1,000 Days at Sea

On January 17 Reid Stowe sailed into the record books and proved his doubters wrong. For 20 or so years he’d been telling anyone who would listen about his plan to spend 1,000 days at sea without ever touching land. “Impossible,” many of us said. But goddam! He DID it, and he will tell you that God had a lot to do with his success. “There have been good times, and bad times, and weird times,” Stowe said on day 1,000 as he spoke via satellite phone to the 50 or so people who gathered at South Street Seaport in New York City to celebrate his milestone. Stowe was still aboard his 70-foot, home-built schooner, Anne, sailing in calm Atlantic waters four degrees north of the equator and a couple of hundred miles west of the African coast. He will hang out there for a few more months so that he can avoid sailing through the winter storms that plague the North Atlantic. He expects to arrive back in New York Harbor on June 17—1,151 days after he departed. From the beginning of the voyage, his course has been tracked by the METOCEAN Mertrac Vessel Monitoring System which uses a two-way satellite system to determine his daily position. A plot of the voyage can be seen at www.1000days.net. Click on Google maps.

“I’m feeling good,” he told us. “A school of porpoises just swam by, and I finished an hour of yoga a little while ago. I’ve done that every single day of the voyage. I’ve been eating fish every day, and I haven’t seen a ship in two months. I feel very connected to the universe.”

Stowe regards his voyage as a spiritual journey, but the trip has not all been peace and harmony. After several years of preparation and a disappointing effort to round up major sponsors to fund his mission, Stowe, then 55, and his 23-year- 1,000 Days and Counting: Sailor Reid Stowe Makes Longest Sea Voyage—Ever!

Haggerty at Large by Betsy Frawley Haggerty Betsy Frawley Haggerty is a lifelong sailor, an award winning journalist and the former editor of Offshore Magazine. Her column, which debuts in this issue, will appear monthly. To follow Stowe’s homecoming voyage, visit www.1000days.net. old girlfriend and novice sailor, Soanya Ahmad, cast off their dock lines in Hoboken, New Jersey, on April 21, 2007 and sailed down the Hudson through New York Harbor to the Atlantic Ocean. The
heavy cargo schooner, which Stowe built in his family’s backyard in North Carolina about 30 years before, was seaworthy, but, due to a lack of funds, the sails and rigging were not all they had hoped. Even so, Stowe, who had once spent five months sailing Anne to Antarctica, was undaunted.

Things were a challenge from the start. On Day 4, they encountered the U.S. Navy, which advised them to take a more southerly course, due to military testing. Eleven days later, they collided with a freighter. It’s not clear from Stowe’s website (www.1000days.net) how or why this occurred. “They were lucky; it was just a glancing blow,” Sterling Barrett, a key member of the shore support team, told me recently. Glancing, my eye! Stowe and Ahmad were fortunate to have survived uninjured; the schooner lost its bowsprit and headstay, equipment that is critical to the structural integrity of the boat and the rigging. A less determined (and perhaps more prudent) sailor would have turned back, but Stowe believed in his mission and spent the next month drifting as he cut away the damaged bowsprit, redesigned and fashioned a shorter replacement, rerigged the headstay and recut the jib to fit the new rig. It was at this point I became a believer. Maybe, just maybe, Stowe really did have the expertise and wherewithal to complete what at first seemed a very dubious mission. The accident had the opposite effect on the cadre of critics who write anti- Stowe rants on www.sailinganarchy.com and www.1000daysofhell.com. In short, they characterize Stowe as an eccentric nut and incompetent seafarer, a fraud, a convicted felon and a deadbeat dad, who is doing nothing more than drift around the world eating bean sprouts and meditating. It’s true that Stowe has had a checkered career. He did once serve time in federal prison on drug-smuggling charges and he had been wanted for failure to pay child support for a daughter, who is now 30. Those payments have since been made. And yes indeed he does eat sprouts and act like something of a hippie. But as for his seamanship, it may not be by the book, but he must be doing something right. Not only has he lived 1,000 days at sea, but he has survived a knockdown in the Southern Ocean, navigated himself around Cape Horn and circumnavigated the globe, all the while sewing sails and making repairs on his boat, which, after nearly three years at sea, is, well, beaten up.

“I’m not a perfect sailor, and they’ve found some flaws,” Stowe told Herb McCormick of Cruising World Magazine in response to questions about his critics. “They don’t like my lifestyle, my philosophy, my woman, my personality, my boat, and perhaps the fact that I am following my dreams. But I can’t see how any man who spends any amount of time at sea alone could hate me. At sea, you learn respect; otherwise you couldn’t do it.” And, yes, he is now alone at sea. Soanya Ahmad left the boat on day 306 after becoming dangerously seasick. With the help of his shore crew, Stowe arranged for her to be picked up several miles offshore by a launch from the Royal Perth Yacht Club in Western Australia. Five months later, in July 2008, Ahmad gave birth to a son, Darshen Ahmad Stowe. Darshen, who is living in Queens with his mother and grandparents, will be nearly two when his father sees him for the first time. Meanwhile, Stowe, who has broken several sailing records, including the longest non-stop voyage ever, sails on. “I am not really thinking about land yet,” he told his supporters on January 17. “I am a little bit nervous about coming back to the world.” An earlier post on his website could explain why. “I patiently live here in this beautiful sky-roofed cathedral, checking it out, in no hurry for a change. I am curious, but not thinking much about what will happen next. I move with the wind and current.”