THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, February 4, 1995 TAG: 9502030112
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Larry Maddry
LENGTH: Long : 138 lines
WHEN TALKING with Michael Johnson, you sometimes are struck with the notion that he's an Indiana Jones of the sea.
He's a lean, wiry, bearded 50-year-old with a slight British accent who looks like a sailor-hero served up by central casting.
Unlike Indiana Jones, Johnson doesn't charge off to the four corners of the Earth looking for archaeological treasures.
The former state psychologist and College of William and Mary graduate, hunts challenges instead. He sails the seas in a 40-foot yacht - the Aissa - which has ``Norfolk, Va.'' on the stern.
A Grafton, Va., resident, Johnson and his yacht completed a six-year 41,000-mile circumnavigation of the planet last August. And in true Indiana Jones fashion, he was into a gripping adventure near the beginning of that around-the-world odyssey. The plot thickened when he decided to tackle Cape Horn the rough way.
Cape Horn is a watery graveyard at the southern tip of South America ripped by howling gales - where the wind in the rigging is said to carry the shrieks of dead sailors who drowned in the canyons of its mountainous waves.
``I had sailed Cape Horn before,'' Johnson said, ``but we did it the easy way by going from west to east.'' A sailboat passage around the cape from east to west - Atlantic to Pacific - tests the mettle of the most experienced sailor.
However, Johnson wanted to challenge himself further. He decided to round Cape Horn without an engine or electronic navigation equipment. ``I relied on my Plath sextant,'' he said.
Before tackling Cape Horn, he packed and sealed the engine shaft aboard his Westsail 32, a 15-year-old, double-ended cutter. He also sealed the echo sounder and had only his charts, sextant and chronometer for navigation.
``There is a steady current running from the west past the cape, and you have to make at least thirty miles' progress a day to counter that alone,'' he explained. ``Often we would sail for 24 hours and find we had gone backward on the chart.
Johnson and his crew spent 25 days sailing around Cape Horn in March 1989. Temperatures ranged from tropical to below freezing, with the wind chill dipping to 2 below zero. Winds sometimes reached Force 10 (between 55 and 63 mph, a force sufficient to uproot trees.)
``We got it all rounding Horn,'' he said. ``Snow squalls, ice on the rigging and towering seas. The troughs between the waves were sometimes so deep that when we dropped into them, the wind left our sails, jolting the boat when they filled again on the rise.''
Johnson and his crew were concerned during the passage, he said, because there is no place for refuge in the wind-whipped open sea between Cape Horn and Antarctica. Johnson's outstanding seamanship on that remarkable voyage around Cape Horn was recognized by the Ocean Cruising Club of Great Britain when it awarded him the Barton Cup in 1990.
On his world-circling adventure, he sailed to Easter Island and Tahiti, then to New Zealand and Australia, up to Sri Lanka and across the Indian Ocean to Kenya. He then rounded the Cape of Good Hope, cruised up to Nambia and Angola, across to St. Helena, and through the South Atlantic back to Brazil, where he cruised the Amazon River before leaving his vessel in storage in Curacao in the Netherlands Antilles.
The skipper interrupted his circumnavigation voyage about once a year to fly back to the United States. He financed the voyage by taking on from time to time pairs of adventurous types who paid for the privilege of serving as crew members. There were 11 in all.
Adventure is what his crew members got. Sometimes more than they bargained for.
On Oct. 13, 1989 - while sailing between Bora Bora and New Zealand - the crew spotted a pair of sperm whales approaching.
``They started to dive,'' Johnson recalled. ``One dived and went directly under us. So close I could have reached out and touched its back. But the second whale didn't dive deep enough and hit our boat as he was going under. It was as though the Aissa had hit a brick wall.''
Johnson said there was no structural damage to the yacht. ``We were lucky we weren't capsized,'' he said. Some blood from the whale stained the water at the time of the collision. Johnson said he later found a piece of blubber as large as a fist on the bob stay fitting for the bowsprit.
The skipper was less lucky in his encounter with a massive wave that seemed to come out of nowhere while the Aissa was in the Southern Ocean about 200 miles southeast of New Zealand.
On March 22, 1990, Johnson and crew member Rebecca Walker had watched as hailstones pelted the Aissa's deck during a time of strong seas. But by midday, the barometer had risen and there was hope for better weather.
Johnson and Walker were below deck when the wave struck. ``Without any unusual noise, the Aissa was lifted up and began to go over to port,'' he said. Johnson fell out of his berth onto the overhead skylight. ``I realized that the Aissa was upside down. I remember wondering if we would go right on through 360 degrees or roll back upright the way we had gone over. We seemed to hang upside down momentarily, and then Aissa righted herself by rolling on over. All below was chaos. Cans of food, broken table, cushion, charts, ketchup, books, broken glass kerosene, water - all mixed together with no place to stand.
``Becky was in a heap near the stove and at first made no response to my calls, but finally, groggily, she said she was all right,'' Johnson said.
Lost as a result of the 360-degree rollover were the mast and boom, standing rigging, running rigging, mainsail, storm trysail and dinghy.
Fortunately, the engine and rudder were intact and there was no damage to the hull. The vessel limped into Dunedin, New Zealand, three days later. The rest of the voyage was delayed for about a year while repairs were made. Johnson said the people of Dunedin, after reading about the Aissa's bad luck being rolled over by the freak wave, came forward with offers to help in any way.
The circumnavigation was filled with memories. Souvenirs of the journey fill Johnson's log book: briers from the Nambian desert resembling whalebone needles that are 4 inches long and capable of puncturing vehicle tires; cloves from Zanzibar; a photo of a snake charmer in Sri Lanka; dead scorpions pulled from clothing while in a desert; a photo of a great white shark snapping at the steel bars of a submerged cage containing Johnson as he tried another new adventure while submerged in Australian waters.
Pirates pursued the Aissa several times during the cruise.
``We were just lucky they didn't catch us,'' Johnson said. But a crew member going ashore in a dinghy, as the yacht was cruising hundreds of miles up the Amazon River, was beaten and robbed, he recalled.
Johnson, who sharpened his sailing skills by serving as a crew member on British sail training vessels, said he may write a book about his adventures. He's a history buff who has also been a water rat since boyhood.
``We don't have the challenges we once did, but the sea hasn't changed since the days of Magellan,'' he said. ``The devices have changed, but the forces of wind and water are still the same. There's nobody to call when you are in trouble far at sea. Coping with such things makes for an interesting life.''
In Grafton, Johnson is staying with his longtime friend Stephanie Panzera. He said the pair may sail the Aissa back to the States from Curacao next fall.
Panzera doesn't answer the call of the sea as regularly as her house guest. ``Please don't refer to me as his girlfriend,'' she asked. ``Just say I'm his long-suffering companion of eighteen years.'' ILLUSTRATION: Michael Johnson spent six years sailing around the world on
board his boat, the Aissa, completing the 41,000-mile voyage last
August.
Michael Johnson took along a series of fellow adventurers who paid
to crew the Aissa during his circumnavigation of the world.
by CNB