Around the world, sailing solo and sharing tales
Rich Wilson has braved high winds and mountainous seas and sailed boats more than halfway around the world. Now he's going the whole way, all by himself.
Wilson, 57, is planning to enter next year's Vendée Globe, an around-the-world solo sailing race that starts in France. The 25,000-mile race will probably take about 100 days.
"I've spent a fair amount of time at sea, but this will be the biggest challenge, for sure," said the Marblehead man.
Wilson has completed three solo trans-Atlantic runs and other longer voyages with a crew member, including voyages of about 15,000 miles from San Francisco to Boston, from New York to Melbourne, Australia, and from Hong Kong to New York.
Wilson, the president of sitesALIVE!, a company that works to connect students to learning adventures on land and sea, plans to write dispatches from the boat during the Vendée Globe race, sharing them with schoolchildren through the Newspaper in Education program.
"I'm looking forward to the challenge and to being in nature that long and trying to solve all the problems that will come on and trying to write the best pieces I possibly can for the school kids," Wilson said.
Wilson's 60-foot, sloop-rigged monohull, Great American III, underwent 10 months of repairs after it hit an underwater object on a solo trans-Atlantic voyabe in 2006. It was relaunched a month ago.
Wilson has survived other close scrapes. In 1990, he and a shipmate had to be rescued by a container ship when their boat got into trouble off Cape Horn.
He acknowledged the dangers of circumnavigating the world in a sailboat, but added: "I think that you prepare the boat as well as you can and prepare yourself as well as you can, and then you hope you have good fortune. And you do the best you can do at risk management, while you're at sea."
Wilson has a good reputation among sailors, said Brad Van Liew, executive director of the South Carolina Maritime Foundation. Wilson's boat, which was formerly raced by a French long-distance sailor, has also been around the world in races, Van Liew noted.
"He's seaworthy," said Van Liew, who has raced around the world solo twice himself. ". . . He's got experience. His boat's got experience. And he's got guys with experience preparing it."
The Vendée Globe begins Nov. 9, 2008. Wilson is one of 19 competitors who have preregistered. In order to race, Wilson said, he will have to complete a solo qualifying race from Brazil to France in December.
