Today’s show is a bit of a potpourri, a little of this and that: I’ll be answering a question about the hospital ship USNS Mercy (yes, she’s still in Portland), a look at our ship schedule, and solo circumnavigator Oliver Widger is making his way down the West Coast. He fixed a freshwater leak in one of his water tanks and is good to go, sailing in beautiful seas.
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I’ve been on a bit of a tear about solo sailor Oliver Widger the past few days and have been sharing a lot of info on Facebook, as he departed from Neah Bay headed around the world alone. He plans to sail nonstop, and end his voyage where he started, after months at sea by himself.
There’s been lots of discussion on my Facebook Ship Report page about him, with most people very supportive of his efforts. But inevitably, someone complained that he really wasn’t doing anything that hadn’t been done before by more experienced people. Which is quite true.
So today I’d like to address the question: Why do we care about Oliver Widger?
Like most things, it’s complicated. But the short answer: Oliver is us.
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You may have heard of Oliver Widger. He’s the intrepid Portland man who, after getting a life-changing medical diagnosis, sold most everything, bought a boat and sailed to Hawaii with his cat. This week he’s beginning another adventure: sailing around the world alone, unassisted and without stopping.
He leaves from Port Townsend Friday morning.
Photo of Cape Horn: Jerzy Strzelecki, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
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This week we’ve seen some interesting ships in our Astoria anchorage, with gear we don’t normally see on an average day.
We’ll talk about that and also take a look at ship traffic and our marine weather.
Spoiler alert: the weather’s looking awfully good.
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In this final segment of my interview series featuring round-the-world racing sailor Heidi Brown, we learn about how injuries are handled aboard a racing yacht, when a crew member was seriously injured as they raced through the notoriously stormy Bay of Biscay, off Spain and France.
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Today we’ll hear more from my interview with Heidi Brown, the Astoria woman who returned this summer from sailing in the Clipper Round the World Race. She spent almost a year at sea on a boat with a crew of about 20 people, going from port to port on separate legs of the race, during which some crew members departed and others joined, but Heidi stayed for the whole journey.
Today we’ll hear about some of the more dangerous aspects of this kind of experience: namely, sailing in very high winds. It’s something most people will never do, and Heidi describes in vivid detail what it was like to be on deck working in hurricane force gusts.
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