It's just an adventure. You don't have to justify it

The greatest ocean rowing career in history began with a classified ad.

It was 1972, and Peter Beard was selling velvet paintings door-to-door, the latest in a string of dead-end jobs he's held since leaving school at 15. A newspaper ad sarcastically targets the counterculture youth of early 1970s London: “Heads and Freaks – my daily bread. Call Wendy.”

King dialed the number and soon found himself fiddling with an M1 in a car full of fancy nameplates and long-haired salesmen. Someone asked about his hobbies, and King mentioned that he had just rowed a small boat around Ireland. The bird nearly slid off the road.

While others fanned out to knock on doors, Bird King led to a pub and asked him questions, not least how he planned to top off his adventure in Ireland. King replied that he was preparing to circumnavigate the world. In fact, he told Bird that he was looking for partners.

Two years later, they set out from Gibraltar in a borrowed rowboat. The third partner only made it to Casablanca, but for Bird and King, it was The beginning of a beautiful friendship. One hundred and three days later, they landed on the island of St. Lucia after a journey of 3,303 miles.

They both had enough of ocean kayaking. “By the time we got to the West Indies the boat was leaking and we had everything we had, including the money. So we came back,” Baird told his friend Kenneth Crutchlow in a 1995 interview. “Rowing around the world was Derek’s dream, not mine. I never saw myself going all the way with him.”

Baird (right) training in London with Derek King and Carol Maiston, who left the campaign after 10 days. Wikimedia

This should have been the end of Bird's rowing career, but when he heard that American Patrick Satterley planned to row the Pacific Ocean on his own, it revealed a deep-seated ambition he didn't know existed in him. "I felt kind of disenfranchised," he said, "as if someone had taken my chance."

As it happened, Satterley borrowed the same boat that Baird and King borrowed across the Atlantic, a 36-foot Britannia II. The craft was owned by John Fairfax, a pioneer of ocean rowing, W.C The occasional shark wrestler who rowed across the Pacific Ocean with Sylvia Cooke in 1971 and 1972. Satterley planned a similar route from San Diego to Australia but only made it as far as the 3-mile buoy, where he tied Britannia II And I took a boat to the shore. Disgusted, Fairfax withdrew his support and took Britannia II Back to San Francisco. There she sat for two years as Baird worked to raise funds and make her ship shape for a second voyage across the Pacific.

Set out in October 1980, he battled difficult conditions for nearly half a year. On his 147th day at sea, short on food and a damaged rudder, he capsized in the heavy surf off Maui. Britannia II He was pushed ashore and smashed against the rocks as Bird scrambled to safety. He covered only about a quarter of his planned voyage to Australia, and in the process lost nearly his boat and his life. But rather than quitting or backing away from his ambitions, Bird elevated his prestige. He decides that the next time he paddles across the Pacific, he'll go nonstop.

First, he needed a boat. The Honolulu boat builder, Phu Liem, offered to build one at no cost, on the condition that Baird work for him. The new boat has been called Healy on Britannia— a footnote to “Carry on, Britannia” — Baird made it out of the Golden Gate on August 23, 1982. He spent the next 10 months alone at sea, traveling 6,000 miles with a single resupply. He weathered two tornadoes and a coup in between weeks of mind-numbing solitude. After 394 days he reached the edge of the Great Barrier Reef in heavy weather, just 33 miles from the Australian mainland. Baird saw that he was close enough and agreed to tow an Australian Navy patrol boat.

The book Bird wrote with the King, and the Christmas celebration aboard Healy on Britannia. Screenshot from Kayaking in the Pacific

When a crew member asked him why he did it, Bird told him, “It's just an adventure. You don't have to justify it.” Reminiscent of the answer Everest climber George Mallory famously gave to the same question — “because they are” — Baird said he had always felt a kinship with mountaineers. “I realized that mountain climbers and extreme skiers and ocean paddlers are really the same people with different skills,” he told Crutchlow. "We never ask each other why we do what we do. Obviously."

Baird later recalled a conversation with some dock workers who were unloading his boat. "He must be crazy to do that," said one of them, not knowing that the torpedo-shaped rowboat belonged to the man standing nearby.

“What if he asked you why you lived your life the way you do?” Bird response.

The longshoreman sizeed him up and said, "You're the rowing guy, right?"

By the time he finished his row with Australia, Baird had logged 441 days alone at sea And he discovered that despite his sociable nature, he had a rare ability to tolerate solitude. "Flying wasn't the ocean-paddler stereotyped recluse," Geoff Allum wrote. "He somehow managed to combine his passion for life with the ability to spend months and months alone at sea, with no apparent harm."

For friends like Allum, the only lasting consequence of Bird's journey seemed to be wanting more. Having crossed the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, he was more than halfway to completing Derek King's dream of circumnavigating the world. Closing this circuit would have delighted sponsors and the press, but Bird chose a tougher and more ambiguous challenge: rowing the Pacific Ocean again, in the opposite direction.

