Legendary solo sailor Webb Chiles has circled the globe six times over five decades of ocean voyaging, most recently with his Moore 24 sailboat Gannet.
Click on the player to listen to Webb’s story.
Read Webb’s incredible account of rounding Cape Horn here.
Webb Chiles Podcast Interview Transcript
The transcript was auto-generated and lightly edited for readability. Listen to the audio to fact check.
Summary
00:00 Introduction to the Journey
01:04 The Pitch-Pole Incident
03:00 Exploring the Gannet
06:00 The Evolution of Offshore Sailing
09:13 The Journey Begins: From St. Louis to the Sea
12:01 Navigating the World: Celestial Navigation Insights
25:04 The Challenge of Cape Horn
31:08 Reflections on Epic Voyages
38:38 The Romance of Sailing: Then and Now
40:31 Navigating the Unknown: Tales from the Sea
44:29 Writing from the Edge: The Business of Sailing Stories
49:21 The Evolution of Sailing and Writing in the Digital Age
52:14 The Open Boat Adventure: A New Challenge
56:21 Survival at Sea: The Pitch-Pole Incident
01:02:32 Drifting Towards Destiny: The Journey to Land
01:10:46 Resilience and Recovery: The Aftermath of Survival
01:13:32 Unexpected Detention: A Journey into Saudi Prisons
01:18:28 The Psychological Toll of Imprisonment
01:20:35 The Release: A Glimmer of Hope
01:23:48 Reflections on Survival and Freedom
01:25:33 The Fate of Chidiak: A Sailor’s Loss
01:30:06 Circumnavigating the Globe: Sailing Adventures
01:32:22 A Changing Relationship with the Sea
01:35:54 Despair and Resilience: The Sinking of Resurgam
01:42:59 Love and Compromise: A Lasting Partnership
01:45:56 Sailing Simplified: The Essence of Adventure
PITCH POLE
Webb Chiles it’s nightime – eight, nine o’clock at night. I go to sleep early out there becuase you wake up often.
I’m sleeping and then I’m being thrown through the air. She hit something. A pitch-pole is doing a somersault for people who don’t know. She hit something and flipped over and I’m thrown out. I remember thinking I was concerned that the mast might come down on me and impale me. Well, it didn’t.
I wasn’t thrown a long way. I’m a good swimmer. I was a good swimmer. And so I get back to her and I’m able to turn her over.
But she was almost gunnel-deep in the water. And that meant that the centerboard trunk was below the water. And there’s a slot in there where water was continually coming in.
Bernie Harberts (01:04) Which means you can’t ever pump it out.
Webb Chiles (01:05) Well, that’s what I was trying to do and couldn’t. Yeah, there was a pump built into the centerboard trunk, but the whole system’s below water. So I was using—I can’t remember what I was using, a plate or something. I had buckets on the boat, but I think they were lost too.
When I couldn’t get the water out of her, I tied the two boats together. I pumped up the inflatable using my foot pump and tied them together and we drifted.
I had some food. I had not very much water because I was living off of six sips of water and half a can of tuna fish a day. And one day a coconut comes by, drifts by, and I grab it. There was still a hammer left on it and I was able to break into it. I thought, “This is another week of life.”
INTRODUCTION
Bernie Harberts (01:54) This is Webb Chiles, who sailed more offshore miles in small open boats than probably anyone else alive. He was just talking about being pitch-poled in the Pacific Ocean in an open boat. We’re going to get back to that story in a second. But first, I want to ask Webb about his most recent voyage—a thousand-mile trip out into the Atlantic Ocean and back. He took this voyage on his boat Gannet, a Moore 24. That’s not a boat you’d ordinarily associate with offshore sailing.
GANNET: THE MOORE 24
Bernie Harberts (02:27) Tell me about Gannet.
Webb Chiles (02:28) Gannet is of a class called Moore 24s—Moore with two O’s, M-O-O-R-E, after the builder. The Moore 24s were built in the late ’70s near Santa Cruz, California. They were the first of the ultralight classes built in the United States. Ultralight—she’s 24 feet long. She displaces a designated 2,050 pounds, and half of that is in the keel. Back then, they made boats light by having sandwich construction: fiberglass, in-core balsa wood, fiberglass. There are some defects to that in the water. If water gets into that balsa, it can cause it to deteriorate. I launched Gannet in ’79.
The previous owner re-cored the deck, sent me pictures of it, and where I’ve had to drill into it to put in supplies—it’s all been dry. She’s designed to race around buoys in harbors, but I took her around the world and have been in two 55-knot gales as recorded on the shore—one approaching New Zealand, one approaching Durban, South Africa.
She is a credit to Ron Moore and his people’s honor as boat builders. She sails beautifully. I don’t get seasick, which is fortunate. But I have never on any other boat—and I once sailed most of the way around the world on an open boat, a Drascombe Lugger that I thought displaced 800 pounds, but they now say it’s 600 and some odd—anyway, she really accelerates. She has a very quick motion. So when I go sailing—I just came back from 12 days and a thousand miles out there, came back a week ago yesterday—I feel the motion. Everything moves for two or three days afterward. Particularly when you come in and what I want most is a hot shower and a cold drink. You get in the shower and you close your eyes and everything moves.
Bernie Harberts (04:52) Explain that moment. You’ve been rolling in your skin, I imagine. What is that like when you’re in the shower?
Webb Chiles (04:58) You close your eyes and it feels like you’re going to lose your balance. You feel as though you’re swaying and everything is swaying. I felt this even out of the shower for two or three days this time. I was sailing a lot to windward. But she’s a great little boat. Nobody has probably ever mentioned comfort and Moore 24 in the same sentence. These boats are still raced on the West Coast—there are racing fleets in Santa Cruz, San Francisco Bay Area, and Seattle. They race each other, and except during COVID, every year there’s a race from San Francisco to Hawaii. One year it’s single-handed, one year it’s double-handed. Moore 24s have still won those races recently. This is now an almost 50-year-old design. That’s incredible.
And to me what’s even more incredible is that the guys three or four years ago—their elapsed time from San Francisco to Hawaii was 10 days and something. Now if you went back to the ’60s or ’70s, the regular Transpac in big boats—Cal 40s and much bigger boats—they would have been hard put to have an elapsed time of 10 days. These two guys went out there. On the West Coast, your problem is breaking away from the coastal weather pattern. That would take a day or two. And then, if you’re going to Hawaii or as I have gone down to the Marquesas, you have to cross the doldrums. But once you break away from that weather pattern—36, 48 hours—it’s all downwind. And these guys hand-steered, and every day after those first day or two were 200-mile days, 200-plus-mile days.
Bernie Harberts (06:54) On a 24-foot boat, that’s up there pushing the waterline.
Webb Chiles (07:00) Yeah, they’re planing. The waterline rule no longer exists when you’re planing. You can be on that little boat going along at six or seven knots, and then you get a little bit more wind or just catch a wave and all of a sudden you’re doing double digits. The most I’ve ever seen was 13.7 or something like that, but that was when I was looking at the Velocitek—the device I have on the mast that shows speed. So we could have been doing more when I wasn’t looking at it. You’re paying attention to something else. Anyway, she’s a great little boat.
Well, when I bought her, she was called Growler. She was on Lake Superior in Duluth, Minnesota.
HOW GANNET GOT HER NAME
Bernie Harberts (07:33) So how did she get her name?
Webb Chiles (07:39) She was launched in ’79. Her first owner was in California. After a year or two, he sold her to a man in Texas who I believe was a policeman. He had her on a lake between Texas and Oklahoma called Lake Texoma or some such thing. Then he sold her to a man in Duluth on Lake Superior, Minnesota. Then it was sold to another man in Duluth, and that’s who I bought it from. She was called Growler then.
When I bought her, Carol, my wife—now a retired architect—her career had taken her to Chicago. We lived in Evanston, Illinois, close to the lake, half a mile. I had a 37-foot boat then that we had lived on for five years in Boston and that I had sailed around the world more than a time and a half. Carol sailed with me part of that time, 10,000 miles one year.
I had it in New Zealand, in the Bay of Islands, which is my favorite place in the world to have a boat. It would be the place I’d most like to live if I could full-time. I can’t because of rules that make sense. Anyway, I had imported that boat into New Zealand, paid the duty, so it didn’t have to leave. I had to leave, but the boat didn’t, and I owned a mooring down there. So I thought, well, fine. I looked out at Lake Michigan and said, “I’ll get a little boat to sail on Lake Michigan in the northern summer and in the winter I’ll go to New Zealand.”
Well, one, I didn’t really like sailing on Lake Michigan that much. It’s the fifth biggest lake in the world, but it’s a lake. You get out in the middle and there’s land 30 miles away. I would like land to be a thousand miles away. So after two summers, she came with a trailer. I had her towed to San Diego and I decided to sail her around the world.
But when I was on my other boat called the Hawke of Tuonela on her mooring in the Bay of Islands, gannets are a species of birds. They’re kind of a little bigger than seagulls. Golden head, black-tipped wings—they’re beautiful birds. I would be sitting on the deck in the evening having a drink, as is my want. And they would circle around up there and then they’d see a fish and then they’d go straight down and they’d hit the water like a bomb. Then they can swim underneath. Well, I admire gannets. They’re not pelagic birds, they’re coastal birds.
I wasn’t going to keep the boat called Growler, so I named her Gannet. That’s where the name came from.
Bernie Harberts (10:29) Beautiful. You went from a Hawk to a Gannet.
THE HAWK OF TUONELA
Webb Chiles (10:32) The Hawk story was that that boat—all my boats have been basically racing boats. Gannet’s the most extreme.
Back in the ’60s, early ’70s, I guess, the racing rule was called the International Offshore Racing Rule, IOR. And Hawk was a one-tonner—built about 37 to 40 feet, the design. She was designed by Charlie Morgan, a Heritage one-tonner. The first owners raced her for a while, then they donated her to the Naval Academy. And the Naval Academy called her Hawke, H-A-W-K-E, after either a Revolutionary War or War of 1812 schooner.
One of my favorite pieces of music is by Sibelius called The Swan of Tuonela. Well, when I bought the boat, she was called Hawke. I said, “Fine, I’ll name her the Hawk of Tuonela.” I’m in New Zealand in the Bay of Islands, and I’ve hauled out to anti-foul. When you’re anti-fouling, New Zealand is not all that hot, but still paint sets up. So you can kind of work. So I’m anti-fouling.
A woman comes up behind me and I sense her behind me, but I’m working. And she finally says, “I suppose you know you have the name of that boat wrong.”
Bernie Harberts (11:54) It’s the British spelling—put an E on there. It’s the old, old spelling. That’s great.
Webb Chiles (12:01) And I turned around and looked at her and I said, “I do know.” And I went back to looking and told her the story over my shoulder.
