One of the bravest of those ‘orphaned in the immensity of the sea’

The ranking of singlehanded sailors you will find elsewhere in this issue was a collegial staff effort. If I had ranked the greatest solo sailors in history myself, I would have put Vito Dumas, now residing at the midpoint, number 10, nearer the top, maybe in second place behind the sainted sea captain who wrote the book—the first book ever—on singlehanded circumnavigating, Joshua Slocum.

I’ve been a big fan of Vito’s since I read his book, Alone Through the Roaring Forties. I should say I’ve been a fan since I opened the book, before I read a word, and studied a black-and-white photograph of the author. There’s Vito aboard his 31-foot ketch Lehg II, striking a pose with one arm akimbo, the other raised with a heavily gloved hand gripping a rough manila halyard. He’s wearing a sou’wester with the brim turned up, over a wool scarf that wraps his head, neck and chin and is tucked into thick oilskins. The picture, which deserves an honored place in any exhibit of the best sailor’s portraits ever made, was taken in Cape Town. It must have been an uncommonly cold day in South Africa.

What is most striking about the photo is Vito’s big, confident smile. The man is about to sail thousands of miles alone in a tiny boat through the most dangerous reaches of the oceans to an appointment with Cape Horn, and he’s smiling. There’s a simple explanation for that: This Argentine cowboy was utterly in love with sailing.You get the feeling from his book that he thought it was a privilege to be abused by the sea in a boat he so admired that he wrote he once kissed it in “a surge of affection for my shipmate.”

Dumas sailed around the world in 1942-43 east to west below the three great capes. It was a brutal way to circle the globe, especially in the long approach to Cape Horn in the Roaring 40s. At one point the boat smashed so hard into a wave Dumas was literally splattered onto a bulkhead, breaking his nose, suffering numerous other injuries and bleeding profusely. The boat was later capsized by one 50-foot wave, then righted by another. It’s no wonder he was moved to compose a short but lyrical prayer asking for mercy for “sailors who are orphaned in the immensity of the sea.”

Vito Dumas was the first person to sail alone around Cape Horn and the first singlehander to sail around the world by the capes course. He died in 1965 at the age of 65.

I don’t mean to diminish the achievement of the sailors who have followed in Dumas’ wake, particularly those who sail alone in around-the-world races. Given the size and complexity of their machinelike boats, which are less seakindly and perhaps less seaworthy than Dumas’ stolid derivative of a Colin Archer lifeboat, theirs is probably a more dangerous lot. But at least they know what they’re getting into. The Roaring 40s these days are a virtual highway (call it Intercontinental 40) for adventure sailors. When Dumas strapped on his sou’wester and set a course along latitude 40 south, he was sailing into a black hole, the watery equivalent of terra incognita. Few small boats had ever ventured there. He entered this treacherous region in a wood boat that not only lacked the weather and navigation electronics that serve today’s circumnavigators, but didn’t have a radio or even a bilge pump.

I’ll admit there’s some nostalgia at work here. Looking back, it’s easy to admire the circumnavigating pioneers, simple sailors who accomplished brave feats without sponsors to fund them or dreams of glory to spur them on.

That sort of feeling may account for some of the negative reaction to the breaking of the west to east transatlantic monohull sailing record last October by Robert Miller’s Mari-Cha IV, which sailed from New York’s Ambrose lighthouse to Lizard Point on the southwest coast of England in an amazing 6 days, 17 hours and 52 minutes, more than two days faster than the previous record holder, Bernard Stamm. Mari-Cha, at 140-foot LOA, is more than twice as long as Stamm’s Open 60, and many times more sophisticated. Designed by a team of two Frenchmen and two New Zealanders and built of carbon fiber in a French yard famed for defining the state of the art, it has two 140-foot masts, a canting keel and a budget that would do credit to a NASA project.

Interspersed among the cheers for the record-breaking dash across the Atlantic was some grousing by folks who complained Mari-Cha’s owner had bought the record by spending what it took to build his fantastic craft and sail it with an all-star crew of 24. Stamm, they pointed out, sailed his 60-footer with three friends in midwinter in conditions so terrible they almost met the Perfect Storm standard.

Stamm’s was the more romantic effort, and he has a bit of Vito in him, being a gritty singlehander (winner of the last Around Alone race), but there’s no reason to get weepy over his record being destroyed by higher tech at higher expense. Stamm is a great sailor, and his record was a terrific achievement, even though he set it in a boat named after goose liver–Armor Lux-Foie Gras Bizac. On the other hand, Mari-Cha ought to get extra credit for being the first boat not named after a sponsor (unlike Jet Services, Playstation, etc.) to set the record since Atlantic did it in 1905.

We ought to be glad rich guys like Robert Miller are around to throw money at sailing records. If these records serve any purpose, it’s to advance the technology of sailing. Mari-Cha, a monohulled sailboat that can sail faster than 40 knots, is certainly doing that. When sailing records fall, it is almost always not because someone sailed better, but because someone came up with a better boat. Charlie Barr was a skipper of legendary skills, but he set the transatlantic record in 1905 because he sailed the most technologically advanced yacht of the time, not to mention one of the biggest, at 185 feet. It took 75 years for a technological leap in the form of Eric Tabarly’s trimaran to come along to break Atlantic’s record.

In a odd twist on technology, Mari-Cha has something in common with the original record holder. Like Atlantic, she’s a schooner. Mari-Cha’s two masts are so far apart they’re like two independent sloop rigs on the same boat, but because the foremast is no higher than the aft mainmast, she’s a schooner.

One of the next challenges for this 21st century schooner will be an attempt to sail around the world in 80 days. In her little sprint across the Atlantic, she managed to set a new monohull speed record of 525.7 nautical miles in 24 hours, so her chances are good.

I wish this marvelous boat well in her assault on the 80-day barrier, but when I see the photos of the triumphant crew of two dozen spraying champagne in their matching $1,500 foul weather suits, I’ll be thinking of Vito Dumas in his oilskins and sou’wester, alone on his little ketch. It took him 272 days to sail around the world—a greater achievement in my book than that of any 80-day wonder.