That’s another check mark on the road to Mexico. Getting behind the wheel these days is a mixture of the usual sense of anticipation mixed with memories and nostalgia for past encounters with those people we see waving us on our way. In Hilton Head we said goodbye to Webb. The man whose sixth time around the world was in a 24 foot Moore ultralight racing sailboat seen below. He called her GANNET:
He is the first American to sail alone around Cape Horn, in 1975, and by his own estimation the first among a dozen or so people in the world who sailed that cape by themselves. He spent the days and nights bailing his leaking boat of freezing cold water and because he is an artist and a writer first and foremost, you can read his own description on paper or in Kindle in STORM PASSAGE.
I know I’d have failed miserably, cold wet and fearful of the unknown. I am wondering how I shall cope in Patagonia in summer. On land.
You can’t fault Webb. He prefers Rusty to me, most people do, and when he describes Rusty as a “noble creature,” Rusty just ignores him. Because I suppose Rusty really is the perfect dog. He missed me though when I took Webb shopping.
Layne said he cried. For me I hope. We ate well enjoying cold oatmeal for breakfast and I never thought I’d hear Layne give her vote of approval for Webb’s signature dish, a staple of his sailing life.
Uncooked oatmeal nuts and fruits (dried when at sea) protein powder and milk. I think of it as a Swiss muesli type of breakfast and it tastes better than it sounds. Quite good actually.
The other staple is Laphroaig single malt at sunset. Too strong for Layne, too strong really for most mere mortals but I have found I like it, and decidedly I do not aspire to demigod status or immortality or anything like that. I’m just a bloke happy to go for a drive. Cheers!
What I have learned from Webb is the value of mentoring. Webb made his own way in the world, raised by his grandmother but determined to go to sea. He aimed high. He sailed around the world in a small open boat, it would be an insult to describe a Drascombe Lugger as a rowboat but to the untrained eye that is what they would see. He passes the lessons learned on to me.
He spent a couple of weeks drifting in the South Pacific after his open boat got filled with water and his sails got shredded. That uncaring ocean! Six sips of water a day and a finger full of jam occasionally for a treat. He was skeletal by the time he washed ashore on an island that he swam for across the reef as Chidiock Tichbourne wallowed on by. These are ridiculously other worldly stories that you’d think would render a drive in a van utterly banal. And yet…
An interview made before the successful circumnavigation aboard GANNET. I should point out Webb notes that only amateurs seek adventures, professionals try to avoid them.
So here I am in a pansy van equipped with heating and cooling windshield wipers and recovery gear, a well stocked pantry and a fridge and the ability to drive against the wind at sixty miles an hour. And yet he asked me to name her after his boat, hence GANNET2.
So how does that work? It comes from that most fundamentally important human trait, curiosity. Some people are curious, they want to know more, they like to learn that which they don’t know. Over dinner Webb reiterated he’s looking forward to reading about places he’s never been and things he’ll never see. That is one of the reasons Layne and I chose a van this time over the boat we used to travel from San Francisco to Key West in 1998-2000. The Panama Canal, Miraflores:
We sailed the edges of Central America but this time we will bd in the middle of it all. Webb has seen Cape Horn, I want to camp on the Straits of Magellan. Webb has anchored in Rio, I want to drive across the Amazon. In that sense it is similar enough but completely different. The concept of dispersed camping is fascinating to him: park in a wood and stay for free, something he had never heard of previously. There is a peculiar freedom in a van that is equipped such that she does not need to be parked in a campground attached to electricity and water hoses, and he recognizes that as similar to anchoring out, away from marinas.
GANNET is far more spartan but not so terribly different when it comes to the aims and goals of travel. And to have Webb cheer me on makes journeying aboard a van that much more plausible, more real.
I am encouraged to travel beyond the edge of human experience and to send back reports.
I shall do my best.