SIX CIRCUMNAVIGATIONS
Bernie Harberts (12:12) You spelled Tuonela correctly. How many circumnavigations? How many times did you sail around the world?
Webb Chiles (12:17) Six. And to put that in perspective, I don’t know of any other American who could make that statement. Maybe some people have done it as crews on round-the-world races, but on your own boat and mostly by yourself and without sponsorship—I never sought that, didn’t want it. Sponsors are bosses and I stopped working for other people in 1974. I stopped owing money in 1974. Debts are chains and I don’t like to be chained.
Bernie Harberts (12:46) So six.
Webb Chiles (12:47) Six circumnavigations. In terms of the world, there’s a Japanese sailor who’s done seven, and there’s an Australian who’s done more than that. It’s a little hard to say how many he did because he once went out and went around almost a couple of times non-stop—Jon Sanders, J-O-N Sanders. They both—well, the Japanese participated in races.
Bernie Harberts (13:08) They both have jobs though. That’s fascinating.
Webb Chiles (13:17) And both of them have had sponsors to one degree or another.
BEGINNINGS: ST. LOUIS TO SAN DIEGO
Bernie Harberts (13:21) And I know of Jon Sanders’ trip, which was the big solo trip before Reid Stowe’s trip, another long, long voyage. So I’d like to get back to your start—where you were born.
Webb Chiles (13:38) I was born about as far from the sea as you can be born. If there’s any lesson useful, it is that you don’t have to be born to this. You can learn it yourself. It would be better to have come from a good family and have parents who taught me useful things, but they didn’t. I came from a dysfunctional family. I was born in St. Louis. Grew up in a suburb of St. Louis. I’m a reader, always have been. So I read. I read Conrad. I read Slocum. I read other things. I was not close to my mother or my stepfather.
My mother and father separated before I was born. I saw him maybe twice, maybe 10 minutes at a time in my life. But his mother was the relative I was closest to, that grandmother, and her last husband. She was never divorced—she just outlived three husbands. I was always closest to them. Anyway, they retired in the early ’50s. Bought a little house in San Diego’s Mission Beach, three in from the ocean, for $7,000 back then. I spent my summers in high school—all three summers in high school—with them. It’s just three in from the ocean. There’s a video that I made called Beginnings that’s on my YouTube channel, because I went back to St. Louis to redo Beginnings 1. And you can see how close it was.
Anyway, I was over the seawall and on the beach and in the water all the time and I saw boats. I didn’t know anybody who sailed. And now I know that if you were a kid and went along the docks and said, “Hey, I’d really like to go sailing and can I clean your boat for you or something,” you’d probably find somebody who’d take you sailing. But I was shy and I didn’t do that.
But I’d read about it. I bought my first boat when I was 25—a 26-footer, an Excalibur 26, a stock boat, kind of like a mini Cal 40 for people who know boats back then. I was living in Oakland, got it in Jack London Square. And the first time I sailed—I’d only been on sailboats maybe three or four times. The first time I sailed alone was to take that boat from Jack London Square around to Berkeley Marina. I’d ordered it with an outboard—it wasn’t there, so I had to sail it. And I was innocent, and the salesman sold me a lot of stuff I didn’t need including a 170 percent genoa, which you’d never use in San Francisco. I’ve never had one since. And I had a working jib but it wasn’t on the boat, and there weren’t winch handles on the boat. So I sailed that boat with a 170 percent genoa and without winch handles around. It was a downwind slip.
I did my best and I hit the dock with the bow, but not too hard. But that was the first time.
Bernie Harberts (16:40) And what year was that?
Webb Chiles (16:45) I would have been 25 in November of ’66 and ordered the boat and then got it in January and taught myself. I’d read about it, taught myself, and the woman who was then part of my life—we sailed on San Francisco Bay, which is a good place to learn because it’s got a lot of wind and a lot of current. I liked San Diego better than San Francisco, the climate among other things.
I got that boat in probably the end of January, early February. And so over the Labor Day weekend, she and I sailed that boat from San Francisco to San Diego, just stopping in Santa Barbara.
Bernie Harberts (17:27) How far is that?
Webb Chiles (17:27) Five, 600 miles.
CELESTIAL NAVIGATION
Bernie Harberts (17:27) So what did you do for navigation? You would have been—did you study up for it or was there—explain the navigation at that time for us that are used to GPS.
Webb Chiles (17:31) Well, this was just coastal. So I did not use celestial. I taught myself celestial before. The story of that is that her father—the woman I was with then, and we were together on and off for many years, several, six or seven years—her father was a mid-’30s graduate of the Naval Academy. He did destroyer captain in the North Atlantic in the Second World War. He did his 20 years and never wanted to see the ocean again. But he still had his navigation text from the Naval Academy—Mixter’s Primer, Mixter being the name of the author, Mixter’s Primer of Navigation, I think. He gave it to me, and so I taught myself celestial out of it.
Bernie Harberts (18:15) To explain to people that don’t really understand it, to break it down—as I recall, because I came up with a set of HO249 tables, an Almanac, and a Davis Mark III plastic sextant. What did you have at the time to get you started? What all materials did you need?
Webb Chiles (18:33) Well, back then, you mentioned HO249. HO249 were the air sight reduction tables. During the Second World War, the military needed thousands of navigators for planes and ships. My memory is that there were naval sight reduction tables that ran eight or nine volumes. The air sight reduction tables were three volumes—two for the sun: 0 to 40, 40 to 90, and then a third one for the stars.
I remember reading back then—and I’ve read a lot of stuff that I know isn’t true—among things that people have written, articles saying you can’t row an inflatable dinghy. Well, you can’t row most of them, but if you have the right one and you know how to row, you can. I’ve never had anything but inflatable dinghies and oars. I have an outboard on Gannet, but I never put an outboard on a dinghy. I’ve said if I’m too old to row ashore, I’m too old.
But the point of this was that I remember reading something way back then. Somebody said you can’t use the air sight reduction tables—they’re not accurate enough. Well, that just is not so. I used them for two circumnavigations and never ran into anything. I needed a sextant. I bought a used—it was actually a World War II Navy sextant. David White made them. And I’m in San Diego. Back then, this would have been the ’60s, people on merchant ships would go through Panama, and apparently there were a ton of sextants in pawn shops in Panama. They would buy them and then bring them into the United States and sell them. So I bought that David White.
So you needed a sextant, you needed air sight reduction tables HO249, you needed a chart, you needed a parallel ruler, you needed dividers—really not a compass.
I developed—I’m totally blind now in this eye due to glaucoma since about age 70. But there was always a small amount of scar tissue right in the center of that eye of unknown etiology. The doctors didn’t know what caused it. Maybe a birth defect. Well what that meant is that if I looked directly at a star through the telescope and I looked right at it, it disappears.
So I couldn’t do star sights, and they didn’t fit into the rhythms of how I like to live out at sea. Star sights you’ve got to take just before dawn or just after sunset, where you can see the horizon and see the stars as well. I developed my own way, and that was that I took a sun sight in the morning when the sun was just above 20 degrees above the horizon.
In the almanac, there were refraction tables which tell you for a given altitude what kind of distortion the atmosphere is going to cause. I found they weren’t accurate enough below 20 degrees. So when you take a sight, you don’t have a position from a sight. You just have a line, which actually is part of a circle that goes around a quarter of the world—the surface. I mean you might be in San Diego and get this line and the other part of the curve is over by Japan or somewhere. But it looks like a straight line on your chart.
So in the morning you get this one line. You take your sight, you get this one line. Then you take a sight at local noon. Now for the sight in the morning you need exact time—for every three or four seconds you’re off of exact time of when you’re taking that sight, you’re going to be a mile off in where that line is, a nautical mile, which is about 2,000 yards rather than a statute mile.
But in noon sights, you don’t need exact time. What you do is you figure out about when local noon is going to be, depending on where you are in that time zone. Time zones are 15 degrees—360 divided by 24 is 15 degrees. If you’re on the east side, local noon is going to be early. If you’re on the west side, it’s going to be late. Well, you know about where you are, so you guess that. So about 10 minutes before local noon, you take a sight. And then you take a sight every two minutes, and you keep on doing that, and they keep getting higher, and then they start getting lower. Well, when it’s highest is when the sun is due north or south of you.
Bernie Harberts (23:22) Right, so you’re measuring—the noon shot is the highest point of the sun. Time irrelevant.
Webb Chiles (23:29) Yeah, you just keep on taking them. So you take a bunch of them and whatever the highest one is going to be the local noon. That’s going to be a straight line of your latitude. Then you take that line in the morning and it’s only going to be three or four hours and you’re going to move that line from the morning forward on your chart the distance and the direction that you think you’ve gone in those three or four hours. And where those meet is going to be your noon position.
In terms of celestial navigation, if you could draw a circle of probability five miles in diameter, you were doing very well. Now in terms of GPS, where you’ve got something that’s going to be as accurate as within a boat length and maybe more, that may sound outrageous. And if you’re in a Navy ship, maybe going 30 knots, that’s significant, but you’ve got a lot of people in a Navy ship to be looking out. If you’re on a normal sailboat, you’re only going to be—pay attention an extra hour before a landfall and you should be paying attention anyway.
THE DIFFERENCE: CELESTIAL VS. GPS
Bernie Harberts (24:41) Tell me the difference between a landfall purely on celestial, paper charts, advancing daily runs, and when you finally see land—especially let’s say you’re coming up on these low atolls in the Pacific, and you’ve been out 20, 30 days and you’re not quite sure. Whereas now, of course we’re sure within five feet. But what was that feeling? Do you remember that feeling of one particular landfall where it may have been cloudy and your sights were a little—what one pops out? What was that?
Webb Chiles (25:17) Well, fortunately for me, my first landfall in my first circumnavigation was San Diego to the Marquesas. And the Marquesas are not low islands, they’re high islands. So you could see them as you arrive. But then from there, you go through or around the Tuamotus—the tallest thing on those islands is a palm tree. If you’ve got good visibility, you can probably see a palm tree maybe five miles off.
Bernie Harberts (25:44) Man, your navigation better be right though.
Webb Chiles (25:46) Yeah, but you just have to pay attention. I mean, you’ve got to be looking out. I must admit, I went from San Diego to the Marquesas. And then I had to go on to Tahiti for repairs. And I did not want to go through the Tuamotus at that time. So I went around the end of them and down. And I remember when I got—the equivalent of what you’re talking about was when I got—and I don’t remember what the name of that particular atoll was, but there was one that I could make the turn at. And when I could see it, it was a great relief because then I was going to be heading for another high island, Tahiti, 7,000 feet high, and I’d been out for five or six weeks at that time. And there was great satisfaction in it, as well as pleasure that you knew you weren’t going to run into something.
