5/17/2023 0 Comments Lunacy va beach![]() ![]() I spoke with Matt yesterday on the phone for the first time since then. “Have a good trip,” he wrote to me, when his onboard email was still working. Pierre on our own boat, about to set out across the Atlantic. My last real communication from Matt was last July, when he was waiting for the ice to clear to enter the NW passage. At last we’re able to release some of the tension we’ve stored up, especially Simon, who has organized Matt’s supply drops in some far-flung places along the way. I talked to Simon on the phone not as a journalist, but as a friend and supporter, and suddenly, for both of us, sensibility is kind of out the window. Simon and I were giddy with pride at what our friend has accomplished. “This is just unbelievable, what is about to happen when he crosses the finish line.” “You can’t believe how good it was to talk to him face to face,” Simon told me on the phone yesterday. Simon had just completed another run down to the Caribbean and had intercepted Matt 600 miles off the East Coast. His friend and old yacht delivery compatriot Simon Edwards and I chatted yesterday on the phone. Yesterday at this time, he was closer to finishing than he is now 24 hours later.īut his spirits are high. And now, with the finish line in sight, he’s run out of wind. ![]() He’s sleep-deprived from trying to keep watch in the heavy shipping around Cape Hatteras, and he weathered a spring gale just a few days ago on his way north from the Caribbean. This home-stretch run has doled out perhaps the toughest conditions Matt has faced yet, mentally at least. The trouble is the weather is not cooperating. He’s already been recognized by the Scott Polar Institute as having piloted the smallest vessel ever through the Northwest Passage, and if the weather cooperates, he’ll make history again in a much bigger way sometime today. Matt has the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel in sight, and is only a handful of miles from crossing his outward track, which would make him the first person in history to complete a solo nonstop voyage around both American continents. You’d think that in a voyage of now 310 days–the time Matt Rutherford has been at sea since departing the Chesapeake almost a year ago–the hardest part would be far behind him.īut in fact, the hardest part is right now. ![]() Matt Rutherford off Virginia Beach (photo courtesy of Mark Duehmig)Įditor’s note: Andy Schell, my Matt Rutherford correspondent, shot me this report just moments ago. ![]()
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