Ironie's Voyage of a Lifetime

by Catherine Fahy, I&M on 7 Nov 2007 Josh Witte, who set out to circumnavigate the globe without knowing exactly where the winds would take him, recently returned to Nantucket after seven years with tales of adventure in distant lands. Pirates, nor’easters and a solo passage across the Atlantic all figure in the tale.

Witte left Nantucket in November 1997 to sail around the world aboard his 37-foot sloop Ironie, which he found in Newport, R.I. after a winter of searching boatyards from Maine to Key West for the right boat. Ironie, a Dutch-built boat with a steel hull, proved capable of handling heavy weather on the disastrous first leg from Nantucket to Bermuda but sustained enough damage to discourage Witte’s crew from continuing on to the Caribbean.

In part because of her relatively inexperienced crew, Ironie also arrived at the very back of that year’s Caribbean 1500 fleet, a sailboat rally that leaves Newport in November every year and stops in Bermuda on its way to Tortola.

'We got slammed, I mean we just got demolished,' Witte said, recounting 10 days of continuous nor’easters and 72 hours hove to – basically standing still at sea when the weather is too rough to sail.

'It was pretty awful and we were really scared,' he said.

At the time, Witte had no way of knowing that what he had just experienced would be the worst weather on his trip and, looking back, he said such a harrowing initiation made him a more careful sailor.

'I was thinking, ‘There’s no way I can sail around the world,’ but in retrospect, it was great,' he said. 'I paid my dues in the beginning.'

Because of the battering Ironie and the rest of the Caribbean 1500 fleet experienced that year, Hamilton, Bermuda was unusually devoid of prospective crew and Witte had stiff competition from the other captains when word got out that someone was going to be at a local bar looking for a spot on a boat heading south.

'Fifty captains would be in there offering them the best deal,' Witte said. Eventually, Witte set out for Tortola with Nantucketer Dennis Simmonds and a crewmember rally organizers helped him find.

The threesome were relieved to have a comfortable passage south to the British Virgin Islands, where they spent a few days before heading east to St. Barth’s for New Year’s and south down the island chain until they reached the north coast of South America and the Panama Canal.

The Caribbean is one of the world’s top sailing destinations for good reason, Witte said, but is also among the most notorious in terms of crime and piracy, especially around Panama. In Colon, the town on the east side of the canal where he began his transit, Witte said supermarkets have guards with submachine guns and no one was surprised when the Panama Canal Yacht Club was held up by robbers with machine guns the day before he arrived.

'I wouldn’t tell people not to go to Panama because there are some amazing islands but it is very, very dangerous,' he said.

Witte’s first-hand brush with crime wouldn’t come until much later in his trip when $15,000 worth of equipment disappeared from Ironie while she was stored in a boatyard in New Zealand for two years. Witte also had a fishing rod stolen in the Straights of Malaca, where cruising sailors can have a lot more stolen off their boats if they’re not careful. Witte was also attacked off Morocco by a group of pirates, who he fended off by kicking their boat away.

Witte’s course over seven years took him from Nantucket to St. Maaretn completely around the world, the last leg across the Atlantic by himself.

Incidents like these are inevitable on a sailing trip around the world, but like bad weather, Witte said their memory faded with time and the excitement of new places like Cocos Island. Located on the Costa Rican side of the Panama Canal, Cocos was called the most beautiful island in the world by the late Jacques Cousteau and was believed to be Robert Louis Stevenson’s inspiration for 'Treasure Island.'

According to a website published by 'NOVA' Online, if the legends are true then Cocos could have as much as $1 billion in hidden treasure. It was also the island featured in the opening shots of 'Jurassic Park' and has the most crystal-clear water Witte has ever seen, he said. Cocos is uninhabited – in fact, according to 'NOVA,' it is the largest uninhabited island in the world – but visitors are allowed to make day trips to see why it was favored by the pirates whose initials are carved in the steep cliffs.

'It’s got that feeling that something has happened there,' Witte said.

From Cocos, Ironie carried Witte and the crew he picked up in Colon after Simmonds’ departure – a couple of surfers named Chris and Magoo – to the the Galapagos Islands, which are part of Ecuador and are every bit as impressive as he’d heard they’d be, Witte said. The Galapagos Islands are also the place where most circumnavigators make their big 'leap of faith' across the Pacific, Witte said.

In early 1998, the Pacific was in the grip of an El Nino year and reports were coming back to the Galapagos that it was making Pacific passages more difficult than usual.

'We were hearing horror stories of west winds and doldrums,' Witte said, 'but we just said ‘screw it’ and one day we left.'

After a passage of nearly a month that was blessed with fair winds, Witte and his crew made their first Pacific landfall in the Motus of the Society Islands of French Polynesia, followed by Bora Bora, Tonga and Fiji. Witte said he rarely planned his next landfall, preferring instead to go where the winds took him.

'I never plan anything ahead of time,' he said. 'I just knew I was going around the world.' Like the Galapagos, he said the islands of the South Pacific are everything they’re rumored to be, right down to girls with flowers behind their ears. 'It’s just an amazing place to make landfall,' Witte said. 'I was blessed in the Pacific Islands.'

An even bigger leap of faith than the South Pacific is the Southern Ocean, considered among the most hostile bodies of water in the world. For Witte, it lived up to its reputation and claimed the lives of four of his friends on other boats trying to reach the north coast of New Zealand, including a single-hander he’d been sailing with since leaving the Panama Canal. The loss was particularly hard because of the closeness of the cruising community, Witte said. 'I had no idea of the community, which is what I miss the most.'

New Zealand let Witte down once more when his boat was robbed, but Australia was kinder and the dark memories faded as he turned to the northwest and the wonders of Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. Joining him on that leg was his girlfriend at the time, Rebecca O’Brien. Other islanders who joined him at different times included Rick Greenwood, Stephen Glasser and Dr. George Mitchell.

If certain bodies of water don’t bode well for sailors – particularly Americans – then so do certain bodies of land such as the Middle East, which is where Witte happened to be at the start of the war in Iraq.

'We were getting really nervous, but more about pirates than anything else,' he said, recounting a tale of friends being shot at and robbed in the Red Sea then ignored by a U.S. naval warship. Witte’s own passage along the shores of the Sudan and Israel didn’t include any similar experiences and for the most part he came away with a good impression of the Muslim world.

'Everyone we met was generally pretty friendly,' he said. By then, Witte had also completed a single-handed passage of more than 11 days to Sri Lanka, during which time he slept no more than 15 minutes at a stretch. 'The arrival was the most amazing feeling,' he recalled.

The same could be said of his arrival in St. Maarten, where he ended his circumnavigation six months ago. Witte reached St. Maarten after a 25-day solo transatlantic passage from the Canary Islands. He sailed