Bernie Harberts (26:36) Do you think that’s diminished a little now with electronics?
Webb Chiles (26:39) Of course it has. Of course it has. I think that if you’re going to go offshore, you still ought to know—you still ought to have at least a plastic sextant. And you ought to know how to take a noon sight for latitude. That doesn’t take a lot. You don’t need exact time. You need an almanac or some kind to tell you about the sun’s situation.
I had several sextants, good ones. But good sextants now are really expensive. The Chinese make one that isn’t all that expensive—it may be good. But they’re precision instruments.
I lost that sextant when I was sailing. I used it on my first circumnavigation. Well, when I was going to Tahiti that time, that was part of my first attempt at Cape Horn, and there was rigging damage on the boat. I did repairs in Tahiti, more rigging damage, went all the way back to San Diego, and then started again. So my first circumnavigation, I started in ’74.
EGREGIOUS AND CAPE HORN
Bernie Harberts (27:47) Which boat? Okay, this was Egregious.
Webb Chiles (27:48) Egregious. It was very similar to Hawk, another 37-foot IOR race boat. But anyway, the first circumnavigation was San Diego with only two stops all the way around the world. I went San Diego south, went around Cape Horn, kept on going—the hull was cracked. Finally, I put into New Zealand for repairs. Sails were ripped out, ripped in. Then San Diego to New Zealand, New Zealand to Tahiti, Tahiti back to San Diego. But then I went and tried to sail an open boat around the world.
Bernie Harberts (28:19) We’re going to stop right there, because you just sailed around Cape Horn in a boat with a cracked hull. To you it’s just like, “Well, you know, went around Cape Horn and then the hull was cracked.” What is this like? So you take off—it’s Egregious, and there’s rigging damage and you go back to San Diego.
Webb Chiles (28:42) There was rigging damage before and I went to Tahiti. Did repairs, went down into the Southern Ocean, rigging damage again. That boat—and then all the way back to San Diego. That boat had a peculiar arrangement where instead of tie rods, the mast was stepped on the keel, but it had an arrangement where there were aluminum flanges that went out inside the cabin to the overhead. And then there were right-angle pieces on the end. And then there were two—I think 3/8-inch bolts that went right through the mast. And a friend of mine who was a professional boat builder, the first time he stepped down below he said, “You’re going to have problems there.” And he was right because there was no flexion there. And there was enough motion that it sheared off those bolts. And when that happened then the mast could move around and it broke part of the tang to the lower shrouds. This is technical to people who don’t know what it is, but I don’t know what else—a piece of metal that holds the wire that holds the mast up. And so that happened and those bolts sheared and then I took it back to San Diego and they did massive repairs and re-welding. And so then I took off.
But the fact that there were the two earlier failures was critical in why I kept on going with the hull cracked. One, I didn’t have a lot of money. In the book, my first published book, Storm Passage, about that voyage, the second part I say “victory or death.” Well, I wouldn’t say victory anymore because I don’t believe we conquer capes or mountains. We merely transit them. Completion probably isn’t as dramatic. But there is satisfaction in knowing that you are so committed to any goal that you will make it a matter of life or death. And it was for me then. I read books about people doing other things, and I, as a kid, said I could do that. Well, I had to prove it to myself that I could do that.
THE DRIVE TO CAPE HORN
Bernie Harberts (30:46) And what was the drive on that trip? Because the first Oakland to San Diego, that seems like more of a recreational sail. But to set off from San Diego in a relatively lightly built boat and decide to go around Cape Horn, there’s some different drive behind it. What was the drive?
Webb Chiles (31:08) I wanted to prove that I was the equal of those people who have done epic voyages in the past. I admired Slocum.
Bernie Harberts (31:14) Which ones did you really admire?
Webb Chiles (31:18) I admired a man who is not much known, Vito Dumas, who was the first to survive going around Cape Horn alone. The first person to go around Cape Horn alone was, if I remember correctly, Al Hansen, who was a Scandinavian. He went east to west and was killed on the Chilean coast, driven ashore there—it’s a lee shore. But Dumas went around during the Second World War to show you how empty that ocean is down there.
I don’t remember the exact years, but it’s like ’42, ’43. And he, if I remember correctly, went around on purpose during the winter when it was even colder because he felt that the storms were less severe in the winter. I was the first American—am the first American—to go alone around Cape Horn. I set a world record for speed on that first circumnavigation for solo circumnavigations in a monohull. I was off the Horn 50 years ago. December 12th.
Bernie Harberts (32:19) It feels like we should be twisting the cap off a bottle of Laphroaig. That’s a huge deal—50 years ago. And so what was that feeling going? Because I’ve sailed down into the Southern Ocean from warmer climates and it gets—it’s not as cheery and tropical. There are things to watch out for.
Webb Chiles (32:26) I was there in December, which is the beginning of their summer. I had some sleet or snow for each of the several days before the Horn. The water—I was bailing water with a bucket.
Bernie Harberts (32:50) The hull was cracked.
Webb Chiles (32:51) Hull was cracked. Not a big crack when you finally saw it in New Zealand. It’s a thin-keel, spade-rudder boat, and the keel was not a bolt-on keel—the lead was inside. The trailing edge of that keel, the crack was about that far down and about that far back. And it was just a hairline. But by the end, I was at sea for almost five months without stopping. October 18th of ’75 to March 16th of ’76, San Diego south around, keep on going to New Zealand.
But anyway, the water’s almost freezing—it was cold. But in terms of navigation, you have to be able to see something up there. It’s cloudy down there. I couldn’t for several days. And it was always safer—you’re going south and heading east.
Bernie Harberts (33:41) You’re going south and heading east.
Webb Chiles (33:44) Well, you don’t want to make the turn east too soon because even though there are islands around the Horn, they’re so close together, it’s a solid land mass. So I didn’t get any sun sights for three days or something. And then one afternoon I got a quick sight of the sun through haze—not the best, but it gave me a line that made me think, “Fine, I’m far enough south that I can turn east.” And I did. And I remember I was sitting up in the companionway, eating some canned ravioli. And I look ahead and there is some land—first land I’ve seen for almost two months. And it was part of what are called the Diego Ramirez Islands, which are southwest of the Horn. And I go past them and I thought, “Well, no matter what happens, I’m going to get blown past the Horn—be the first American to go around the Horn.” I was maybe the 10th or 11th person of any country to go around. Not sure about that. First American, I am sure.
And the next day, the wind increased up to hurricane force, Force 12. And one of the few times I’ve ever tied myself in the cockpit and hand-steered all day. No sails, and the boat’s doing hull speed—eight, 10 knots. There are 20-foot waves breaking off of each quarter because they’re coming out of the southwest, they’re going up to the north, and they’re hitting the land and then ricocheting back. And I had a self-steering vane on that by Aries and they have a servo rudder in the water. Well, it couldn’t handle those conditions. So I’m out there steering, but when we go down those waves, that servo rudder—a rooster tail would come up from the servo rudder like a hydroplane. And finally around sunset, and I had nothing to eat all day, but finally around sunset the wind drops down to maybe gale force and the Aries could then steer the boat under bare poles and I was able to go down below. And I remember thinking I was where I wanted to be and I was pleased to know that the water I was bailing out of the bilge and throwing into the Atlantic that night had come from the Pacific that morning.
Bernie Harberts (36:12) That’s beautiful! Wow! And was that when you finally felt you had enough sea room or gone far enough south? Was there any hesitation about “I can turn east now?” Because if you’re wrong, you’re going to hit whatever—Diego Ramirez or the Milky Way or whatever Slocum sailed through.
Webb Chiles (36:37) I was sure enough. I don’t remember the certainty of it then, but the line gave me the sense that I was far enough. You could pass—well I’ve gone around the Horn again since then from New Zealand. I mean you don’t have to go as far south as the Diego Ramirez Islands to go around the Horn. There’s 30 miles in there too. So there was a pretty good margin of error as long as I didn’t run into the Diego Ramirez Islands themselves, which as far as I recall are uninhabited.
Bernie Harberts (37:12) Did you run into ice or did you have to ice watch?
Webb Chiles (37:15) I did not ever see any, but I think I must have been near something one night because I was used to the temperature. This is in the Southern Ocean. This is after the Horn. But all of a sudden, one night, and it’s really dark and you have no visibility, instead of being cold, it was suddenly decidedly colder. And I thought there must be a berg around here but you had no sense of where. I couldn’t see anything. It could be ahead of me, could be behind me. No, I had radar on one boat for a while.
Bernie Harberts (37:45) No radar, obviously, at that time.
Webb Chiles (37:50) But no, I have often thought, just what you were saying, when you sail, say Maine, or even this coast, which has these shoals that go out 30 miles—I mean you could be 30 miles off of various capes, Cape Fear maybe, and be in 30 feet of water. I’ve often thought, well it’s not amazing that there were all these wrecks, it’s amazing that not everything was wrecked.
Bernie Harberts (38:16) That’s absolutely right. It’s staggering. And then you look at that chart of North Carolina banks and South Carolina—it’s the shipwreck map that all the gift shops sell. And it’s just—and then offshore, way offshore, just a whole second wave of sunk boats. So I’m just so impressed because I caught the tail end of that era. I’m really moved by the feeling of sailing in that age versus now where it’s easier. It’s more known. And we’ve lost that feeling of like, “I could die.” There’s no exaggeration if you’re in the Southern Ocean.
Webb Chiles (38:51) It’s not an exaggeration, but there’s nothing wrong with knowing where the hell you are. I don’t mind. I bought my—when you go back to it, the other things you had back there were radio direction finders, which were not useful down at the Horn, but they were useful along the coast. I used one once. After I had Egregious—I sold that 26-foot boat that I never put a name on, bought Egregious, and then went to the open boat which I called Chidiock Tichborne after an English poet. The problem was that I had a 19-foot name on an 18-foot boat.
Then I bought another English boat called Resurgam. I named her Resurgam—I shall rise again—because that was after the year that I was—the preceding year, I was locked up as a spy in Saudi Arabia. Suzanne, who was then my wife, and I came apart, and the grandmother that I was close to died. So this was an affirmation that things were going to get better, and they did.
RESURGAM AND ENGLAND
So I buy this boat in the winter in England. It was a Sparkman & Stephens. She was a little smaller, 36-footer, but also an IOR racer—what we called three-quarter-tonners back then. She was on the East coast of England in a place called Ipswich, about several miles, I don’t remember how far—seven or eight, maybe more—up a river.
When you have a boat after you’ve had it a while, everything—you get it organized, or I think you should, and everything should fall to hand. But a new boat, that isn’t so. So I take her out and in England, if this is England, and that’s the corner by Dover, the tides come together there. And so if you time it right, you can carry the tide down the East Coast and more or less hit that point and carry it west along the South Coast. So that was my idea.
