While her friends back home in Southern California are savoring the pleasures of spring, Sunderland is pondering the treacherous passage between South America and Antarctica. With its mountainous, heaving seas and gale-force winds, Cape Horn is a mariners' graveyard, regarded as the Mt. Everest of the yachting universe.
Reached this week via email the budding adventurer from Thousand Oaks claimed she was not afraid.
"I understand very well how dangerous the ocean is, and especially where I am, and I sail carefully and never forget how fast things can turn bad out here," she responded, from a position west of southern Argentina and 700 miles from Cape Horn. "But fear would just get in the way. When things are going on, you don't have time to be scared about it; you have to just get your head around everything and deal with it."
If Sunderland is successful it will mark her first major milestone and the beginning of a long, easterly Southern Ocean traverse aboard a 40-foot yacht named Wild Eyes. Her voyage is controversial because of her age, but also because she'll be entering this notoriously inhospitable stretch as the Southern Hemisphere summer fades to autumn and savagely cold and stormy weather begins to set in.
"My biggest hope is that she has he maturity to wait out any nasty weather rather than push too hard for a record and risk getting into trouble," says Charlie Nobles, executive director of the American Sailing Assn.
Sunderland, who lives in Thousand Oaks, Calif., and embarked Jan. 23 from Marina del Rey, Calif., is one of two 16-year-old girls attempting nonstop, unassisted solo-circumnavigations, subsiding on freeze-dried food and desalinated water, while accepting only verbal or online guidance from home-based teams.
Australia's Jessica Watson began her odyssey from Sydney last October and rounded Cape Horn on Jan. 13. Soon afterward she endured 70-knot winds that threatened to capsize her 34-foot pink sloop.
Watson, now more than 18,000 miles along and crossing the Indian Ocean, is five months older than Sunderland, so Sunderland will become the youngest if she completes her trip within five months of Watson's ending date. (Abby's brother Zac, who completed his voyage at 17, briefly held the distinction as being the youngest sailor to solo-circumnavigate the planet but he made several stops. England's Mike Perham, who is slightly younger, stole that honor weeks later.)
Abby Sunderland's trip was delayed by about two months because of boat issues. Her parents assure, however, that she'll listen closely to weather experts and scurry to the nearest port if conditions become too harsh.
Meanwhile, the intrepid mariner is faring reasonably well. "I miss my family, and my dog, and my friends," she wrote, adding that thoughts often turn to her 5-year-old sister, Katherine. They share a bedroom and Katherine idolizes Abby, and has not slept in the room alone since Abby's departure.
Aside from bouts of loneliness, the eldest Sunderland daughter--one of seven children, with an eighth on the way--insists she's relishing the experience of a lifetime. "Everything around me is so amazing, just standing out on deck is exhilarating," she explained. "Every day there are new experiences, and they always seem better than the last; everything from squalls to gales, to just racing along."
Her parents, on the other hand, are besieged by the same type of angst as when Zac was braving gales and encountering ghost ships carrying suspected pirates.
"I have definitely been recruiting the people in my life who pray," said the mother, Marianne, in reference to a recent convergence of severe weather fronts that were falsely predicted to slam Wild Eyes. "But I am super-impressed with how Abby has handled everything, from the boat and its workings to the loneliness and monotony of everyday life at sea. But I'll be glad when she has rounded the Horn and can get back up into some calmer waters."
Abby might get to see her father before she rounds Cape Horn. Laurence Sunderland has flown to Argentina and hired a captain to take him out to try to photograph Wild Eyes before his daughter attempts the passage, but that might prove difficult as 20- to 25-knot winds and large swells are in the forecast through Tuesday.
After she gets around South America's tip, Abby will turn to the north and attempt to outrun a building Antarctic storm. Ultimately, she'll cross the southern Atlantic and the Indian Ocean, pass between Australia and New Zealand and cross the Pacific on a northeast course toward home.
That's a lot of water to cover and, given her late start, perhaps a lot of icebergs to dodge as well.
-- Photo of Abby Sunderland aboard her vessel, Wild Eyes, courtesy of Gizara Arts
