What is The Vendee Globe? Here’s the skinny. 30 boats. 30 skippers. Around the world. Non stop. Full speed. Four months. Alone. Absurdly high tech, light-weigh monohull sailboats. Held once every four years since 1988. The world’s most demanding race.
“A human being alone on his boat fighting his demons. In a psychological sense, this is what single handed yacht racing is all about,” says fellow skipper Jean-Pierre Dick.
Excuse me?
Sail boat seems such an inadequate term for these ships. Rocket ships with rudders? A Brahma bull with sails? In the entire universe of sailing, thirty skippers will qualify. Who, you wonder, would spend years scouring the world for sponsors and organizing a program and finding the right boat? Who would want to push that sailboat to its breaking point 24 hours a day for over 2400 hours?
And simply, Why?
Sift out the details and the answer is the same for all of them. To slake a smoldering unquenchable need to press themselves past the edges of their limits. To match their tiny ships and tiny bodies against the four oceans of the earth and fury they represent. To answer the call of their dreams. To know that they will never be the same. To feel the adrenaline of living with fear for months on end. To live in the aquatic crease between life and death.
They are not doing this to win anything. They’re doing this because they could not survive on this earth if they did not try.
One man in America has qualified for the race that departs from Les Sables d’Orlonne on November 9th. Rich Wilson of Marblehead, MA. He’s been at home on the water since he was kid. If you merged John Dewey with Sir Francis Chichester, you’d end up with Rich Wilson, educator and adventurer.
Of course there’s a back story. His sailing pedigree began as a a one year old with asthma,a kid who couldn’t run across the play ground without running out of breath, to a man who ran the Boston Marathon with an inhaler that he rarely used tucked in his shorts. He will connect with school age kids around the world onlinef as he sails around the world. As fast as he can. Against other skippers. For months.
And connect with school kids across the globe while he’s at it.
He happens to be a friend of mine and a man I respect deeply.
When you get an invitation to be a guest to watch him sail to the starting line, you drop everything and go.
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