When I leave—which is the first time I ever sailed this boat—I go down the river powering and there are lots of shoals off that coast too. And I get out and there’s a lot of shipping that goes into Harwich, I think it’s the name of the port. So I get out and it’s foggy. And so what I found was that you used your depth sounder—you could find a certain depth, I don’t remember what it would have been, say it’s 50 feet.
Bernie Harberts (41:27) It’s an electronic depth finder.
Webb Chiles (41:29) Yeah, and if you stay in 50 feet of water, you’re not going to run into anything. That’s the example. I don’t know the number. And the tides carried me, and we’re making eight or 10 knots more or less over the bottom because of the tide.
Bernie Harberts (41:37) Right, sure, sure. Swept along.
Webb Chiles (41:45) Yeah. Well, I was using—I never trusted radio direction finders to get across, but you get one angle. And so there were radio signals along the coast of England, and you could tell when you’re coming up to them and when you’re going past them. I navigated that, made it around and made it into Brighton without much sleep that night. And I usually get some sleep—I maybe did get some, I don’t recall. But you use what you did. But now you would simply look at—I would simply look at my phone.
Bernie Harberts (42:24) It’s incredible. But as you say, it’s nice to know where you are. The romance of this is, I think, purely in the wake.
CHIDIOCK: THE OPEN BOAT
Webb Chiles (42:33) My metal sextant I lost when Chidiock, the open boat, pitch-poled in the South Pacific between Fiji and what’s now Vanuatu. Probably hit a floating container, like a deadhead log, you know, kind of thing. There were other sailboats out there that did at the same time, and they sank. Chidiock couldn’t sink. She had flotation built in her, but she was gunnel-deep in the water. I pumped up the inflatable, tied them together, drifted for two weeks, and reached land.
But then when I wanted to go on and put the boat back together—I mean, she got ashore. I’m shortening down this story.
Bernie Harberts (43:09) Chidiock—yeah go back, let’s just talk about Chidiock quickly and then we’ll kind of cut back into that. So she was a Drascombe Lugger.
Webb Chiles (43:17) You know what a dory rowboat looks like? That’s what her hull looked like. And put two masts on her. She was all rigged—main mast and a mizzen. But she looked like a rowboat. She had 12 inches of freeboard.
Bernie Harberts (43:31) 18 feet long.
Webb Chiles (43:36) She had a centerboard, so she had a little wetted surface. I was in a 55-knot gale in her around Tahiti. I was within six miles of going into Papeete Harbor one night and instead of getting to Papeete—I’m here and I want to get there—Tahiti is 40 miles long. Instead of going like this, I got blown all the way around the island and went in like this and got in four days later.
Bernie Harberts (44:00) I read that passage two nights ago.
Webb Chiles (44:03) The advantage of that was, and I didn’t do this on purpose, but I made my living—my money from writing back then. And one of my own lines is that almost dying is a hard way to make a living. But in fact, when I almost died or got into survival situations, those always sold best. In the United States, you sold to a magazine.
WRITING FOR SAIL MAGAZINE
Bernie Harberts (44:29) Like Cruising World, SAIL, paper.
Webb Chiles (44:30) SAIL was my main magazine back then, but I have written for them all. But SAIL—I had a rapport particularly with that editor.
Bernie Harberts (44:39) How does that model work?
Webb Chiles (44:40) You sold what were called first North American serial rights, which meant that it was perfectly legal and honorable to sell the very same article in any other country. You couldn’t sell it to SAIL and to Cruising World. That was illegal—or strictly illegal.
Bernie Harberts (44:55) Not ethical.
Webb Chiles (44:56) Yeah, but I could and did. So things—I called that article, which is one of the chapters of a book called The Open Boat Across the Pacific, “The Last Six Miles,” because it actually took a lot more than that. I probably did 100 miles to get that done. And then I sold it in England, France—I mean, so you sold these multiple times.
Bernie Harberts (45:13) Did you go through an agent? Was it all about postage stamps?
Webb Chiles (45:25) Well, I had an agent for books, but magazines I did myself. And so you did it by putting things—pieces of paper in an envelope and putting stamps on.
Bernie Harberts (45:37) And waiting and maybe the check showed up.
Webb Chiles (45:40) No, no, they were in—well, I’d had an agent before I sailed. I wrote some novels that didn’t get published and had reputable agents.
When I made that first circumnavigation, by the time I finished it, when I was in Tahiti, I’d already done much of the writing, and it’s a log format. But I get back to San Diego, and I have the boat and about $2,000 in the world. This is ’75—’76—a little more—$2,000 is a little more than it is now.
Bernie Harberts (46:18) Having sailed back from New Zealand to—
Webb Chiles (46:20) New Zealand to Tahiti—but I’d finished that and I sent the manuscript off to the agent.
Bernie Harberts (46:22) To San Diego.
Webb Chiles (46:30) I don’t like to do boat deliveries because I don’t like to sail boats that I haven’t prepared myself. Preparation is a lot. But I did one. I was asked to take an Ericson 35 down to La Paz. And the woman who was then in my life was a New Zealander called Suzanne. I met her in New Zealand and she flew in, joined me in Tahiti, then flew in and stayed in San Diego with my grandmother while I sailed on. So we took this boat down to La Paz, took the bus back up.
And while I was gone, the book and the boat—Egregious—both sold. So all of a sudden I have some money. And that first book was published by Times Books, which was then part of the New York Times. I took two parts of that. And one was about rounding Cape Horn. And one was about a cyclone in the Tasman. And I sent one of those to Yachting and one of those to SAIL. I think the Horn to Yachting and capsize to SAIL. And they both sold, but with the letter back from SAIL, the woman who was then the editor, recently deceased, was a New Englander with a great name—Patience Wales, W-A-L-E-S. She sent a note and said, “Give me a call.” And so I did, and so we had a rapport. I had a contract with her and then later after she left SAIL, I had an arrangement with the editor who was then the editor of Cruising World for a certain number of articles at a certain amount.
Now with the internet you couldn’t sell this article because you’re selling world rights on the internet, kind of thing.
So not last year, the year before, I sent an article to a magazine who in the 1970s were paying me $1,000 an article, plus extra for photographs. Now, when you work out—and I ran the inflation—
Bernie Harberts (48:29) How is that now?
Webb Chiles (48:30) That would be between $4,000 and $5,000, when you’re counting the extra for the photographs. If I sold back then—if I had an agreement with this magazine to sell four articles a year—so I was making about $20,000 a year, which back then two people could very easily live on sailing the world. And I did. That was important to me then.
Well, two years ago, I sell this—I send an article, and I’m offered, in terms of inflation, one-tenth of the amount. One-tenth. And the complaint is, from the editor, “Well, we’ve gotten poor because of the internet.” Well, that may well be, but it’s not a good career move. It’s not a good career journey. The money has not mattered for a long time.
Bernie Harberts (49:17) So yeah—but how would someone—is this an incredibly depressing story for someone who wants to go sailing and pay for it by writing? Or is it a story of you’ve got to get on the internet? Like what would be another model? How do people do it now? Because I haven’t followed it.
SELF-PORTRAIT IN THE PRESENT SEA
Webb Chiles (49:40) I do not participate in social media. I have no social media accounts. I’m a writer. And I have a main website. I have an online journal. The website is inthepresentsea.com. The whole name of it is Self-Portrait in the Present Sea. That was a title I carried around with me for decades before I knew what the hell to do with it. And when I started that website back in 2006, Apple came out with whatever their web app that they’ve dropped a long time ago.
Bernie Harberts (50:15) What I love about that—it’s just a beautiful chronology and one of the only collections that I know of a traveler that’s purely online and it’s just beautiful content, not kind of posing for social media. It’s just what happened and it’s going on 20 years. I love it. And it’s incredibly unique and incredibly true to that spirit of your travels with Gannet and getting out there and not being swayed by the very short-form crumbs, which is fine for some people, but it’s very beautiful to see that.
Webb Chiles (50:59) Thank you. Yeah, I don’t engage in social media and never will. I think there are people who want to go out there and do it now and make money off of social media. A lot of it is soft porn, frankly. And one of the women in my life, Jill, was a very beautiful and very sexy woman. And I suppose if we had been together at this time—been still in our 30s and whatever—I would like to think we wouldn’t have done that. We wouldn’t have done that, but it would not have been sailing.
Bernie Harberts (51:32) Those articles—$1,500 an article. It’s great. Wow.
So no, it’s a perfect way to circle back to the open boat voyage, which is just—that’s the one that stands out of all your voyages the most to me, because in my mind, it’s the one that I came to your work through. And to me, it seems the most pared back of everything. It’s the simplest, smallest voyage that I associate with your trips. So you take off in San Diego, you mentioned circumnavigating Tahiti, and you said Suzanne, your wife—I recall she came out, you guys cruised.
THE OPEN BOAT DECISION
Webb Chiles (52:24) She didn’t sail with me, but she stayed on for a while. What happened was that after I completed the first circumnavigation, I had sailed counting the two earlier attempts at the Horn—I sailed about 40,000 miles in less than two years. And that was enough for a while. And I was with Suzanne and we were in love and lust and that was fine. But after about a year, I started to think about wanting another challenge. And I wanted to do something qualitatively different. And somehow, and I don’t remember how, the open boat came into my mind. But up to that point the longest open boat voyage made had been made in a Drascombe Lugger. Somebody took one and took it from England to Australia.
It was almost all coastal when you think about it. They went across the channel. They went through the canals. They did the Med. They shipped it from the Eastern Med, I think, to India. I think Suez was closed then. But then if you can picture the world, you can shore hop along that. You can get across to Indonesia and those islands and then make it to Darwin. And actually, that boat was still in Darwin when I was there in Chidiock.
So I ordered one. I’m in San Diego with Suzanne, and I found out that a guy who had one was selling them part-time. He was a park ranger up in Orange County and lived in one of those little pastel stucco houses just off of the freeway that are now worth over a million dollars. And so I arranged for us to go up there to see them and see the boat. And so we do on a Saturday.
And we get in there and here’s this lugger on a trailer in his driveway. And I looked at it and it was well built and I said, “Can I get onto it?” He said, “Sure.” So I climb up and I look down. And they have a centerboard trunk. This boat’s only six feet wide. And of that, as I said, 12 inches of freeboard. On the inside, you go down about this far and then there’s kind of a ledge that goes all the way around that has stowage under it and whatever. And then there are floorboards and in the center there’s the centerboard trunk that sticks up. So I lie down and there’s just enough room on either side of that for my shoulders.
Bernie Harberts (54:48) Lying on the floor between the centerboard and that little ledge.