Crossing from west to east means paddling the turbulent North Pacific Ocean, from Siberia to San Francisco. Strip, the watch company, came in as sponsor, and Baird built a new boat for the North Passage. at 29 ft sector two It was smaller than his previous boats and designed to hold himself in any conditions. (The first sector It belongs to Bird's friend and rival Gerard d'Aboville, who jumped from Japan to North America in 1991, flipping 39 times in the process. Crutchlow, founder International Ocean Rowing Association And director of the O'Birds North Pacific, he notes that while d'Aboville was the first to line up the North Pacific, he didn't start from the Asian continent. "The difference was 400 miles," he wrote, "a matter of principle").

Bird on Sector Two, the boat he built and spent 10 months aboard in the North Pacific Ocean. Wikimedia

The boat was made of cedar wood covered with fiberglass. Baird built it in an East London warehouse where Polly Wickham worked on the drawing sets for a theatrical production. The two began a relationship, and by the time sector two Polly was ready to go, as she was pregnant with her son, Louis. Baird was 27 when he rowed the Atlantic with Derek King, and 35 when he began crossing the Pacific to Australia. Now a 45-year-old new dad, he was embarking on the most ambitious ocean kayaking project anyone had yet attempted.

Of the many challenges of the voyage, getting away from the Siberian coast was among the most difficult. sector two It's built to weather strong storms, but without enough sea space, even a moderate wind can drive it ashore where it, and possibly Bird, will be blown to bits. In Vladivostok, local meteorologists and sailors told Byrd that if he didn't leave by the end of May, he never would. But the ship holds sector two It didn't arrive until May 28, and the weather window didn't open until June 5, 1992.

The bird rowed until ten o'clock that night. By five o'clock the next morning, the wind had driven him all the way to Vladivostok. He dropped anchor, waited for the weather - a three-day hurricane - and then put out to sea again. He battled headwinds for another fortnight, moving south without getting safely off the coast, until he passed in a heavy mist 100 yards from a lighthouse, which indicated a bad set of rocks. The currents were pushing it toward North Korea, measuring 20 miles south. That was the end of his first attempt in the North Atlantic, but only the beginning of his obsession with it.

The following year, he departed earlier, on 12 May, to endure severe cold, snow and ice in an attempt to cross the Sea of ​​Japan before the adverse winds of the season settled. A month later, he passed between the Japanese islands of Honshu and Hokkaido, into the North Pacific Ocean. He spent most of July making two giant circles in the ocean 500 miles east of Japan. August and September bring a pair of tropical storms. October more circles. During a 54-day stretch that fall, he advanced only 35 miles. In November, almost out of food, a passing freighter gave him provisions to last another two months. When they were almost gone Crotchworth hauled another ship to Baird with more food and an offer to carry him and sector two to Japan, where he could start again the following year. Baird declined the offer.

That was the 208th day. Byrd continued for another 96 days before finally welcoming a ship to take him to Japan. His 304 days in the North Pacific was an endurance record for single ocean rowing, but he barely made it halfway. Crutchworth writes: “The computer printout of Peter’s Trail, with its loops and backtracks, looks like a tangle of yarn. Ten months into the expedition that should have taken six months, the end of the yarn was still 2,000 miles from San Francisco.”

Baird tried again in 1995, making two unsuccessful attempts to off the Siberian coast. The following year he returned for his fifth crackdown in the North Pacific. I swear it will be his last. This time he left even earlier, at the end of March.

Sixty-nine days later, on June 3, 1996, the Russian Rescue Center received an emergency signal from sector two. A few hours later, they found the boat capsized and badly damaged. There was no sign of Baird, and his life jacket and suit were still on board, suggesting that whatever happened was unexpected. The captain of the rescue ship reported a large number of logs in the vicinity, leading some to speculate that a wave laden with wood may have swept Baird from his rowing seat.

birds on board HMAS Bendigo After the warship picked him up from the Pacific Ocean near the Great Barrier Reef. Screenshot from Kayaking in the Pacific

Crotchworth recalled his first trip with Baird to Siberia in 1992. They were seeking permission to launch from Vladivostok, the stronghold of Russia's Pacific Fleet. The Soviet Union had collapsed only months earlier, and the Cold War had not yet fully thawed. Ivan Abroskin, the deputy mayor, hosted a dinner for us, proposing a toast: “Peter, you are like an icebreaker—go first so that others can follow.” "

Baird was certainly a pioneer. 1974, his crossing from Gibraltar to St. Lucia was with Derek King a successful fourth row in the Atlantic. And not only was his 294-day row from San Francisco to Australia in 1982 and 1983 the first solo row in the Pacific Rim; It was the longest continuous row—a record bested by Byrd's epic 308-day run in the North Pacific in 1993 and 1994, though Byrd didn't care much about such distinctions. "It's mostly luck or God - if you believe in God - or something outside of yourself that determines how fast you get through," he said.

Byrd spent a total of 938 days at sea in a rowboat, all before GPS and advanced satellite communications made ocean kayaking excursions a boom. This was also a record, only recently surpassed Erden Eruch, who crossed one and a half turns of the globe in a canoe. In 2016, Erouge rowed from California to Hawaii with Louis Byrd, who was five years old when his father disappeared. The trip only lasted 53 days, but it gave Louis the sense of a father he barely knew.

"The only place where I feel close to Peter Bird is in the Pacific Ocean," he said. "It's like opening a door to somewhere I could never get in without taking something like that."

Top photo: A bird arrives in Australia after 294 days alone at sea. Wikimedia

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