“Visit the education pavilion, you’ll love it,” Rich Wilson says after
he’s given me a tour of Great American III at the dock in Les Sables
d’Olonne, France. Rich is the only American to qualify for the
quadrennial Vendée Globe single-handed, around the world, non-stop, with no assistance, 25,000 mile race. He’ll be at sea about 100 days.
Anyone
who does this sort of sailing qualifies as being a certifiably driven
person. At the Vendée Globe starting line on November 9, 2008, there
were 29 other skippers who, for their own reasons, needed to pit
themselves against the muscle and fickle fury of nearly every sea and
ocean on the planet. They put themselves on an aqueous rack, knowing it
might break them or their thoroughbred 60-foot monohull sailboats. It’s
not that they don’t care. They simply know a piece of their psyches
would wither and die if they didn’t test themselves in this event,
called the “Everest of Yacht Racing.”
Rich Wilson, at 58 years of age, knows his days of high wire sailing are dwindling. What isn’t diminished is his desire to connect with school age kids.
He knows that ocean adventure and the life lessons learned from it are a natural fit for teachers, parents and kids. He’s proved it three times between 1993 and 2003 with three voyages aboard his trimaran Great American II in which he broke records established by the fastest ships in the Age of Sail, all the while sharing the adventure at www.sitesalive.com with thousands of students, including mine.
For the next three months at sea, in addition to making sail changes, studying weather maps, plotting courses, repairing anything that goes bump in the night - from software to autopilots to sailing gear - he’ll be making pod casts and writing essays for his educational program.
“On this race we have 26 different newspapers all across the USA which will publish a 15 part weekly series, all under contract. We have five more newspapers which will promote the program on line. We will get to six million readers for the weekly pieces 250,000 – 300,000 schoolkids participating, and a 60 page teachers’ guide,” he says.
I’ve
known him since 1990, the year he and his crewmate aboard the trimaran
Great American I, spent several hours upside down in 65 foot seas about
400 miles from nowhere off the tip of Cape Horn, but that’s another
story.
Rich visited my fourth graders and me as recently as 2003, after breaking the Hong Kong - New York clipper ship record set by Sea Witch in 1849. He’s a natural in front of an audience of any age, easily identifying ‘teachable moments’ as they pop up in his presentations.
Now Rich, aboard Great American III, an Open 60 monohull built in 1999, is five days from departing for the biggest challenge of his career.
When a guy of world-class stature says, “Check out the education pavilion,” you do it.
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