Webb Chiles (54:51) Yeah, on the sole part that goes down the side. So I said, “OK, I’ll buy it.” And he said, “What are you going to do with it?” And I said, “Well, I’m going to sail it around the world, but we’re going to Disneyland first,” which we were. Suzanne had never been to Disneyland. And anyway, I got delivery of that boat in June, and I set off for the Marquesas in November. I’d sailed the boat locally. That was—I believe probably the most audacious thing I did. I did not know if it was possible.
SAILING THE OPEN BOAT
Bernie Harberts (55:25) You take off from San Diego. I imagine you’re steering—I think as I read, sheet-to-tiller. There’s no electronics back then. Were you ever overwhelmed by “this is not a good idea?” Or could you just live with it?
Webb Chiles (55:40) The latter. I was never overwhelmed by “this is not a good idea.” I was physically uncomfortable. I mean, wet in times. Later adrift. But no, I was not overwhelmed. It was fine. And it was a good boat to sail. A good boat. And in terms of sextants, I jumped forward more than a year. I sailed that year. I left San Diego in November out to the Marquesas in about five weeks. An interesting thing is that she made it—that’s about 3,000-plus miles—Chidiock made it only maybe three or four days slower than 40-footers sailing at the same time.
Bernie Harberts (56:21) She’s an open boat. There’s no cabin. How did you even get out of the sun?
Webb Chiles (56:26) Well, I have skin cancer now due to that. I didn’t.
Bernie Harberts (56:31) Great question.
Webb Chiles (56:34) I slept on—I had made a mattress made out of closed-cell foam and open-cell foam. Closed-cell being a little too firm, the open-cell absorbs water. So out at sea, I put the open-cell down. And I had a tarpaulin that—in port, I ran a line between the masts, ran this down to stay under it. And out at sea, I wore foul-weather gear and I had this tarpaulin over the top of me.
Bernie Harberts (56:58) And did you gather water? Or you carried enough water to have done it without collecting rainwater?
Webb Chiles (57:00) I had water. I didn’t get to—and when she pitch-poled—
THE PITCH-POLE: FULL STORY
Bernie Harberts (57:10) So this is the next—this is the second season, is that correct?
Webb Chiles (57:14) I made it that year from November to the following, roughly September, October. I went San Diego, Marquesas, Tahiti. I went to Samoa, Pago Pago, down to Tonga, and then to Fiji. And I left her in Fiji in this guy’s backyard. That was a convenient thing about a little boat—you want to leave it. And there was a guy at the Royal Suva Yacht Club, a Brit expat who worked there, said, “I’ll leave it in my backyard.” So we sailed around and picked it up and put it in his backyard. And so I go back. And the next year, sailing and heading west, and when I hit this and pitch-poled.
Bernie Harberts (57:55) Are you heading towards Torres Straits?
Webb Chiles (58:01) Yes. And pitch-poled, pumped up the inflatable and was there drifting for three weeks. And then the trades—I thought I would reach land in 14 days and did. But then when the boat—when they set out, I needed a new mast and rudder and floorboards and that kind of stuff.
So then I bought a plastic sextant. I was going—before the next cyclone season, I wanted to make it to Australia. There’s another 1,400 miles. So I bought a plastic sextant, and it was a Davis. And it was accurate enough, but what I found was that every time I used it, every time I took a sight, I had to readjust the mirrors. Like when you’re taking those noon sights, every two minutes you take a sight, you have to look at it and get your horizon level on the two mirrors again. But it was accurate enough.
Bernie Harberts (58:47) So, to the pitch-pole—describe when that happened. So I guess to describe for people, you’re sailing along, you’re in an open 18-foot sailboat. As I recall, it had wood masts—was it a Gunter rig?
Webb Chiles (59:01) It was a Gunter rig, sliding Gunter rig.
It’s nighttime. I was asleep. I’m on the floorboards, had the tarp over. It was fairly rough. And my memory is it’s eight, nine o’clock at night. I go to sleep early out there because you wake up often.
And well, I’m sleeping and then I’m being thrown through the air. She hit something. A pitch-pole is doing a somersault for people who don’t know. She hit something and flipped over and I’m thrown out. And I remember thinking that I wanted to—I was concerned that the mast might come down on me and impale me. Well, they didn’t. And so then I get back and she—
Bernie Harberts (59:50) Swam back to it.
Webb Chiles (59:51) I wasn’t far away. No, no, there was no lifeline. I wasn’t attached. I was in the water and I wasn’t far away. I wasn’t thrown a long way. And I’m a good swimmer. I was a good swimmer. And so I get back to her and I’m able to turn her over so that her—I don’t recall. I think she was sideways. I think she was like—
Bernie Harberts (59:54) You’re not attached. Bottom-side up. Sideways. They’re kind of lying on the water.
Webb Chiles (1:00:21) Yeah, so I was able to get her so she was on her bottom. Right. But the motion was so explosive. I had my water in flexible five-gallon water containers. And they were tied on. But when she flipped, the force was such that it just ripped the containers away from the handles. So the water was mostly gone and so was almost everything else.
But she was almost gunnel-deep in the water. And that meant that the centerboard trunk was below the water. And there’s a slot in there where water was continually coming in.
Bernie Harberts (1:01:02) Which means you can’t ever pump it out.
Webb Chiles (1:01:03) Well, that’s what I was trying to do and couldn’t. Yeah, there was a pump built into the centerboard trunk, but the whole system’s below water. So I was using—I can’t remember what I was using, a plate or something. I had buckets on the boat, but I think they were lost too.
Bernie Harberts (1:01:17) So the boat is full of water, you’ve crawled back into her.
Webb Chiles (1:01:22) And when I couldn’t get the water out of her, I tied the two boats together. I pumped up the inflatable using my foot pump and tied them together and we drifted for two weeks to land.
Bernie Harberts (1:01:36) And did you live in the dinghy?
Webb Chiles (1:01:39) I had a bag, a waterproof bag that had clothes in it. I had some food. I had not very much water because I was living off of six sips of water and half a can of tuna fish a day. And one day a coconut comes by, drifts by, and I grab it. There was still a hammer left on it and I was able to break into it. I thought, “This is another week of life, this coconut alone,” just the coconut meat.
There was some liquid. I caught rain. I did. I had the tarp. Had some heavy rain come. And I was able to catch enough to get some. But I was thirsty. Thirst is terrible.
THE EDGE OF LIFE
Bernie Harberts (1:02:21) At that point, that must have been one of the extremes, like pushed up against the edges of life or experience that you’ve encountered.
Webb Chiles (1:02:32) Yep, you’re not certain you’re going to get to land.
I was calm. The problem was I was thirsty. I was uncomfortable. I developed ulcers in my legs from the exposure to the water. I wanted it to be over.
I’m here and I’m in the Southeast Trades. It’s now called Vanuatu. When I went ashore it was called the New Hebrides. But there are about 60 islands running north-south. And the Southeast Trades are going to blow me that way. And I was making about a knot. I reached land when I thought I would. There was a very good chance I was going to make it.
Bernie Harberts (1:03:15) So based on your last position, do you have any idea how far you were off?
Webb Chiles (1:03:20) About 300 miles. I knew where I was the day before. I was about halfway from—well, Fiji is several hundred islands too, but I was off the main island, Viti Levu of Fiji. I was about halfway between it and the line of the New Hebrides, Vanuatu.
MAKING LANDFALL
Bernie Harberts (1:03:40) Describe making landfall.
Webb Chiles (1:03:42) On one night, I see some land and I think, “Good, I’m going to make it.” And then I almost get killed because we drift right on toward a cliff, a sheer area. And I actually got back in—I get out of the inflatable and I go back to Chidiock.
I’m sitting waist-deep in water and when I get in I have these infections in my legs that really hurt to immerse in the water. And I take the rudder—the rudder’s still in place—and I take the tiller and I use it to kind of scull the boat. And here’s this cliff—it’s dark, it’s night, but you can see the white of the waves breaking in. And I’m trying to avoid that, obviously. And so I scull this, use the rudder to scull, and was able to keep off.
And so we drift on, and the next morning I look around, and I don’t remember what sleep I got then. But I do remember the next day I look up in the morning, and there are several islands around. We’re like in the corridor going down, and we’re drifting down toward one in particular. And it has like a saddle. There are two hills and it was now—I did not know the name then, Emae Island, E-M-A-E.
Almost all those islands in the Pacific, if they have a pass, it’s on the west side. It’s not the windward side. Water gets pushed over and it goes out the west and they have a pass. So there’s no pass. There’s no way over that reef, through that reef on the east side of that island.
It gets later in the day and we get to a point that I said—and I’ve had these boats tied together because I had hoped from the very beginning to somehow resume the voyage. But it’s getting late in the day and I know I’ve got to get ashore. And so I untie the boats and I have oars in the inflatable and I start rowing. So I row up to the reef—surf’s breaking unbroken all along. And I go down a ways to try to see if it looks better and it doesn’t. And I go up and I say, “You have to do it.”
And I thought I probably would get injured going over the reef. I thought we’d flip. So I just headed in and I row and a wave picks us up and I continue rowing like hell. And we don’t flip. And this wave actually helped us because it came in and filled the boat with water. And we come—the wave passes and I’m still rowing. And another one picks us up and pushes us farther and I’m still rowing. The third one picks us up and we’re over the reef and we’re into the lagoon. You have the surf outside, but when you get there, when you’re in the lagoon, it’s generally flat. There was just a complete—I mean, complete physical difference from being in the surf and being in the lagoon. And there was also the difference in “I’m really going to survive.” I didn’t even get anything—I mean, you don’t want coral cuts and all the rest of it, a broken arm or leg—nothing.
So I row on and I spin around and I look off to my right—I see clothes drying on a line between palm trees. And there’s a village down there. And I remember thinking that these people are living normally when I’ve been on the very edge for a long time. So I row on in, and I’m maybe a quarter or half mile south of this village to the beach, get it up on the beach. And I take the clothes bag out and things in it are wet. And I put on less wet clothes.
And I had some bottles of Coca-Cola. And I remember they were bottles from Fiji and that kind of thing. And I had been saving those out at sea because I thought if I ever get to the point that I’m really going to die of thirst, I’m going to drink the last two bottles at one time and for one moment not be thirsty. So I’d take one of those and I probably ate some tuna fish or something.
And the village isn’t far away, but even though it’s the tropics, I have this infection in my legs and I’m feeling chilled. And so I said, “Fine, I’m just going to go to sleep and I’ll go to the village tomorrow morning.” So I pulled the tarp up over me and lied on the beach and fall asleep. And after a little while, I think I’m hearing Elvis Presley sing.
Bernie Harberts (1:08:14) On the beach.
Webb Chiles (1:08:21) That’s not my music. I listen to Bach. I mean I like some popular music, but I never—I was that age, but I never bought an Elvis Presley record.
