I LOST MY BOAT, BUT I PRESERVED MY LIFE
An American (Ken Barnes), safely headed toward land after three days adrift, said a driving storm off the tip of South America snapped his masts and rolled his yacht, shattering his dream to make a nonstop, round-the-world voyage. "I lost my boat, but I preserved my life," Ken Barnes told a group of reporters in a radio conversation from the fishing vessel that rescued him Friday.
Barnes said his 44-foot (13-meter) ketch, Privateer, was hit with winds between 40 and 50 miles per hour and waves of about 20 to 25 feet. "The boat rolled 360 degrees. I was inside the boat, if I would have been outside, I wouldn’t be here today," he said. "But like I say, I went around with the boat as everything else did inside the boat. The batteries ended up in the sink, all the tools, the floorboards, one of them came up and broke in half."
Barnes received a long gash on his right thigh but was otherwise uninjured. The 47-year-old man from Newport Beach, California, hoped to become the first American to circumnavigate the world in a solo, nonstop voyage from the West Coast. He left Long Beach, California on October 28. He said he knew the attempt would be dangerous.
"Anybody who sails these waters knows the risk that they are taking," he said. The U.S. Coast Guard and Chilean maritime officials received signals from Barnes’ distress beacon on Tuesday, minutes after he called his girlfriend on his satellite phone to report he was in trouble. It wasn’t until Friday that the Polar Pesca 1 fishing vessel, guided by a navy plane, was able to reach Barnes.
He was some 500 miles (800 kilometers) from the western entry to the Strait of Magellan at the time of his rescue. Navy Capt. Ivan Valenzuela said Barnes’ boat, which he spent years equipping for what he expected to be a six to eight month voyage, had to be abandoned.
"It was badly damaged, its two masts broken and had also meter-high flooding," Valenzuela said. "It will probably sink very soon, and Mr. Barnes himself told us he has no interest in recovering it." After his rescue, Barnes spoke briefly to relatives gathered at his condo in Newport Beach, California.
Barnes wore a survival suit and ate Pop Tarts and granola bars while waiting to be rescued, his family said. "He was very well equipped," Valenzuela said. After the fishing boat reaches land, expected Sunday, Barnes will be flown by helicopter to Punta Arenas, Chile’s southernmost city.
(SOURCE: AP – 1/7/07, from a sermon by Philip Harrelson, "Storms Beyond Your Control" 6/30/08, SermonCentral.com)