplies or to have a good meal and a chat. The first solo circumnavigator was , a former clipper captain from Nova Scotia who, rendered professionally obsolete by the rise of the steam engine, set off eastward from Boston in 1895 in a 37-foot oyster sloop and returned three years later. He made many stops, navigating with spooky accuracy despite relying on a rudimentary combination of lunar sights, dead reckoning, and an old tin clock instead of a proper chronometer.

Eighteen others had followed suit by 1967, when an Englishman named became first to sail around with only one stop. What was left to do but cut out the stop?

The Sunday Times, a weekly newspaper in the UK, hit on the idea of offering a trophy, the Golden Globe, to the first sailor to complete the feat and a cash prize of 拢5,000 for the fastest circumnavigation. No official entry was required, nor was any kind of qualifying experience. Skippers could sail whatever kind of boat they wanted, no matter how unsuitable. The only nod to safety was the paper鈥檚 stipulation that, to be eligible, sailors had to leave between June 1 and October 31, 1968. Departing earlier or later would mean near-suicidal conditions in the Southern Ocean. In the end, the field was made up of six Brits, two Frenchmen, and one Italian.

In early February, four were left. Carozzo, the Italian, had made it only as far as Portugal before stomach ulcers forced him to retire. Others dropped out due to boat damage or the realization that life would be much more pleasant elsewhere. Who was left? In the lead, 29-year-old Robin Knox-Johnston, a straitlaced merchant marine officer who considered hegemony over the sea a British birthright, was on the homestretch, crossing back up the Atlantic in his 32-foot teak ketch, Suhaili. He had left earlier than anyone else remaining, in mid-June, and was likely to be the first back but very unlikely to be the fastest. The only sailor with a chance at overtaking him was the famous French sailor and Bernard Moitessier, who was sailing very fast in 39-foot steel ketch named Joshua (for Slocum). Moitessier had just rounded Cape Horn. British naval lieutenant Nigel Tetley was in third, having just passed New Zealand in his increasingly beat-up 40-foot trimaran named Victress. Tetley would not catch Knox-Johnston, but if he continued as he had been, he would be faster.

Then there was Donald Crowhurst, the dark horse, whose exact whereabouts were unknown.

In Les Sables this June, skippers and support teams came and went to their boats like bees to a favorite flower. They hauled out and put away sail bags and boxes of hardware and giant plastic bins of canned and dehydrated food, hung off sterns to tinker with the self-steering gear, politely signed autographs when visitors couldn鈥檛 be dodged, went up masts, drilled and cranked and coiled and generally enacted sustained, miscellaneous marine busyness.

The busiest boat was Italian Francesco Cappelletti鈥檚, because it was nowhere near ready to sail. While the other skippers had all raced to Les Sables by sea from Falmouth in the UK, Cappelletti, running far behind schedule, had been forced to ship his yellow ketch overland from the south of France. At Les Sables, he鈥檇 put it in the water and stepped the masts, but with days to go, countless tasks remained undone, including major ones like wiring and installing pumps and radio. Before he could leave, he鈥檇 need to pass an involved safety inspection and spend three days at sea doing 300 additional qualifying miles, and things were not looking good for Cappelletti. His one bittersweet ray of hope was that racers who didn鈥檛 make the July 1 start were permitted to start as late as July 7. In fact, in the 1968 race, the only Italian competitor, Alex Carozzo, faced with a similar situation, had repaired to a mooring after the start deadline passed for another week of preparation before setting out.

Russian Igor Zaretskiy鈥檚 ketch, Esmerelda, was another hive of activity, due not to desperation but an abundance of helpers: a large and unsmiling crew of men in Yacht Russia T-shirts and shin-length denim shorts who, when Igor went out for a test sail, followed unsmilingly behind in a rigid-inflatable boat, flying the Russian flag. Among Zaretskiy鈥檚 supplies were 600 packs of cigarettes鈥攁 disincentive against quitting the race, because if he put into port abroad, he鈥檇 have to pay duty on them.