So I sit up and as I do I hear a gasp and the tarp falls down from me. And I’m surrounded by maybe 20 or so young Polynesians, one of whom has what used to be called a ghetto blaster and is playing Elvis Presley. And they all jumped back because they thought there was a corpse under there and all of a sudden it moved. And so they went back and they got the—well he was the assistant chief, he wasn’t the chief. The chief wasn’t there then.
And as I approached that island, I remember seeing a house partway up the hill. I knew people were there. That was the first time I knew that. I assumed there was somebody on that island, but that was the first time I knew that. That was the chief’s house. He was trying to get the people to move the village from down along the beach, where it was subject to storms and hurricanes and cyclones in that ocean, move on up. And he had his house. So they got me—I was able to walk a little bit and took me up there and gave me—they didn’t have running water—they gave me a little bit of fresh water to rinse off the salt. Gave me some turtle stew and put me in a bed with sheets and everything. And I thought that Chidiock had been lost.
So the next morning, the chief there, whose name I remember was Fred Timikara—they come in in the morning and he and a couple of other people.
Bernie Harberts (1:09:58) Beautiful.
Webb Chiles (1:10:00) And asked how I was and everything. I said, “I’m doing okay, thank you for your help and your courtesy.” And he said, “Well, your boat came ashore.” It was about a five-mile-long island at the other end of the island.
And what I learned later, here’s this island, and there’s a rock, a pinnacle over here down in the south. And there’s a countercurrent that ran around this rock. So Chidiock followed me. She came over the reef. She lost her mast and rudder and floorboards. She had a teak gunnel, and part of that’s broken. But other than that, the hull’s sound and the centerboard’s still there. So the people at—I bought the boat retail. I mean, no sponsorship involved. But I got in touch with them and they’re an honorable marine company. They’re not in business anymore. They shipped out to me new sails, mast, floorboards, oars, rudder. And when I got them, I put them on the boat and sailed to Australia and then sailed on to Bali and Singapore and all the way—did 4,000 miles non-stop, Singapore to Aden, which as far as I know might still be the longest non-stop open-boat passage ever. And then went up the Red Sea, went into Sudan, learned my grandmother had died, flew back, and then returned and was going up the Red Sea and bent a rudder and—shortened that story up—went into Saudi Arabia.
IMPRISONED IN SAUDI ARABIA
Bernie Harberts (1:11:32) Turned off, show it.
Webb Chiles (1:11:34) Well, I went into Saudi Arabia. It is a rule of the law of the sea that any ship can go into a port for repairs. So I went in and it happened to be the day—it was early June in 1982, and it happened to be the day that Israel went into Lebanon that year. Anyway, I bent the rudder on a piece of coral, went in to—was able to get the boat to the shore.
And there’s on the shore—this is around dawn—there’s what looks like an oil refinery, I mean, in the middle of nowhere. So I think I made myself a cup of coffee or something.
And then there’s a bell that sounds and people start moving around at seven or eight o’clock in the morning. And so I go up to them. And what it was was an Italian desalination plant. And they notify the authorities. I was given a shower and I come out and there are people with guns. And they say, “You have to come with us.” And I did. And they locked me up as a spy, first in Rabigh jail, and then they moved me to the police intelligence headquarters in Jeddah.
And I was not physically mistreated—the food was good—but they claimed I had a bomb on my boat and was a terrorist. That was more despairing than anything that’s happened at sea. I feel for these poor people who have been the hostages in Gaza forever and others in other parts of the world.
Bernie Harberts (1:13:10) So they just came and seized—so what was that like? You’re standing with a boat, you’re drinking coffee?
Webb Chiles (1:13:17) No, I went to shore. Some of the people from the Italian desalination plant took me and went to one of their places and I was in—
Bernie Harberts (1:13:22) This desalination plant. You’re with the Italians taking a shower.
Webb Chiles (1:13:32) And I come out of the shower and there are people with guns and soldiers. They said, “You have to come with us.” And I had to go with them.
Bernie Harberts (1:13:40) They didn’t have to grab you. They took you to a police station? What is that like?
Webb Chiles (1:13:48) No, they took me first to a military area and then I was taken to Rabigh Jail. And the British spelled that G-O-A-L and they still spell it that way. Well, inside there—it was not bad. I mean, once inside, things were open. There were about 50 men there. About half were in for vehicle accidents.
Bernie Harberts (1:13:58) What the hell?
Webb Chiles (1:14:15) If you get in an accident, you’re probably going to end up in jail for a while. And half were in for alcohol. Two of them were South Korean truck drivers. There was something like one-third of the new construction in the world was going on in Saudi Arabia that year. And so these two guys were driving their truck and ran into something. You got locked up for six weeks for vehicle accidents, for alcohol. For alcohol, you also got caned. And I was only able to speak to one person. There was a Somali who spoke English. And so I learned from him. Inside, there were not bars. You could wander around.
And I was in one room, which was also the eating room. And the food was pretty good.
Bernie Harberts (1:15:06) Beautiful.
Webb Chiles (1:15:07) But from him I learned the story. The only exceptions—well, I asked if it hurt when they got beaten and he said, “Well, they hit them hard enough to break the cane” from time to time. The exceptions were me—and it’s hard to explain that you’re in an open boat up the Red Sea.
Bernie Harberts (1:15:11) Of alcohol. I mean it has a bomb in it somehow.
Webb Chiles (1:15:32) And one man who was in for murder. He killed a guy in a knife fight, and he was in for a certain period of time, I don’t remember the length of time, but X number of months to make his peace with Allah and then he would be beheaded. And he was pretty calm.
And then I was there for four days. A man who probably shouldn’t have—one of the guys who was the main jailer, who was a lieutenant or something like that, he got word to the American Embassy, which was in Jeddah then. The capital’s Riyadh, but the embassy was in Jeddah—I don’t know where it is now. And so on a Monday, the American Consul comes. The American Consul was a Cuban refugee named, I think, Fernando Sanchez. And he came with a Yemeni interpreter. And he said he would get me out. And he left.
So the next day, I think it was, they came to my cell and said, “Get your stuff.” And I had my camera with me. There’s a picture of the cell in one of my books, a book called The Ocean Waits. And so they put me in a police car and drive me down. And I think I’m going to be released. And it’s a good road, naturally. And where in the past you would have seen bones of camels off to the side, here you see bones of Mercedes. Well, they took me down. And we get into Jeddah. And they took me to what I later learned was the police intelligence headquarters, which is a high-rise building. And instead of being released, I’m locked up in another cell. And this one was—
Well, this is June. No air conditioning in this cell. Solid steel plate over the door—what would have been the window. A little gap so you could see out. A light bulb up here that’s on 24 hours a day. A solid steel door. And if you were old enough to know an old radio program called Inner Sanctum that started with a squeaking door—well, that door squeaked. It was opened every two hours, day and night, by the guard. There’s a guard just outside.
I’m still there. And there was an identical cell on the other side. And then in between was a toilet and a shower that I could get to by banging on the door any time I wanted to. And food was provided. Well, the window had the solid steel thing over it. Just a little bit at the bottom. I had something to read.
Bernie Harberts (1:17:57) Was there a window? So you can tell if it’s daylight?
Webb Chiles (1:18:09) I guess my duffel—I don’t think I had my camera with me there. I had it in jail but not there.
Bernie Harberts (1:18:18) And so in that moment, how did your mind compare to when you were in the inflatable dinghy after you pitch-poled? That’s not a good situation. And now you’re in this jail. Was it a—
WORSE THAN THE SEA
Webb Chiles (1:18:28) It’s much worse in jail. You’re helpless. You’re not helpless when you’re afloat and you still have some control over your life and you’re free. I mean, but, you know, nobody knew I was there and you realize that they can do whatever the hell they want to you and various countries have. I mean, they have held people. Russia has held them. Iran has held them—people in Gaza. It happens to lots of people. But the problem, one of the problems is, that it’s open-ended. You have no idea when it’s going to end. Mine ended after a couple of weeks—it wasn’t going to end until the morning it ended. And they came and got me and instead of—they would come and get me at intervals and take me over to this one police lieutenant’s office who spoke English.
He would question me, and he was the one who showed me this cylinder, which had what looked to me like Russian markings on it. And he said, “What is this?” I said, “I have no idea.” He said, “This was found on your boat.” And I said, “No, it wasn’t.” And he said, “It’s a bomb.” I said, “If you say it is, but I have no idea. I’ve never seen it. It wasn’t on my boat.”
So then he gives me one day. And this happened most days, sometimes more than once. Again, I was not physically mistreated. But one day I go in there and he hands me like a little blue book that you used to take exams in in school. And it has in it a lot of writing in Arabic. And he said, “You have to sign this.” And I said, “I’m not going to sign that. I can’t read it.”
And he said, “You have to sign it.” So we go back and forth like this. So finally, he hands it to me and I say, “I am told that I have to sign this, but I have no idea what it says.” And sign my name and hand it back to him.
I wrote that and I handed it back to him and he didn’t know what I had written until I handed it back to him and he looks down and he looks up at me as though he’s disappointed. Anyway, so they got me—it was the day the old king died, a couple of kings ago now. And it was a Sunday. And so I’m taken up to this office again, I don’t know but I just think it’s another interrogation, but there is Fernando Sanchez and the Yemeni interpreter again, and I’m being released.
So they take me and I get in their car and I go to—I’ve been taken to the American Embassy, and as you go through that gate, and there are the Marines out there, there was a great feeling of relief.
But I get inside, and I’m questioned by probably somebody in intelligence or something. And there was a man there who was a sailor, who was the husband of a woman who worked in the embassy. I was able to stay in their apartment for a while.
Well, back then I had travelers checks. Well, everything in my duffel bag, everything that had been on Chidiock and that duffel bag was given back to me. Nothing was taken. Nothing’s going to get stolen in Saudi Arabia. They’re going to cut off your hand. And so I had travelers checks. And they say, “Where do you want to go?” I said, “I don’t care. You get me on a flight out of here, and I will take care of myself.”
Bernie Harberts (1:21:37) I mean they’re trying to help.
Webb Chiles (1:21:50) Well, because the king had died, the airports were closed for two days. So on Tuesday, I’m able to—the flight was Swissair to Zurich, I think. And so I’m told by an official, “You may have trouble at the airport. They may just be setting you up. They may go through your bag and find whatever they want in there—drugs, a gun, whatever. But we’ll send the interpreter with you. And if something happens, he’ll get word back to us.” And I thought, “Well, great. They hid me from you before—they can do it again.”
