She sat on the end of the dock in front of the Empress Hotel in Victoria, British Columbia. The number “82” painted in big black letters on her bow.
Jeanne Socrates invited us aboard after we knocked loudly on the hull. What we saw below deck were hundreds of thousands of different things for her journey. It would be a long one. In a few days, the 68-year-old grandmother of three would leave Victoria on a seven-month long, solo, nonstop, circumnavigation of the world.
Jeanne would be towed out to the exit of Victoria Harbor and cast adrift into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. She’d wave goodbye to her friends and well wishers and turn northwest to her venture.
When I asked her why she was sailing around the world, she answered, “Why not?”
Leaving Victoria in late October, Jeanne would turn left and head south while cruising about 80 miles off shore to avoid the crab pots and shipping lanes. She would be sailing away from the approaching winter into the approaching summer warmth of the Southern Hemisphere.
Even though Cape Horn appears to be due south of Washington and British Columbia it is more 3,000 miles east of Seattle. So Jeanne will have to travel southeast for a long time at her maximum sailboat speed of 8.9 knots just to get that far.
When she finally gets to Cape Horn she will make a sharp left turn and head for the Cape of Good Hope at the southern tip of Africa.
Prior to leaving she was given a mysterious black box that automatically reports her GPS position at regular intervals so that that some world committee officials can proclaim at the end of her trip that she never touched land.
Passing Cape of Good Hope, she will sail further east and go below New Zealand down. Once beyond New Zealand, she will make a small left turn and head northeast toward Hawaii and back to Victoria.
Her elapsed time will be approximately seven months, or 210 days. She will prepare and consume 630 meals.
Jeanne told us the humidity will be about 85 percent for most of the journey and laundry will take six to eight days to dry.
Jeanne’s boat’s name is Nereida, which is cutter rigged with a furling Genoa and staysail. She has a mast that stretches to 58 feet above the waterline. In case of a malfunction at the top of the mast, there are steps bolted to the mast so she can climb up and fix anything that goes wrong. To climb up there she has to set the sails so that the automatic steering keeps it sailing on either port or starboard so she won’t swing back and forth while the boat is rocking violently in a beam sea and throw her over the side. Don’t forget this lady is a 68-year-old grandmother who is doing all of this alone.
Earlier, Laurie and I along with Mike and Nancy Domaille had dinner with Jeanne and she appeared to be a normal, attractive woman with a thick British accent. She and her husband had set out eight years ago to sail around the world. He developed prostate cancer and they had to fly home where he unfortunately was unable to conquer the cancer.
She returned to where they had left the first Nereida and resumed their around-the-world trip, but without her husband. Since then, she has sailed in the single-handed Transpac race from San Francisco to Kauai and already traveled solo almost around the world. She was 50 miles short of completing her solo circumnavigation, 30 miles north of Acapulco when the self-steering malfunctioned.
She woke up when the breaking surf drove the vessel onto the beach where it was a total loss. Fortunately the wreck was near a village and she was able to get help and salvage some of her stuff, but her logs of her trip were a total loss.
For companionship she will have two solar panels capable of generating 55 watts each and two more generating 80 watts to recharge her batteries and a wind propeller to generate even more electricity to run the electronics.
We will follow her journey on our computers via svnereida.com. Why don’t you take the trip with her on your computer occasionally? And reflect on what you are doing that day and where are you planning on going for your next trip?