Posts from ‘Small boats’
Cape horn challenge – Teaser
Using only balanced sails without the aid of self-steering, it took Yrvind 45 days to sail across the Atlantic in a very small boat.
I arrived in Martinique in perfect health happy in the knowledge that my age had not caused any problem, because being at sea is such a wonderful thing.
More photos here, and his fantastic blog here.
I hope to be as wild and old as Yrvind someday.
The most epic of all small boat voyages, is without doubt the one navigated by Frank Worley. Using a sextant aboard the tiny 22ft boat James Caird, and rollocking amongst 50ft waves in one of the coldest regions on earth, Worley successfully navigated all to safety after the ice crushing of Endurance.
Curiously, his death was by lung cancer. It wasn’t the waves and bitter cold that killed him – It was the cigarettes one would presume… No doubt there was a lot of (understandably) tobacco smoking going on in the confines of that small ship…
Read more on Worley.
Ben & Teresa making their film One Simple Question – Kitecam photo en route to an iceberg.
The Pacific Voyagers project started with a single traditional boat (called a Vaka), being built in Aotearoa. Slowly, as news spread across the Pacific, island by island, energy grew, with new Vaka’s started construction on the Cook Islands, Fiji, Samoa and Tahiti. Two additional Vaka’s are being crewed by people from Kiribati, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Vanuatu.
The project is aiming to “renew our ties to the sea and its life-sustaining strength…. The ocean is the origin of life, and it continues to give us air to breathe, fish to eat, and to nourish our soul.” … “Sailing together, we seek the wisdom of our ancestors and the knowledge of scientists to keep the Pacific healthy and give our grandchildren a future.”
The Vaka’s left New Zealand in April, and are currently sailing the Pacific – Read more here.
These two identical seafaring madmen from France, managed to sail across the Atlantic on a very small boat of their own construction: Without a GPS. A sextant, or even a compass. Both highly intelligent, and University educated in both physics and mathematics, the duo gave up their potentially successful careers to become surfers, photographers, filmmakers, and vagabonds. Today, they are sixty one years old, and have seemingly crammed at least eleven lives into their identical two… Read more in English on their website.
Inside-Outside (9mn extracts of "Huis clos"… by EandMBerque
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” -Kerouac
On September 28th, 1996, American sailor Brian Caldwell sailed into Hawaii, successfully completing his circumnavigation. Caldwell briefly became the world’s youngest circumnavigator, aboard his ‘girlfriend’, a JJ Taylor built Contessa 26 by the name of Mai’miti’vavau. By November of the same year, Australian David Dicks took Caldwell’s brief record, circumnavigating his S&S 34 back into Fremantle, Western Australia.
SV Mai’miti’vavau then went on to continue voyaging, under the capable hands of James Finan, another American, who went on to take her from Hawaii & across the Pacific to Brisbane. I met James last year as he came south to pickup and deliver a boat back north from the Sydney to Hobart race, which must have been a world first: Two guys under 30 having a beer, who had both sailed red Contessa 26′s across the Pacific!
I snapped this photo on Palmyra Atoll, of Caldwell’s sail, placed inside the ‘yacht club’, by James as he passed through the island.
And so with all this history, it was sad to see the effects of Cyclone Yasi on SV Mai’miti’vavau – Which resulted in her being sunk on her mooring in Brisbane…
SV Mai’miti’vavau is now for sale, and I dearly hope some young kid picks her up, brushes off the dust, epoxies up the hull, and keeps on sailing…
More information is available from Brian ‘BJ’ Caldwell’s site, which is located here.
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