So we go to the airport and go through the customs. Fine. And this is a new modern airport—marble, whatever. Go to the lounge, the boarding lounge. And I’m facing this way, and there’s a long corridor down that way. And they just get ready to board, and I hear multiple steps coming down there, and I know they’re coming for me. And so they—people with uniforms and guns—and they come down, and they say something in Arabic to the Yemeni. He said, “They want your passport.” And the boarding has started. And I said, “What do they want my passport for?” And he said something more. “They want your passport.”
So I give them the passport. Everybody’s gone. The plane’s boarded. And they look at my passport and mutter among themselves. And then they give me back my passport and say—and the Yemeni says, “You can go.” So I go. And I get on the plane. And as it goes down the runway, and I remember thinking this—as it takes off, it’s taking off over the Red Sea, right? And I said, “If this thing crashes, that’s okay, I’m back in my element.”
Being locked up was far more despairing than any experience I’ve ever had at sea. That was the worst.
Bernie Harberts (1:23:53) Wow. And what happened to Chidiock?
CHIDIOCK’S FATE
Webb Chiles (1:23:55) Chidiock stayed there. I go back and my grandmother’s died. I now own her beach house in San Diego. But after a while, not even that long, I wanted to go back and get Chidiock. And now Saudi in the last two or three years is trying to get tourists, right? They’re advertising.
Well, back then, there were no tourist visas. The only way an outsider got into Saudi was to make the hajj, being a Muslim, making the pilgrimage to Mecca, or for some foreigner who had a job already lined up there. So there were no tourist visas. But I actually inquired. I got a letter from our State Department saying, “We strongly advise you do not return, even if you have guarantees from somebody outside the country. Once you’re in the country, anything can happen.”
And so I went—well, I sold my grandmother’s house and went to England to buy another bigger boat to live on. And Avon Marine gave me another Drascombe Lugger. But I was in England to both get that lugger. Well, I didn’t get it in England. They shipped it to Egypt for me, then I took care of it from there. But I went to the Saudi embassy there, and there was no way I could get back in the country. So the man I mentioned who knew these people in the embassy—he was a lawyer. He was retired, but he was just where his wife had a career. He sold Chidiock for me inside Saudi to, I think, an Egyptian physician for a couple of thousand. Chidiock only cost $5,000 back then, maybe $20,000 now. It was a couple of thousand, but she stayed there. I do not know—
Bernie Harberts (1:25:42) You think she’s still around? She’d probably be the only Drascombe Lugger in Saudi Arabia.
Webb Chiles (1:25:47) Well, I don’t think so. I doubt whoever owns it in Saudi, if she’s still around, I doubt participates in the Lugger Group.
25,000 MILES IN OPEN BOATS
Bernie Harberts (1:25:56) Wow. Wow. This is unbelievable. So how many miles did you figure that was in Chidiock—in that open boat?
Webb Chiles (1:26:10) Boy. Okay, well I took the second one which I called Chidiock Tichborne II. They shipped it to Alexandria, Egypt. Had it trucked across to Suez. This is 1983. I was locked up in ’82. I sailed down the Red Sea to cross my outward track of the preceding year back up to Suez, got her towed through Suez—the canal on another yacht—and then I sailed Chidiock II from Port Said to Malta, left her there, went to England, got Resurgam, sailed her to Brighton and then around to the marina in Vilamoura, Portugal, the south side of Portugal. Went back to Malta, sailed Chidiock to Vilamoura, and then sailed Chidiock trying to get across the Atlantic and got her out to the Canary Islands where there were headwinds.
And all kinds of boats were stopped waiting for the wind to change. And the woman who was then in my life was an English woman. I called her and said, “I’m stuck here. Why don’t you come out?” But she was sent to a different Canary Island. I was on Santa Cruz de La Palma, which was toward the west. Her flight took her into Lanzarote, which is closer to Africa. So I flew over there, and we spent a couple of days together, three or four. And there was a storm while I was gone. And when I went back, Chidiock had capsized on the mooring. She was near a hill where there was a downdraft and my sextant and all kind of other stuff had been lost. I could have put her back together but it was more than I wanted to do then. So it ended.
In all, I probably sailed 20 to 25,000 miles in open boats.
Bernie Harberts (1:28:00) That’s extraordinary. 25 is around the world, roughly.
Webb Chiles (1:28:04) Gannet’s circumnavigation, for example, which I had good numbers for—I’ve had good numbers for the last two because I’ve had computers. Her daily runs added up to just under 30,000 miles—29,900 and something. So while the world at the equator is 21,600 nautical miles, but you’re not going to sail exactly that. You can’t sail across Africa. So 25,000, 30,000 would be a pretty minimal circumnavigation. I mean, a minimum number that you could actually do.
RESURGAM AND MORE CIRCUMNAVIGATIONS
Bernie Harberts (1:28:42) And so, Resurgam, you get Resurgam, and she’s in Portugal at that point?
Webb Chiles (1:28:51) I had her in—I bought her in England, sailed her Ipswich to Brighton, Brighton to Portugal. And then I sailed her across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, Panama, completed that circumnavigation out at Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas that I’d been—where I’d touched with Chidiock several years earlier. And then continued on with her. I actually lose track of the third and fourth because I changed direction some. But I had her for several years, from ’83 to early ’90s—I don’t remember the exact year. And then I had Hawk.
I completed my first circumnavigation, the one in Egregious, just two stops, 202 sailing days, which was a world record for speed in a solo in a monohull back then. Now they do it in under 50. But I completed that circumnavigation in less than a year. My fifth on Hawk, which I just wanted to go sailing—this was New Zealand to New Zealand. I did that in less than about 18 months. But my fourth circumnavigation took 13 years, two boats and two wives. That was the slow one. Again, it took five years, but not continuous. I spent an extra year in New Zealand because I like New Zealand and also because I ripped up my shoulder.
When I went into New Zealand, you tie up to the Customs Dock there in the Bay of Islands at the marina, and I was ready to leave, I pushed through—the dock lines onto, stepped onto the boat and stepped onto a dock line which rolled under me and I went down and landed on my shoulder. And it hurt, but not a big deal. And then I left the boat there and flew—
Bernie Harberts (1:30:40) In Russell or what part of New Zealand was that?
Webb Chiles (1:30:42) Opua is near Russell. I mean, Russell—yeah, Opua is in the same part of the Bay of Islands. And I left her on the mooring there and then flew back to spend time with Carol. And my shoulder was still bothering me and so I went and saw some doctors and they did an MRI. And if you’ve ever had an MRI, they put you in this tube and they warn you about claustrophobia, because it’s small. When they slide me—and then they slide you in, right? They slid me in, I looked around and I thought, “I have more room here than I do when I’m sleeping on the pipe berth in Gannet. This is a cinch.”
But anyway, I had an almost severed supraspinatus in my left shoulder. And surgery was possible, but the surgery takes forever to recover from. So I opted for physical therapy. And I went into physical therapy skeptical and came out a believer.
I’ve always been able to do my age in push-ups and still do as part of my workouts. And I was able to do it again in a couple of months. And I still have some aches and things. I said to the doctor, “What happens—I mean this is almost severed, right? What happens if it severs completely out in the middle of the ocean?” He said, “You’ll have some pain, but it won’t be intolerable.” He said, “You’ll probably not be able to use that arm much. You won’t be able to lift it.” And so I’ve gone on and it hasn’t gotten any worse.
LONGING AND BEING
Bernie Harberts (1:32:03) So I’m 57. How old are you now?
Webb Chiles (1:32:06) 83. It’s harder to do 83 push-ups as you get older. It actually isn’t. You add one a year. I try once a month to go to 100.
Bernie Harberts (1:32:21) And how has your relationship changed with the sea over time?
Webb Chiles (1:32:27) Well, it changed after my completion of my sixth circumnavigation. There has not been any other goal that I have felt as compelled to complete as it. I have said that I’ve divided my life so far into longing and being. And the date that that changed, even the minute, was 11 o’clock on Saturday morning, November 2nd, 1974, when I pushed Egregious off from her slip. She was engine-less in San Diego’s Harbor Island Marina for the first attempt at Cape Horn. And I said that that part ended—the longing part ended—when I completed my sixth circumnavigation.
Bernie Harberts (1:33:14) That’s the longing part. There—what do you say, you’re going to do it?
Webb Chiles (1:33:20) The next thing was being. It started then and it went to when I completed the sixth circumnavigation. And I have in both videos and writing said, “Well what comes after being?” and the answer obviously is dying. And that most people are deathly afraid of dying, which is odd because most people—and I don’t mean just Christians but as many others—believe that after they die, they’re going to, if they behave as they should, have a life of eternal bliss. Well, I don’t expect eternal bliss—I expect oblivion. I admit to some apprehension about the palpable pain in the process.
So it’s changed in that I’ve not had anything—and I don’t know that I will again. I had in mind another commitment, but I don’t think that I am willing to undergo the rigors it would require. It would have been—but I don’t think it will happen. I don’t think it will. And, well, I like living here very much. There is physical beauty here. It’s quiet. It’s tranquil.
Bernie Harberts (1:34:22) And that would be another circumnavigation.
Webb Chiles (1:34:34) I don’t like sailing here that much. This is a better place for powerboats, frankly, than it is for sailboats. And you have to go a long way. You have to go 50 miles offshore to get beyond all the Navy—I don’t know, a dozen towers out there measuring who knows what.
Bernie Harberts (1:34:52) So describe those towers. Were they anchored? Are they floating?
Webb Chiles (1:34:56) No, no, I think—I’m sure they’re—I’m sure they’re tied to the bottom. It’s shallow. Yeah, probably. I’m sure they’re—they look like they’re on struts, supports. I don’t know what they’re measuring, but they’re measuring something. When I left a couple of weeks ago on Gannet, when I went out—and ships anchor out here way offshore waiting to get into Savannah port. I did not realize until I lived here that Savannah is one of, depends on which numbers you read, one of the four largest busiest ports in the United States.
We stayed over there in a hotel one night while renovations were being done here. I mean, here are these big ships going right by your window out there up the river. Going out this time, there were more than 20 ships anchored out there as far as 20 to 30 miles offshore. Whole fleet.
RESURGAM’S END
Bernie Harberts (1:35:49) The story of Resurgam’s end—
Webb Chiles (1:35:53) Well, that’s a more complicated story than I want to go into. There was a time of great despair for a number of reasons. I sank the boat. I opened the sea cocks and sent her down. I got in the water expecting to die. I was 51. I felt I had done enough, and there was despair. I got in the water and I was perfectly calm. I took off my watch and let it float. I was beyond time. I sat in the cockpit and she went down like bow down and the stern goes up and I step off the stern into the water and she goes down.
If you know Fort Lauderdale, there at the mouth into port are a couple of high-rise condominiums. And I was north of that, but I could still see those lights, so I wasn’t that far. I don’t know how far—five, 10 miles. It is August. The water’s warm. I had on a T-shirt and shorts. And I wait for the ocean to take me, and the ocean doesn’t.
