AGX
‘‘This
afternoon at 9 minutes and 13 seconds past two o’clock, the log clicked
onto 30,000. It read 30,041 when I sighted British land once more – an
hour ago, in the pink tinged dusk I saw Unst, northernmost of the Shetland
Islands some 20 miles west – my first sighting of UK territory from the
deck since the Cornish coast faded behind me in the mist on a drizzly
November morning in 2005."
On
October 28th 2005, Adrian Flanagan set sail aboard his 38 ft stainless
steel sloop Barrabas to attempt the first ever single-handed, vertical
circumnavigation westwards via Cape Horn and the Russian Arctic. Inspired
at the age of 15 by Sir Francis Chichester’s epic voyage in 1966/67
on Gipsy Moth IV, Adrian knew that the challenges ahead would test the
limits of his endurance. He became only the 14th solo yachtsman to successfully
double Cape Horn westwards against wind and current, recorded the first
nonstop UK to Hawaii (18,000 nm) and is the only yachtsman to have ever
sailed Russia’s Arctic Coast along the Northern Sea Route single-handed. Read it.
