Thies Matzen took this photo while becalmed with his wife Kicki Ericson on Wanderer III in the trade wind belt between southern Chile and the Tuamotus. He says “I call it the whale picture because it looks a little bit like the boat is disappearing behind a wave which has the shape of a whale.”
While many sailors would have fired up their engines and motored through the calm conditions, Thies didn’t. He waited for the wind to start blowing.
This lines up with his philosophy. “You don’t worry about precisely when you arrive at the other end because there will come wind at one point,” he says. “And you know that it will come.”
Thies and his wife Kicki Ericson have sailed Wanderer III more than 150,000 miles, much of it through the Southern Ocean.
Listen to Thies talk about the day he took the Whale Photo, traditional Polynesian navigation, and what it means to keep the world big on the Travel Grit Podcast.
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