By Randy Jackson—
In a forest, gentle nature surrounds us. On the stark edge of a mountain peak, nature’s architecture lies beneath us. But at the edge of the sea, we stop. We stand where the world is wide open, where the horizon meets the sky. Where the spin of the earth jostles the oceans, and our own restlessness matches the swell and crash of waves.
The sea draws each of us in our individual ways. For some, the restlessness favours adventure, for others, the call is inward, but for all of us, the sea is ready and willing. The waters off Huatulco know that well. Long before resorts lined the shore, Spanish galleons and legendary pirates like Francis Drake prowled them. That same magnetic pull still exists today. But not every sea adventurer is a conqueror; the sea also issues a more private calling, as these three modern stories show.
Floating in a Car across the Atlantic
The restlessness of Giorgio Amoretti was legendary. This free-spirited Italian photojournalist once rode his Vespa from the Arctic Circle to Cape Town, South Africa. He then crossed the Sahara, hanging from a parachute towed by a car. Perhaps it was standing at the Cape of Good Hope, looking out to the Southern Ocean, where his restless spirit met the sea’s calling. His idea was to float across the ocean in a Volkswagen Beetle. In 1978, he was stopped by Spanish maritime authorities in his Styrofoam-stuffed Beetle and had to abandon the attempt.
Yet the dream did not die in Giorgio, and his three sons seemed to be infected by it. So much so that, 20 years later, after Giorgio received a fatal cancer diagnosis, his three sons and a friend sought to complete Giorgio’s dream. They modified a Volkswagen Passat and a Ford Taunus for an ocean crossing. On May 4, 1999, the four set out from the Canary Islands in these bizarre-looking crafts.
To avoid the Spanish port authorities, they left well before dawn, using outboard motors until they ran out of gasoline, after which they threw the motors overboard. They had hoped that currents would pull them across the Atlantic, but they were soon stuck in a circular current far from shore. While stuck, two members of the group had to be rescued by helicopter due to severe seasickness. The remaining two car-sailors persevered, eventually breaking free of the circular current, and made progress slowly with the help of the trade winds.
The journey took longer than expected, and they ran out of provisions. But with fishing and capturing plankton in women’s stockings, an idea they got out of a survival book, they made do with a survival-level diet for four months before reaching Martinique in the Caribbean.
During their time at sea, the restless dreamer, Giorgio, passed away, never doubting his sons would complete the journey he had initiated. It is a testament to the sea’s power to inspire such beautiful madness in the human spirit. Yet, floating in a station wagon across the Atlantic is just one way the sea coaxes the restlessness out of us in adventurous ways.
Rowing 12,000 Kilometers Alone in the Pacific
Years after the floating cars arrived in the Caribbean, on the other side of the world, a fourteen-year-old Australian boy stood in front of his bathroom mirror and made a personal commitment to become the youngest person ever to row across the Pacific.
Up to that point, Tom Robinson’s restlessness had been gradual. Although his father loved the sea and sailing, Tom’s interest lay elsewhere. That is, until his family moved to a house on the Brisbane River. There, he began rowing a plywood boat to and from school, drawn increasingly to the particular silence that nature and open water provide. Then, on a solo five-day rowing trip down the Brisbane River and out to sea toward the Gold Coast, the restless call of the open ocean evoked that personal promise, although it would take nine years to realize.
In those nine years, Tom finished high school and apprenticed as a boat builder. Based on 19th-century whale-hunting boats, Tom designed and built a wooden rowboat capable of crossing the open Pacific. In 2022, Tom had his boat shipped to Peru to begin his journey, hoping to catch the same Humboldt Current that his adventure hero Thor Heyerdahl had ridden on his Kon-Tiki expedition seventy-five years earlier.
Tom’s departure was delayed for some months, putting him closer to the cyclone season. He planned to row to the Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia, some 6,400 kilometres distant, to wait out the cyclone season. But the sea had other ideas. After almost three months of rowing, it became clear to Tom that he could not reach the Marquesas Islands. With supplies running low, he consulted his nautical maps and found the nearest inhabited island in the Northern Cook Islands, another 1,500 kilometres away.
Finally, after 8,000 kilometres of rowing, Tom noticed a grey smudge on the horizon and knew it to be land. He had been at sea for five months at this point and was overwhelmed with euphoria and relief upon spotting land. “Land Ho,” he yelled to the open Pacific. He had made it to the island of Penrhyn.
Tom was the first international visitor the islanders had seen in three years. He was warmly welcomed, and in the Polynesian tradition, he was given a new name, Mahuta-Hoehoe-Asanga, the warrior who has paddled from afar.
Tom joined the islanders’ work and pastimes for four months before setting off again, stopping first in American Samoa to treat an illness, then rowing through the island archipelago of Vanuatu, before setting out on the final leg to Australia.
On day 265 of his journey from Peru, his boat was hit by a rogue wave while his cabin hatch was open, flipping the boat upside down. Tom was unable to right it. As the salt water activated his emergency beacon, a passing cruise ship came to his rescue, its passengers crowded at the railings, watching the approach and recovery of a naked man sitting atop the hull of his upturned boat in the middle of the Pacific. The Pacific had taken his boat, but his restless quest was etched into history.
The Pull Beyond Adventure
The sea pulled the Amoretti brothers toward their father’s dream and pulled Tom Robinson toward a personal quest across the Pacific. But for Bernard Moitessier, the pull was something else entirely, something beyond adventure.
Moitessier is probably best known for what he did in the 1968 Golden Globe sailing race. The first race in which solo sailors would circumnavigate the globe non-stop. Moitessier’s times were impressive, and he was likely to win, except that his love of the sea and his deep mystical spirituality changed his course and the direction of his life.
After circumnavigating the globe, sailing almost 60,000 kilometres over 10 months, with just the final leg from the Cape of Good Hope to Britain to go, Moitessier quit the race. To notify race officials, he catapulted a message canister containing a written message onto the deck of a passing ship. The message was simple: “I am continuing non-stop toward the Pacific Islands because I am happy at sea, and perhaps also to save my soul.” He then carried on across the Pacific to Tahiti.
Bernard Moitessier lived until 1994, continuing his pursuit of the sea and writing several books, including The Long Way, which has become a must-read for solo sailors and lovers of tales of the sea’s pull.
In our own way, we are all familiar with the restless pull of the sea and what that means to us. It is a pull of nature, but unlike the pull we feel in forests and on mountains. The American artist Robert Henri once said, “Why do we love the sea? It is because it has some potent power to make us think things we like to think.”
Randy Jackson blends local reporting from the perspective of a seasonal Huatulco resident with explorations of life and change in Huatulco, Oaxaca and Mexico.
Email: box95jackson@gmail.com
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