It was night when the boat went down, about three o’clock in the morning. And sun comes up and I’m drifting and it was foggy and nothing’s happening.
Bernie Harberts (1:37:07) Are you doing like a float? Is it like a dead man’s float?
Webb Chiles (1:37:10) I was floating on my back. And I’m a former lifeguard. I mean, I was a good swimmer. I did not expect that I could have done what I did in this particular incident. Just waiting and it didn’t happen. And I was calm. And then part of the time I was floating vertically because sometime—and you could tell the time by where the sun is, and the sun was more or less over me.
Bernie Harberts (1:37:19) At this point you’re floating on your back.
Webb Chiles (1:37:38) My legs were down anyway, because I feel something at my thigh. And I look down, and there’s this little fish who’s taking a tentative nibble to see whether this thing is edible. People said, “Well, you got in the water and changed your mind.” That didn’t happen.
This little fish nibbles on me and the animal instinct to stay alive said, “Right,” and I started swimming ashore, toward shore. Started swimming toward the west, more or less at noon. And so I started swimming. And I changed strokes. I’d do the crawl, I’d do a backstroke, I’d do a sidestroke. And I keep on going.
It’s not terribly rough, but waves are breaking over me and after a while—into my eyes and my mouth they became like daggers. And it gets dark. The moon came up, so again you know what direction. You’re swimming away from the moon. I didn’t know how far—where I was. I knew I was maybe 10 miles or more offshore.
But I keep on swimming. And I’m getting more and more tired. And so sometime, presumably after midnight, I’m just trying to make it to dawn. And again, this is just the animal. The animal never wants to die. All I have concluded—my observations are that consciousness resists unconsciousness and DNA seems to impose an imperative that it be passed on into the future. Those are the only two things of which I seem to be certain.
Well, anyway, the animal didn’t want to die. It’s somewhere after midnight. And I am vertical in the water. And I look over toward my right, and I see what seemed to be the mast of a sailboat. I mean, you see a straight line going up, and you see some rigging. And there was nothing in nature that that could have been. And then over here, I see a light.
And I say, “Well, am I hallucinating?” I mean, this makes no sense. And so I said, I thought, “Well, you’ve got to go toward one or the other.” And for whatever reason, I went toward the light. And I am going very slowly. But gradually, the light’s getting closer, and it’s still there. I expected it to disappear.
And finally I get close enough that I can see what looks to me like about a 40-foot trawler-type fishing boat. And I yell the traditional “Help.” I mean, I didn’t really want help. I wanted attention and I could have said “Hey,” but “Help” seemed the right thing. And I yell again and all of a sudden there’s another light comes up on deck and somebody yells back, “Is there somebody there?”
And I yelled, “Don’t go,” because I had a feeling that the boat was moving away from me. Well, in fact, the Gulf Stream is moving me away from the boat. But I swam over, and I was able to get to the transom of that boat, which was high. And I couldn’t climb up it, but they reached over, two young guys in their 20s, reached up and pulled me up into the cockpit and said, “What happened?” And I said, “My boat sank off of Fort Lauderdale.” And they said, “Fort Lauderdale.” And they said “Fort Lauderdale” that way because we’re off of a place called Sebastian Inlet, which is about 130 miles north. 26 hours.
I swam—the Gulf Stream took me up there. And they were out there—they were anchored, they were fishing. The fishing boat belonged to one of their fathers, who was a commercial fisherman. And the one guy was fishing, trying to get enough money to pay a traffic violation that he had. He had several hundred dollars—I don’t know what he did.
And they gave me some water, which is what I wanted. I mean, when I got there, I think this was the situation. I did not think when I reached this boat that I’m going to survive. I thought, “At least I’m going to get a drink of water.” That was the second bad thirst—the thirst thing, which is terrible.
And they were anchored off of Sebastian Inlet. They got onto the radio and the Coast Guard or something and they took me into Fort Pierce and they got in trouble with the Coast Guard because the Coast Guard wanted to come out and get me. And they gave me a pair of boots. They didn’t want any money for rescuing me. I said, “Well, it’s your fine. I got some money.” And I gave them the money to pay the fine. They wanted to catch something to pay the fine. And they did. Somebody wanted—some authority said I should go to the hospital. And I said, “I don’t have any medical insurance. And I do not want a hospital bill.” And so I went to a motel and started to put my life back together and succeeded.
There was despair on several factors. But one of them was Jill and my separating. I moved on and ended with Carol and have been with Carol for 30 years.
CAROL
Bernie Harberts (1:42:59) You’ve got this marriage that works like it works. There’s something that clearly Carol knows when you need to go and you’ve worked something out.
Webb Chiles (1:43:10) I was 50-something when we met and were married two months later. Either make a commitment, or our lives were going to go completely different ways. And we both have made compromises.
Bernie Harberts (1:43:20) How have you guys made it work?
Webb Chiles (1:43:21) We don’t have to work at making it work. It just kind of does. Carol’s a good sailor—she didn’t like the ocean passages. She gets bored on them. I mean, as far as knowing how to sail, she’s a good sailor.
Gannet is too small and uncomfortable for her and that’s reasonable. I just sailed a thousand miles on Gannet, but it’s not very likely except for a race to Hawaii that any other Moore owner is going to sail a thousand miles on the boat this year.
Bernie Harberts (1:43:47) Of any age, gender, or constitution, it’s not going to happen.
Webb Chiles (1:43:52) Since we’ve been married, I’ve sailed around the world two and a half more times. Finished the fourth—she sailed 10,000 miles that one year with me. We were in Boston, crossed to the Azores, Portugal, Gibraltar, Senegal, Brazil, South Africa, and then she went back after South Africa, and then I continued on. That voyage was Sydney to Sydney.
It was no doubt that when we were married, it wasn’t as though I was an insurance salesman who had never been to sea and said, “I’m going to do this.” And I’ve known people who did that. I knew a guy who was a parts manager for an auto dealership in the Los Angeles area. And God spoke to him and told him to buy a sailboat. He’d never sailed and go with his wife into the South Pacific. And he was a member of a small denomination that is prominent out there. Well, he did it. And made some substantial mistakes, but he stayed alive and made it to New Zealand. But anyway, Carol knew what she was marrying, and we both—we liked one another. It’s been good, at least for me. I learned a long time ago not to speak for Carol. She speaks for herself. But yeah, it’s been good. And it is good.
ADVICE: THE FORGOTTEN FACTOR
Bernie Harberts (1:45:16) That’s beautiful. What is your kind of help or assistance to people who are thinking, “I’d like to do this,” to cut through all the expectations, all the videos, all the budgets, “you got to have a 45-footer.” Like, how do you cut through that?
Webb Chiles (1:45:29) The general idea of what you need to go sailing is far inflated from what you really need.
The virtue of going simple is that there’s less stuff to go wrong and to have to fix. I wrote an article once called “The Forgotten Factor.” People get a boat and they think they want to go sailing. And they buy a lot of stuff to put on the boat. And they prepare the boat and they don’t prepare themselves. Make sailing your boat as simple as possible and make yourself as strong as possible. Because even though you can have winches and all the rest of it, sooner or later it’s likely to be physical. And I’ve also said that you shouldn’t go offshore unless you’re willing to face a gale. You’re going often. As I said, the bad, the survival—it’s hard to write necessarily about the routine everyday easy stuff. But on the Hawk of Tuonela, which had her circumnavigation, that fifth one, I think 191 sailing days—I think I only had four or five days of gale-force winds in the whole circumnavigation.
But most people don’t want to do it simply. Most people want to rely on stuff, on equipment, and they aren’t confident in themselves. Well, you’re not born with experience. I mean, you’ve got to go out there and do it. I wasn’t born to this. I learned it. I figured it out. And most people go out there without really untying their links to the land.
More and more you can now have a Starlink thing and out there you can have—you could have had sat phones all along. I know single-handers who go out there and who blog every day back to the shore. Well, their mind’s never gone out there completely. They’re still tied to the shore.
THE MONASTERY OF THE SEA
Bernie Harberts (1:47:19) How would you describe that mind space back in the early days before sat phones?
Webb Chiles (1:47:26) I don’t go out there to have conversations. I have never had a radio on a boat other than a handheld VHF to talk to officials as I go in and out of port.
That’s all I have. I didn’t even have that on Chidiock or Egregious. But I have a tracking device, yellow brick tracking device. On it, in theory, you can send text messages. I say in theory because on my previous one you could, but they’ve changed the app and I tried to do that to Carol just to see if it would work. And it didn’t on this one. I don’t know why. They’ve got a new app and it just didn’t work.
With the previous unit during passages, usually Saturday morning I would—and Carol can see where I am from looking at the positions on the tracking page—I’d send something on Saturday morning, “I’m OK.” And she would send back, “Everything’s fine here,” and that’s it. I don’t go out there to have conversations. I go out there to be out there. I’ve talked about it being—called it entering the monastery of the sea.
And one of the nice things on this last 12 days out there was I don’t watch television news except local because I think it’s terrible. And it’s a combination of the International Enquirer, Entertainment Tonight and they’re trying to alarm people and it’s bad. But I read the news. But it was nice these last 12 days not even to think about the news. Not even to think about all of the things that are happening in the world that are undesirable.
Bernie Harberts (1:49:04) Do you have a favorite time of day at sea or a favorite moon phase?
Webb Chiles (1:49:10) My favorite time at sea in a storm is dawn—we’re creatures of the light. In bad weather, I look forward to dawn. I like the late afternoon, if things are going well. I do not drink excessively here or there, but I have a drink. I mean, if I have the stuff with me, I have a drink or two, and listen to music in the cockpit—that’s very pleasant. But yeah, other than dawn in a storm, I don’t have a favorite time out there. I like it out there.
Bernie Harberts (1:49:44) When did you discover Laphroaig?
Webb Chiles (1:49:49) In a novel, maybe a Dick Francis novel, who wrote about horse racing. Somebody was drinking Laphroaig.
Bernie Harberts (1:49:56) And then you decided you want to try it or you just liked it?
Webb Chiles (1:50:02) Exactly. I have called it the taste of the sea. And in one of my poems, there’s a line: “He has the sea in his glass.”
NINE YEARS AT SEA
Bernie Harberts (1:50:11) How many nights do you think you’ve spent at sea?
Webb Chiles (1:50:14) I’ve spent maybe nine or 10 years at sea making passages. The longest time for a single passage was that passage around the Horn—almost five months on Gannet.
I did a 6,000-mile non-stop passage from Darwin, Australia to Durban, South Africa, and that was almost two months. I’ve done lots of multiple-thousand-mile passages. I’m capable of being at home out there.
END
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