SIGHTINGS
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Latitude 38
• May, 2017
is this your year Every fall, the chill of autumn weather signals the imminent arrival of winter — and serves as a reminder to West Coast sailors that the Mexico cruising season is about to begin. To our way of thinking the best way to kick off a winter cruise to sunny southern latitudes is to join the annual Baja Ha-Ha cruisers rally, a 750mile jaunt from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas, with rest stops along the way at Bahia Tortugas and Bahia Santa Maria. As regular readers know, the Ha-Ha has launched more than 10,000 sailors into the cruising lifestyle since its inception in 1994. Just six months from now, a diverse collection of boats will gather in San Diego for the 24th edition, Baja Ha-Ha, which
KIM KIRCH / WWW.KIMKIRCH.COM
LATITUDE / CHRIS
why sail around the world alone? There aren't many 'firsts' left for circumnavigators to accomplish. While speed records will continue to be whittled away by faster and faster boats, most of the various solo, nonstop, around-the-world firsts have been conquered by a select group of legends. But what about going around the world in a figure 8? The route — conceived and soon to be attempted by San Francisco sailor Randall Reeves — goes south through the Pacific, past Cape Horn, around Antarctica, back past Cape Horn again, up the Atlantic to Greenland, through the Northwest Passage and back to San Francisco. For those counting, that's five oceans, two circumnavigations and a year alone around the top and bottom of the planet. It's about 40,000 miles, or almost twice the distance of the Earth at its equator. Reeves plans to depart in October on his 41-ft aluminium sloop Mõli, a storied boat with some serious miles on her. "I still wrestle with a clear and compelling answer as to why I want to do it," said Reeves, who is well versed in the prose of adventure writers. "It has a lot to do with wanting that kind of challenge and the privilege of seeing the ocean on its own terms, of being able to witness the wilder parts of the world." The son of a merchant mariner, Reeves grew up in the Central Valley, and got his feet wet on Randall Reeves, left, and Tony Gooch, who has his father's boat. "I still remember a circumnavigating first under his belt. Reeves that first sail, tacking up the hopes to claim a first, starting this fall. river. I thought, this is what I want to do. It's where the blue water dream began," he said. In the 1980s, Reeves met Bernard Moitessier, one of his heroes, who was staying at Glen Cove in Vallejo on his famed steel ketch Joshua. "Here I was, an inexperienced young river rat interviewing a sailing god. I was in awe," Reeves said, but added that Moitessier was a little jaded about his circumnavigating credentials, and was instead focused on politics and the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons. "Moitessier wanted to talk about saving the world; I wanted to talk about the ocean. It was the worst interview ever." Reeves laughed, but emphasized the influence of Moitessier's writing. "His descriptions in The Long Way were early inspirations for wanting to see the big bad ocean," said Reeves of the famed book about the 1968 Golden Globe Race, the first singlehanded, nonstop race around the world. Reeves did his first singlehanded cruise in 2010 across the Pacific aboard his 31-ft Far East Mariner Murre, sailing some 12,000 miles from Mexico, through French Polynesia and Hawaii, then up to Alaska before returning to San Francisco in 2012. "Those first solo passages were everything I thought they would be," Reeves said. "I learned to provision, to navigate, to think through a route, and to see that amazing non-human world, the ocean." And then there was Matt Rutherford, who in 2011 became the first person to circumnavigate the Americas singlehanded and nonstop — a 27,000-mile, 309-day trip in a 27-ft Albin Vega. Rutherford's feat again roused a dream. "I'd always wanted to do a really long trip like that since, forever, since reading about that Golden Globe Race." Reeves said he hadn't considered the Arctic, but after hearing about Rutherford's accomplishment, and delving back into his desire to go around the world along the Southern Ocean, an idea was born. "I don't know how it clicked, but it occurred to me that you could put those two voyages together and have a super-long, super-interesting, super-unusual endeavor that might be more interesting to a