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of John Hughes - first man to sail around Cape Horn with a jury rigged (makeshift) mast.
Travel with John in his tiny ship as he almost loses his life in the BOC solo
round-the-world circum- navigation sailing race... ...John
awoke to a terrible crash. Jack-knifing up in bed, he came close to knocking himself
unconscious on the roof above.
Ahead of him, through the darkness, he came face to face with his worst
nightmare. Even in the darkness, he knew what had happened: the mast had broken. It had
sheared off flush with the deck, hopped off its mount and come smashing straight down
through the cabin like a half-ton pile driver.
Water was pouring in. Shattered pieces of the deck were everywhere and
the cabin was in chaos. For the first time in his life, John Hughes tasted real terror.
"I had an immediate fear for the boat and, by association, my life.
I knew that if the top half of the mast went over the side and punctured the hull, the
boat would sink.
Clad only in his boots and underwear, John scrambled on deck. The entire
upper part of the mast and all the rigging was lying in the water at right angles to the
boat. It was like looking at a bird with a broken wing.
2:30 a.m. February 6, 1987: He was 2,880 km east-southeast of New
Zealand and 5,280 km west of Cape Horn, the southernmost tip of South America. At perhaps
the furthest point from land of anywhere on his 44,800-km journey, John Hughes was facing
the greatest of all seafarer's fears: adrift, without a mast, and completely alone...
And
learn that if you are committed enough to your task, you can accomplish the extraordinary:
...To buy his boat, John had spent his life savings on the down payment of $50,000. The
rest he had either borrowed from the bank or worked extra hours to earn. To cut corners,
he shared an apartment with his older brother, David. It took all he had just to get to
the starting line.
"I set sailing around the world alone as a goal to establish
what sort of a person I was," John says, as his tall forehead tips forward the way it
does when he's serious about what he's saying. "Even today, people say that with the
money I dumped into my boat I could have paid for a house and be living on easy street.
Maybe I could, but that's not so important to me. That solo sailing goal was more
important to me than anything"...
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