Aloha!

I'm still in Hawaii, still making repairs to the boat. As some of you who have visited this site before may know, I've been in Hawaii for months now, living on my 43-foot catamaran, THE ARIEL.

Originally, I was planning to sail the cat from Southern California to Australia. I made it as far as Fiji and had a wonderful time down there. Then the weather turned ugly on me and I wanted to head back to Hawaii, tuck into a port and avoid some of the bad weather, rather than trying to reach either New Zealand or Australia. The boat got seriously "munched" on the return trip, though, (the bad weather will find you, no matter how you try to avoid it) and I've spent the last several months making major repairs.

I had to rebuild both motors (which had been ruined by salt water). The rigging had been stressed and needed to be replaced. Both of the trampolines (the webbing between the hulls in the front) had been blown clear off the boat during storms. The chain plates had also been torn out. All in all, the repairs took about four months and countless hours of work by hand to become sea-worthy again--much of the work I undertook was done in shark-infested waters.

Now that THE ARIEL has been repaired, I'm bringing her back to California to outfit a smaller boat for an attempt around Cape Horn. The 27-foot sloop is named THE MINTAKA (after the center star in Orion's belt). Between outfitting the small boat and taking into consideration the weather, I figure it'll take me a year and a half to go around The Horn--only about 2 /12 months of that will be actual sailing time, though. I'll make my way from west to east around the southern-most tip of South America, around the Horn and then back up into the Atlantic.

I want to sail around Cape Horn, probably alone, because it is the maximum expression of sailing, in much the same way running the Iditarod is the maximum expression of running dogs. I look at the experience of sailing the Horn as a kind of dance with the harshest environment anyone is likely to find anywhere on earth.

The sea is magnificent, but unforgiving, and bad weather on the ocean can prove fatal. I've been spending a great deal of time studying the weather lately. I'm constantly on the Internet these days, studying various weather sites. My goal is to be as prepared as possible for my journey.

I know of a cat, a little bigger than mine, that was seen in a hurricane in 1992, cartwheeling across the surface of the bay I'm in right now like a great kite. The boat weighed 18 tons and it just vanished during the storm, and was torn to pieces, parts of which are still being found in the mountains nearby.

Research and study aside, there's really no substitute for wind on your cheek and I'm looking forward to getting back under sail again soon. I'll write again from Southern California.

your friend,

Gary Paulsen