Other boats were oases of tranquility. Sailors knew to casually swing by Lazy Otter around lunchtime, when Turkish-born British skipper Ertan Beskardes and his wife, Arzu, purveyors of military regalia in their onshore lives, would inevitably insist they stay for lunch. Abhilash Tomy, a pilot in the Indian navy who鈥檇 completed a previous solo nonstop circumnavigation in 2013, sometimes slept the morning away, rolling in midafternoon to do some languid boat tinkering. 鈥淚t鈥檚 just a circumnavigation,鈥� Tomy said. 鈥淚 don鈥檛 know why everyone鈥檚 making such a big deal out of it.鈥�

As far as anyone back in Britain knew, in February 1969, Donald Crowhurst was more than a thousand miles east of Cape Town, in the southern Indian Ocean, sailing at incredible speed. They thought this because he had been radioing home false daily mileages and deliberately vague positions, and his overzealous, highly credulous publicist had been spreading and embellishing his story. In actuality, Crowhurst was dawdling off the coast of South America. An inexperienced sailor and struggling electronics entrepreneur with an unfortunate knack for convincing others to believe in his self-delusions, Crowhurst had finagled the sponsorship to build a 41-foot trimaran, Teignmouth Electron, in exchange for a contractual promise that if he didn鈥檛 finish the race, he would repay the cost. In effect, Crowhurst would be ruined, and he had a wife and four children to support.

At the time of the first Golden Globe race, multihulls were in their infancy. They were known to be fast, but many doubted their capacity to endure heavy seas. One major problem was that when a multihull capsizes, its submerged mast and sails become a keel, and it does not right itself. Teignmouth Electron, even setting aside its questionable basic design, especially had no business going anywhere near the Southern Ocean. It was leaky and rattletrap. Its decks were sealed only with paint, not fiberglass, and the great invention Crowhurst had talked up to sell his voyage鈥攁n automatically triggered self-righting buoyancy bag at the top of the mast鈥攅xisted only as bunches of wire running through the trimaran鈥檚 cabin, attached to nothing.

Within a few weeks of leaving port, his boat already falling apart with alarming speed, Crowhurst understood that proceeding with his planned journey would mean almost certain death. In December, ensnared by pride and shame, he had begun keeping a second logbook, documenting a false journey. He calculated navigational sights for positions thousands of miles from where he actually was (not an easy bit of math) and cobbled together guesses at distant weather from radio reports. In January, feigning radio trouble, he had cut himself off from the outside world. Crowhurst planned to loiter in the South Atlantic until the other homebound racers passed him, at which point he could fall in line behind them and finish respectably. Hopefully no one would look too closely at the logbook of the third- or fourth-place sailor.

In mid-April, Crowhurst reestablished radio contact, claimed to be approaching Cape Horn, and asked for news of the other racers. Knox-Johnston was nearly home, he learned, and Tetley was in the Atlantic, about two weeks ahead of Crowhurst. Bernard Moitessier, always something of a mystic and concerned about the corrupting effects of competition and fame, had decided to abandon the race and continue on toward Tahiti in pure communion with the sea. In a message he slingshotted onto the deck of a passing tanker near Cape Town, Moitessier informed the Sunday Times, 鈥淚 am continuing non-stop towards the Pacific Islands because I am happy at sea, and perhaps also to save my soul.鈥�

On April 22, Knox-Johnston arrived back in Falmouth, an immediate hero and celebrity. On May 20, only a thousand miles from home, Nigel Tetley鈥檚 trimaran, badly weakened by months at sea, finally fell apart and sank. When he was informed by cable of the sinking (and Tetley鈥檚 subsequent rescue), Crowhurst understood, inescapably, that if he continued on, he would be laying claim to the fastest time around and subjecting his account of the journey to impossible scrutiny. There was no way his deception would not be exposed.

