1000 Days at sea, and only eight months to go!

by Sail-World Cruising on 3 May 2009 Reid Stowe has been at sea so long it's easy to forget he's there at all. Sail-World has followed his amazing journey - his goal is to stay sailing out of the sight of land for 1000 days, from time to time. While the round world sailing record has been bettered several times, round world cruising rallies have started and finished and the next one begun, and dozens of crew have been air lifted off yachts when the going got too tough, Reid has been sailing, and sailing, and sailing, continually out of the sight of land and mostly in the Southern Ocean.

He left in April 2007, and does not plan to see land again until January 15, 2010 - that's still an incredible eight months away. His hands are sore from sewing up his torn sails, he lives from sprouts he grows in the cabin and fish he catches in the sea. The love of his life, girlfriend Soanya Ahmad, who started the journey with him, left the boat by being picked up off the coast of Western Australia when she found she was pregnant, and is now rearing their baby son - a son he has never seen.

The voyage, Reid Stowe recently told reporters, 'is an experiment in the psychology of what it takes for humans to live in a dangerous situation, isolated and self-sufficient.' He was speaking by Satphone from the Anne, which is a 21-metre gaff-rigged schooner, in the South Atlantic.

Soanya says she was a 20-year-old college student when she first met Stowe a half dozen years ago. She was photographing Manhattan's West Side waterfront where he had docked his rugged, homemade schooner at Pier 66.

'He invited me aboard. It was my first time on a sailboat,' says the daughter of ethnic Indian immigrants from Guyana, both accountants who raised her and her two brothers in Queens.

'Reid was looking for someone to go with him,' says Ahmad, 'And at first, I said no. But then...'

Stowe had set out on his first sea journey as a teenager, dropping out of college in Arizona and sailing from Hawaii to the South Pacific with another young man.

For years after that, he found work at boatyards and as a skipper in the Caribbean, while selling some of his own sculptures and paintings.

He had fallen in love with the water as a boy on vacation with his grandfather, who owned a beach house on the North Carolina coast. That's as grounded as Stowe ever was, the oldest of six siblings whose father was a U.S. Air Force officer who kept the family on the move around the United States, Germany and the Philippines.

By the 1970s, in North Carolina, Stowe and his relatives had built the 70-foot schooner Anne, naming it after his mother. With a fibrrglass and steel hull and wooden interior, the boat was modeled after seaworthy 19th century American vessels — 'round like a bottle, with a deep keel, so it floats like a duck in rough seas, and cuts through the water like a submarine,' he says.

Before they pushed off on April 21, 2007, from Hoboken, N.J., which faces Manhattan across the Hudson River, Stowe and Ahmad crammed the boat with supplies.

The food ranged from rice and beans to tomato sauce, pasta, pesto, olives, chocolate, spices — plus one luxury: about 200 pounds of parmesan cheese. Ahmad also brought along some of her favorite Indian spices — cumin, curry, masala.

Provisions included coal and firewood for the iron heating stove and fuel for limited motoring, with solar panels powering the electronics on board. Water would be collected from rainfall and the sea, using a desalinator.

With small funds from friends and family supporting the record-breaking attempt, plus donated equipment and food supplies, the schooner disappeared into the sunset 'on a warm spring day with a light breeze,' Ahmad wrote on their online log.

She and Stowe balanced one another as a crew at sea, she observed recently in her journal: 'Where Reid might overreact, I was calm. Where I lacked the energy or manual skill to complete a task, Reid more than made up for it. We complemented each other's strengths and weaknesses.'

However, an early disaster nearly ruined their plans. Fifteen days after the couple sailed from Hoboken, they collided with a freighter in the Atlantic, smashing the Anne's bowsprit and damaging the mast.

'It looked like everything was over,' Stowe says now by sat phone. 'I got all stressed out, but Soanya was very calm. She steadied me and said, 'Yes, we can go on.'

The repairs took a month, 'and we drifted until we could sail normally again,' Ahmad remembers. The trip went on successfully until Soanya became strangely and violently seasick.

But on the 230th day she wrote: 'I'm not sure it's healthy to take seasick pills every day for the next two months while we're down here. ... I spend a good deal of my day curled up on the pilothouse bunk trying not to move around too much unless I really have to. I hope it goes away soon.'

The two had sailed together for 305 straight days when Soanya, who had realised she was pregnant, was helped off the Anne by Royal Perth Yacht Club general manager Stuart Walton. From Perth, Australia, she flew home to New York, where on July 16, she gave birth to their son Darshen. His name is Sanskrit for a glimpse of something divine.

Reid sailed on.

One day in the middle of the South Atlantic, roaring seas capsized the Anne, submerging the sails and knocking Stowe into the cabin wall. The waves crashed over the schooner, 'and had me hanging on with my heart beating,' he wrote. 'I am a little gun-shy now, after capsizing, losing my staysail and blowing out my old red foresail.'

Reid's own hero is French sailor Bernard Moitessier, who in the 1960s completed the first nonstop round-the-world race, and was within a hair's breadth of winning it. However, considering his options, he then changed his mind, and, instead of heading up the Atlantic to Europe, just kept sailing to the South Pacific where he ended in his days living on an island. 'He is my lifelong hero of enlightened long-distance sailing.'

Reid Stowe has informally already completed more miles at sea without landing than anyone else on earth, but when he completes his 1,000 days and nights, on 15th January next year, it will be a record that may wait a long time to be broken.

Sail-World will continue to follow Reid's story.