Outside Magazine

On July 1, 17 skippers in 17 boats left the French port town of Les Sables d’Olonne and sailed west into the Bay of Biscay. Their destination? Les Sables d’Olonne, but from the other direction, a journey of about nine months and 30,000 miles. The boats are unremarkable. The sailors are a mixed bag: hotshot pro racers, ambitious yachties, ultracompetent old salts, young upstarts, dedicated adventurers, a hopeless dreamer or two—16 men and one woman representing 12 countries, all with a common intention. They’re racing around the world without stopping, without benefit of modern technology, and alone.

This is the second-ever Golden Globe Race. The original, which has been immortalized in several books, including Peter Nichols’ classic account, A Voyage for Madmen, as well as the documentary Deep Water and the recent Colin Firth film The Mercy, began in the summer of 1968 and, by its end, turned into an epic blend of historic triumph, human tragedy, and utter shitshow. Nine sailors started and one finished. One killed himself. This race marks the 50th anniversary of that event, and besides some allowances for safety, the rules limit the racers to technology available in 1968. Sextants, not GPS. Radio, not sat phones. Film cameras and Super 8s, not DSLRs and GoPros. No digital anything. No high-tech materials like Kevlar or carbon composite. No electric autopilot, desalinization, or refrigeration. No blog posts, no video chats, no selfies at sea.

Such restrictions might seem suspiciously like pedantic hipster nostalgia for all things analog, but the throwback nature of the race is an earnest attempt to reclaim radical simplicity in a world addicted to interconnectedness. Just think—no email, no texts, no news alerts for the better part of a year. But no family or friends, either. No human touch. Just one person, one boat, one planet. This is a race about intangibles. The skippers will sail a very long way to see pretty much only a disc of water and a dome of sky, their progress marked by changing angles in the sextant mirrors, lines drawn on charts. Whoever wins won’t even win money—more on that later—but will be symbolically awarded a perpetual trophy.