The As It Happens Files by Mary Lou Finlay Read Free Book Online Page A

who might have been lost had it not been for some remarkable rescue operations. The most daring involvedBritish racer Peter Goss’s rescue of Raphaël Dinelli, a French sailor whose boat capsized 1,200 nautical miles south of Australia in the same storm that killed Gerry Roufs—a “survival storm” Derek Lundy called it.
    DL: A survival storm is essentially a storm in which wind and wave have reached the point where the sailor can’t make any choices. He or she is really just hanging on, adopting storm tactics—that is, probably running off before the wind and waves. You’re really at the mercy of whatever happens. I mean, if you get through a survival storm, there’s a little bit of skill involved—well, a lot of skill involved—but there’s a heck of a lot more luck involved.
    ML: So you’re bobbing along on the ocean, just praying to God that you’ll survive it.
    DL: You’re surfing and screaming along on the ocean, praying that you’ll survive, yeah.
    ML: So they’re in this condition and Pete Goss has to turn his boat around and beat
up
into these gale-force winds?
    DL: He had to beat into winds that were blowing in excess of hurricane force, probably around 70 knots or so. The seas were described as anywhere from 50 to 65 feet. The Vendée Globe boats are strong, but they’re not designed to do that; they’re designed to run ahead of weather like that, not go back into it. So he really put himself into a position where he wasn’t sure whether his boat would hold together.
    Peter Goss was about 160 miles past Dinelli when he heard his distress call, and he did turn around into the howling wind. It took him two days, but he got there in time. Gossfinished the race in fifth place, but he was rewarded with a hero’s welcome in France and the knowledge that he had acted nobly. Raphaël Dinelli, for his part, showing the steely determination that characterizes so many of these adventurers, entered the next two Vendée Globe competitions and, on his third try, finally made it all the way to the end. He finished the race in 12th place, 37 days after the 11th-place finisher, Anne Liardet.
    In 1997 someone also tried to save Gerry Roufs. Like Peter Goss, Isabelle Autissier reversed course and beat back toward Roufs’ last known position, but without any radio signal from Roufs’ boat, she couldn’t find him in the raging storm, nor could any of their fellow sailors in the area.
    I asked Derek Lundy why people signed on for the Vendée Globe.
    ML: Given how awful it is out there, you ask yourself,
Why do they do it?
Why would anybody put himself through such pain and terror and take such a beating?
    DL: That really is a good question. I think they do it for a number of reasons. First of all, they are professional sailors, and this is sort of the apogee of the profession. You know, you sail the Vendée Globe, you’ve reached the top. But there are also people who just like adrenalin; they like the thrill of coming close to death or appearing to. It must seem to them quite often that they are.
    ML: But are they crazy?
    DL: No, they’re not. I thought they might be, or I thought they were before I started talking to them and reading more about this sort of racing, but in fact, I found myself talking to people who were extraordinarily sane, calm, centred, modest people. There was nothingpretentious about them. One of them said to me once, “When you’ve been out there on the edge of the world, you know you’re insignificant; you know you’re just the ordinary human being you are; it’s impossible to think otherwise of yourself or of humans in general.”
    And I think there’s another element, too. You know, the Southern Ocean itself can be a terrible place, but it is a beautiful place in a way as well, in the sense that it probably is the last true, great more-or-less untouched wilderness on earth. So people who are out there are in a place on earth where hardly any human being living today has been. It