As a child watching sailboats gliding across the flat waters of Michigan's Lake St. Clair, I used to imagine they were all bound for distant adventures. Looking back, it seems I'd always dreamt of a sailing voyage that would take me beyond the confined waters of the Great Lakes to explore the open sea and the fabled islands of the South Pacific. These thoughts kept recurring as I spent my teenage years finishing school and then moving into my own apartment and earning a living. I even came near to marrying and settling down at one point. Then at the age of 21 an impulsive decision brought my dormant dream within reach when I spent my entire savings of $12,000 buying a used 28-foot Pearson Triton from a local yacht broker. 

That first winter I tried living aboard Atom as she lay gripped in a frozen canal, but the constant rain of condensation inside the uninsulated boat forced me back into my apartment. Undaunted, the next summer I quit my boring factory job in Detroit and convinced two friends to escape the coming Michigan winter by joining me on a voyage to Florida and the Bahamas. None of us had more than limited day-sailing experience, but I figured the best remedy for lack of experience was to go out and get it all at once. 

By September we had reached the Atlantic by sailing through the Great Lakes and the New York Barge Canal system to New York City. We reached Florida through a series of short offshore passages and longer detours inland through the Intracoastal Waterway. In the waterway, when we weren't busy running aground, we annoyed impatient bridge tenders and road traffic by trying to pass through the opened bridges under sail whenever the Atomic Four engine was having fits. While offshore, I nervously plotted our course and speed each hour as I made wildly inaccurate first attempts at celestial navigation. Despite our near total ignorance at the beginning of the voyage, for me it was an idyllic winter of gunkholing through the shallow banks and sandy islets of the Bahamas. When the food ran out and our funds got low we returned to Florida where my sea-weary friends made their way home. 

That first voyage introduced me to a cruising life that suited me perfectly and strengthened my resolve for the ultimate adventure - to sail alone around the world. My biggest concern now was that after refitting Atom at a boatyard in Ft. Lauderdale, I had only $500 in savings remaining. But with the impatience of youth, I refused to consider delaying the voyage for another year or two by returning to work. There is a certain wisdom found only in "reckless" youth. After all, if lack of money stopped me this year, then other insecurities could just as easily keep stopping me until my instinct to explore faded into a life of vague regrets. So rather than wait, I worked out a budget that allowed me to spend less than $100 a month.

In June of 1984 I set out alone from Miami and threaded my way nonstop for 15 days through the islands of the Caribbean to Panama. Atom mostly steered herself with the Aries windvane I'd installed in Florida, giving me the freedom to take short naps, prepare meals and navigate by sextant. I'd planned to make only thirteen stops on the entire voyage, partly as a way to reduce expenses, but mostly I wanted to make long uninterrupted passages and keep focused on my goal of a two-year circumnavigation. Sure, I missed some beautiful places along the way, but I did set my course for those islands that seemed most alluring to me. 

I sensed this voyage would forever change the way I would see the world and I didn't hesitate to make a few lifestyle changes. To keep myself in harmony with the creatures who would be my sole companions, I chose not to fish and became vegetarian. A regular exercise regimen and meditation helped keep body and mind together on the long lonely days ahead.

After locking through the Panama Canal, I entered the 10,000-mile-wide Pacific Ocean. For six months I explored the stunningly beautiful islands of Polynesia, Tonga, and the Solomon Islands. On the little island of Tikopia I was surprised to find one of the last remaining outposts where native Pacific Island culture was successfully resisting the onslaught of Western notions of technology, private ownership, and a money economy. Several times I was tempted to abandon the voyage and settle down among the kind-hearted people of these happy isles, but the dream of completing the voyage always lured me on. 

While awaiting the end of the Indian Ocean's typhoon season in New Guinea, I spent three months walking alone with a backpack through the island's immense rain forest. Staying in thatched huts of remote mountain tribes, I learned what it means to live as a primitive man and narrowly escaped death from recurring attacks of malaria, tribal warfare, and once falling 50 feet down a hidden vertical shaft in an abandoned gold mine. A village chief who befriended me in the highlands (an ex-cannibal who had four wives himself) tried to convince me to stay by offering me either or both of his two daughters in marriage. I escaped by pleading poverty since I truly couldn't afford the bride price of 100 fat pigs for each girl. New Guinea was pure Adventure Country. I loved its wildness, but knew I had better leave before it killed me. Before leaving though, I worked a few months building a wooden yacht at a local boatyard, the proceeds of which paid for the entire two year voyage.

