An Around Alone racer with true grit-inside and out

When we left Tim Kent in the November issue, he had started the Around Alone Race with an empty bank account, worn-out sails, a dread of sailing in a storm in the Bay of Biscay and a fond hope that as a solo-ocean-racing neophyte he would somehow be able to finish a brutal race that has defeated many an experienced circumnavigator.

In four months, things have changed, but not everything. Tim still has no major sponsor or steady source of funds, but he has some new sails, including a replacement for the baggy old mainsail he started with, bought with money cajoled from contributors by his dogged supporters.

There is no sign that he has revised his humble aspiration to merely finish-he has enough sailor's superstition in him not to tempt fate by doing that-but no one can deny he is sailing a good race. His Everest Horizontal finished leg 3 in Tauranga, New Zealand, in second place in Class 2 behind (albeit far behind) Tommy Hilfiger Freedom America, sailed by the formidable Brad Van Liew, who was pretty much anointed the winner of the class before the race started. More than just staying in the hunt, Tim has demonstrated a doughty resilience in dealing with the plethora of miseries that lie in wait for singlehanders trying to keep boat and body together on the cruel sea.

One thing that didn't change was the Bay of Biscay. It turned out that the conditions in this square indent in the continent framed by the coasts of France and Spain were well worth dreading. "All along," Tim wrote in an e-mail from the infamous bay, "I have said that I did not want to sail across the Bay of Biscay in a storm. Now that I am doing it, I still don't like it. Barometer went down to 990 last night, winds to the low 40s, and I have been under storm jib and triple-reefed main since sunset last night, about 20 hours."

Nasty stuff, but what was coming was worse. Tim and the rest of the Class 2 skippers found themselves sailing into a hurricanelike storm system predicted to produce Force 12 winds blowing across a wide fetch of the Atlantic. The prospect of facing this with that sailor's nightmare, a lee shore, lurking on the port side persuaded the skippers to find shelter in Spanish ports. "If the storm does not materialize as we think it will, I'll feel a bit sheepish," Tim wrote. It did, and no one expressed any regret about missing it.

Readers of the November Full and By ("Broke and Alone on a Stormy Sea, His Dream Comes True") will recall that Tim, at age 50, gave up his job in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, cleaned out his savings and retirement accounts and bought a used 50-foot around-the-world racing boat to take the biggest flyer of his life by entering the Around Alone. He took this flyer with no experience sailing alone on oceans and, as a sales manager for a textbook publisher, little that would qualify him as a mechanic, electrician, sailmaker or rigger. He is now proficient in all of those disciplines, certified by the Singlehander's School of Hard Knocks. The Around Alone Race is billed as epic adventure, and it is-an adventure in boat maintenance and repair as much as sailing.

Early in the first leg, the autopilot steered the boat into a broach that destroyed the only spinnaker on board. That was just the beginning of serial tribulations at the mechanical hands of his untrustworthy autopilots.

On New Year's Day, while the skipper was napping and Everest was sailing in 30 knots of wind under reefed main and solent jib, the boat jibed and, naturally, all hell broke loose. Tim described it: "The main looked like a pretzel, as did all the battens-everything jammed up against the runners." He turned off the autopilot, eased the sails, got the boat off her beam ends and tried restarting the autopilot. It refused. And so with the boat steering its own erratic course in enormous seas, Everest's resident autopilot technician went to work.

"I got some tools, crawled down below into the watertight compartment in the back of the boat where the autopilot rams live and disconnected the ram for the port pilot, crawled back out again, went below into the cabin, switched electrical connectors from the port pilot to the starboard pilot, sat down at the nav station and checked the configuration of the new pilot to make sure it would work exactly the same way as the old one, went on deck and fired it up. It worked!"

A few days later, Tim reported that "another autopilot failure snapped us into a jibe in 40 knots of air," tearing the solent. By then, he was used to autopilot problems, but he would never get used to what happened next. One of the diesel engine's injectors went bad. This problem wasn't fixable; it was barely endurable, but it had to be endured because the batteries that run the autopilots need frequent charging. The engine ran, more or less, but the failed injector pumped exhaust directly into the boat, resulting in Everest sailing into Tauranga with an interior that looked more like a Third World oil refinery than a yacht cabin.

Tim tells the story: "Had to run the engine twice yesterday. Both times the beast took about eight tries to get running. Each time leaves me filthy, as the effort includes working the compression releases on top of the motor as well as the throttle and start buttons-easy for a guy with three hands like me. Then it's up on deck while the engine bangs away down below, smoke pouring from the cabin. When the time is up, I take a deep breath, dive below to shut the engine off, then dash back on deck to breathe again.

"The scene in the cabin is almost indescribable. The boat looks like it has been in a fire. Every surface is covered with soot and grime. My pillow is blackened, food boxes are filthy, the white painted surfaces are either dark gray or black depending on their proximity to the engine. My foul weather gear is destroyed; it looks like the bunker coats and pants firemen wear-black with filth and oil."

Tim, remember, is living his dream. I don't suppose that in all the years of dreaming of sailing around the world he ever envisioned crossing a finish line looking like a chimney sweep. On the other hand, he's had plenty of happier experiences made of the stuff of classic sailing dreams. On January 3, he recorded a thrilling 119-mile run in eight hours for an average speed just shy of 15 knots. "I had up the main with one reef and the solent, and we were smokin','' he wrote. "I broke the boat's top speed record, hitting 26.7 knots on the GPS at the height of one booming surf."

As this is written, the worst of the race is still ahead-running the gauntlet of the stormy latitudes to an appointment with Cape Horn. But it bodes well that the dreamer who described himself as "just a Wednesday night PHRF racer" has shown a sure-handed ability to overcome the obstacles that keep getting in his way. There's a lot of grit aboard Everest Horizontal, and not all of it came from a broken diesel injector.