His progress slowed. His track became aimless. Early in June, his radio failed, and Crowhurst spent two weeks working obsessively to repair it while the Teignmouth Electron drifted through the doldrums. Once the radio was repaired, Crowhurst tapped out a flurry of messages to his wife and publicist. After that, becalmed in the Sargasso Sea, he opened his logbook and spent eight days writing down incoherent, exclamation point鈥搒tudded ramblings about Einstein and mathematics and intelligence and morality, working himself up to the less-than-realistic conclusion that 鈥淸m]athematicians and engineers used to the techniques of system analysis will skim through my complete work in less than an hour. At the end of that time problems that have beset humanity for thousands of years will have been solved for them.鈥�

On July 1, reaching the end of the logbook, he stopped mid-sentence and wrote no more. Nine days later, Teignmouth Electron was found adrift in the middle of the Atlantic. Crowhurst was gone, and so was the ship鈥檚 chronometer. Presumably he鈥檇 jumped overboard, leaving behind a confession in the form of the two logbooks.

A few nights before the start of the 2018 Golden Globe, in the tented bar in the Les Sables race village, Jean-Luc van den Heede鈥檚 band was playing. Couples waltzed around whatever floor space they could find while the septuagenarian sailor happily crooned away, pausing occasionally to banter in French. Late in his first set, van den Heede invited up a special guest. Robin Knox-Johnston climbed onstage, bearing two beers. He is now 79, Sir Robin, elder statesman of singlehanded sailing with three more circumnavigations under his belt, including another solo voyage in 2007. In 2016, he finished restoring Suhaili its original low-key, slightly tubby glory, and he鈥檇 sailed it across from Falmouth with the Golden Globe fleet. Knox-Johnson downed his beer and gave the other to van den Heede. The two men launched into a baritone duet of 鈥淢olly Malone.鈥� 鈥淐ockles and mussels,鈥� they sang. 鈥淎live, alive, oh.鈥� The crowd went wild.

Bernard Moitessier died in 1994, but Joshua, also restored, was in Les Sables, docked beside Suhaili. (Victress, of course, was at the bottom of the Atlantic, and in a sad and puzzling epilogue, Nigel Tetley had been found hanging from a tree in 1972.) Francis Chichester鈥檚 yacht Gypsy Moth IV was also at les pontons. Alex Carozzo, the Italian who鈥檇 been undone by ulcers, put in an appearance. and were around, both Australians who鈥檇 completed solo nonstops as teenagers (Watson with significant assistance from Don McIntyre), and there was a prevailing atmosphere of fellowship among the circumnavigators, both veteran and hopeful, a sense of being at a rare gathering of usually solitary creatures.

鈥淭he thing about singlehanded sailors,鈥� said Mark Sinclair, a 59-year-old Australian skipper known to all as Captain Coconut, after his orange Lello 34, Coconut, 鈥渋s by nature they don鈥檛 conform. They don鈥檛 obey rules. They do their own thing. So having an event for singlehanded sailors is like an oxymoron. It鈥檚 impossible.鈥�

Or certainly not easy. The competitors complained about all the rules. (The 鈥攖he official regulations鈥攚as more than 60 pages long and involved the purchase of many expensive bits of safety equipment, including satellite phones they weren鈥檛 allowed to use to call anyone except race officials for required check-ins.) The race organizers complained about the competitors complaining. There was some whispering about whether anyone might smuggle aboard a GPS. Not everyone was comfortable with the sextant yet. The rules鈥攖hose rules again!鈥攎andated that the racers pass a specific mark in the Canary Islands, but not everyone was confident about finding it.