From the smothering rain forests of New Guinea, Atom and I sailed nonstop for 30 days, through the wreck-littered Torres Strait and past the long northern coast of Australia to Cocos (Keeling) Island. It's hard to convey to those brought up sailing with GPS, the nervous tension of sailing alone blindly through a squally night, uncertain of your position among a labyrinth of reefs, currents, and low islands. The relief of having this most dangerous leg of the voyage behind me was indescribable.

The joy of finally reaching the open waters of the Indian Ocean was muted by the realization that the trade winds blow at their strongest here, often at gale force for several days at a time. We made fast passages between the widely spaced islands, running with deeply reefed sails at an average speed of 130 miles a day. Not bad for a boat with a twenty foot waterline length in heavy seas under self-steering. Atom would even try to do a 150 miles a day here, and I sometimes let her. But that kind of speed threatened to rip her old set of sails or even bring down the mast if caught in an unintended gybe. Unable to afford all new rigging during my pre-voyage refit, I had at least lessened the chance of dismasting by adding second hand masthead rigging to the original fractional rig.

Although the islands of the South Indian Ocean are less numerous than the Pacific, they are no less exotic. I was again lured away from the sea to backpack across Mauritius and then the French territory of Reunion Island. With its active volcano, knife-edged mountains rising 10,000 feet above the sea, and uncountable waterfalls pouring into lush hidden valleys where small communities live in complete indifference to the mad goings on of the outside world, Reunion Island qualified as the nearest thing I'd seen to paradise on this earth. Perhaps my wistful view of the island is biased from my memory of the girl who waved goodbye from the shore while Atom sailed reluctantly out of the bay of St. Pierre.

The only illness I suffered at sea on this voyage, other than the heartache of leaving new friends, occurred after I departed Reunion for Durban, South Africa. Somewhere south of Madagascar, in a region known for frequent gales and unsteady winds, I went from mere lovesick self-pity to being completely incapacitated from a sudden severe relapse of malaria. As I lay in my bunk for three days in a black depression and a raging fever, Atom mostly looked after herself, and somehow covered 200 miles through disturbed seas in the general direction of Durban. How she did it, I can't say. I was beyond caring. I only know there was squall after squall and I don't recall lifting a hand to guide her or adjust the sails.

In Durban I made an attempt at replacing the soggy patches in Atom's balsa-core deck. For a long time now water had been seeping in through various thru-deck fittings, saturating the core, and running inside soaking virtually every item in every locker after a few days at sea. It wasn't until years later, however, when I completely replaced the deck core in Hong Kong, that I was finally able to sail in a dry boat.

Against the advice of local experts, I decided the safest way to sail alone along the South African coast was to stay well offshore, and so made the run from Durban to Cape Town in ten days. Near Cape Agulhas we ran under bare poles before a gale of cold wind and roller coaster seas originating in Antarctic regions. I was thankful here that I had prepared Atom for heavy weather by strengthening bulkheads, adding watertight bulkheads fore and aft, and reducing the volume of the cockpit footwell by installing storm shutters.

Later, we rounded the impressive cliffs of South Africa's Cape of Good Hope with a favorable current in a flat calm. As if compensating for the severe beating given us off Cape Agulhas, we crossed the South Atlantic with hardly any effort. Day after pleasant day, Atom rode the waves with sails spread like giant butterfly wings before the gentle southeast trade winds. At night in the South Atlantic I gazed at the frosty streak of Halley's Comet through the open hatch as I rested in my bunk. If Atom deviated from her northwest course, I knew immediately because the comet's trail would disappear from my view of sky through the hatchway. From Cape Town back to Florida, I enjoyed the life alone on the sea so much that I visited land only twice - stopping briefly at St. Helena Island and Martinique. On these islands I continued my habit of backpacking across each of the islands I visited and climbing their highest peaks. 

As exhausting and frightening as it was at times, as I remember it, the easy days far outnumbered the bad. The personal rewards of the voyage were incalculable and I never for a moment regretted my decision to go. By keeping the bow of my boat pointed west and chasing the sun across 24 time zones, I even felt I could count myself one solar day younger than if I had remained at home. A day younger and a lifetime richer. Those two years as a vagabond sailor ended any chance that I could remain satisfied with the normal life of a land dweller. Within a year I set out again on my sturdy Triton, this time on a voyage alone to China and what would become a 12-year-long second circumnavigation.

Check the Articles page for more on Atom's voyages and cruising destinations.