鈥淭he reality is,鈥� said Don McIntyre, 鈥渢he only way you will finish this is if you have a burning passion to finish it. It鈥檚 all in the brain. You can have the best boat and the best gear, but if you鈥檙e not there for the right reasons, you鈥檒l find a reason to retire.鈥�

But these reasons, the right reasons, resist definition. All the sailors seemed to have decided more or less instantaneously to enter the race as soon as they heard about it, as though the idea had broken a pane of glass inside them, releasing an implacable spirit. They described obsession, sleeplessness, a rush to lock down a spot in the lineup without knowing how they were possibly going to get the money together. But as far as why, they couldn鈥檛 do much better than offer platitudes about the challenge or say, well, this is just the kind of thing I do, this is who I am. Fundamentally, the desire to be in the race was just that, a desire, as instinctive and unpredictable and inarticulable as lust.

Minnesotan Nabil Amra, who is competing under the Palestinian flag and is one of the more novice sailors, was something of an exception. When he first heard of the event, he wasn鈥檛 initially seized by a personal mania. First he suggested to Mahfouz Kabariti, an activist and president of the Palestine Surfing and Sailing Federation, that a Palestinian enter. Kabariti told him Palestinians are prohibited from competing internationally. 鈥淢aybe it was my Midwestern sense of fair play, but that burned me up,鈥� Amra said. 鈥淪o I thought I would do it. I had an interest in cruising, not necessarily in sailing around the world without seeing anything. But sometimes we make a sacrifice for a greater good.鈥�

He added, 鈥淪ometimes anger can be a powerful motivator if you harness it.鈥�

Will a lofty sense of the greater good be enough when you鈥檝e been cold and wet for four months in the Southern Ocean? No one can predict what will happen out there. There鈥檚 a randomness to how environment and boat and human will chafe and collide, an unpredictability to internal and external breaking points. At any moment, anyone might hit a submerged shipping container and sink. And there is the uncertain capacity of the self to cope with existence as the solitary center of a disc of empty water. You can鈥檛 know how you鈥檒l manage until you try. Some find they can鈥檛 get enough.

Abhilash Tomy couldn鈥檛 wait to leave Les Sables. He was sailing a newly built replica of Suhaili that had been constructed, like the original, in India. 鈥淚 know what the mind is going to be like,鈥� he said. 鈥淚 know what the body鈥檚 going to feel. And you just go through it.鈥� What does the mind feel like? 鈥淓mpty. Blank. Happy. In control. Without emotions.鈥� And the body? 鈥淪hit.鈥�

On his previous circumnavigation, Tomy said, 鈥淚 became very clairvoyant. I could see far into the future, far into the past.鈥� What did he see? 鈥淢any, many things. I saw everything.鈥�

Tomy said he would come back completely wiped clean, without memory or guilt or morality or cravings. 鈥淐ompletely deconstructed,鈥� he said. For him, that was what was critical. A self so distilled it became a kind of nothingness. That was what he was looking for.

On July 5, four days after the start, Francesco Cappelletti officially withdrew from the race, acknowledging that he would not be able to meet the safety requirements in time for the July 7 deadline. He still planned to sail around the world, but, no longer bound by the race rules, he would be using GPS, not the stars.

Later the same day, Ertan Beskardes headed for port in northern Spain. announcing his withdrawal from the race, Beskardes wrote, 鈥淎fter few days, not talking to my family regularly to share the daily experiences has sadly taken the joy and happiness from this experience. The feeling gradually felt worse until nothing else mattered except to talk to them.鈥�

He had not been afraid of loneliness, but it got him anyway.

Before that, though, before the race was quite a reality, the morning of the start was hot and sunny with only a breath of breeze. One by one, the skippers steered out of the marina and through a channel to the open sea, where they raised their sails. A hundred or so boats had gathered to send them off. There were dozens of recreational yachts, a tall ship, a couple IMOCA 60s. There were race officials and support teams in rigid inflatable boats. A helicopter darted and hovered among the masts. 鈥淲e love you!鈥� Beskardes鈥� family shouted to him as they motored past. He blew a kiss.

At noon, the boats gathered behind an imaginary line in the sea between Suhaili and Joshua, both under sail. A cannon fired, and they passed between the two old yachts, racing toward the horizon at a sedate pace. Eventually, all the other boats turned back, and they were alone.

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