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Fleetwood’s Circumnavigation Around the World Before 80 Years “You don’t have to have a really big boat, mine certainly isn’t, and you don’t have to be rich. I’m doing my sailing on income from my Social Security plus some writing.” |
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By Jo Bailey and Carl Nyberg Jack van Ommen makes it sound easy. In the past 2-1/2 years he’s sailed 25,000 miles, visited 23 countries, encountered storms and doldrums, and done it alone in his 30’ sloop, Fleetwood. Tanned and trim at the youthful age of 70 years, Jack said, “I enjoy being by myself with the boat. I’m never lonely. But there are times when I’m just plain scared. Sometimes I get no sleep and I’m all banged up from being tossed around, but I’d do it all over again.” Jack left Gig Harbor in February 2005 aboard Fleetwood, sailed down the coast to Santa Barbara and then crossed to the Marquesas. From there he sailed through the South Pacific, Philippines, Vietnam, Borneo, Indonesia, Christmas Island, the Sychelles, Madagascar, Mozambique, South Africa, St. Helena, Brazil, French Guyana, Surinam and Trinidad, arriving in Portsmouth, Virginia, this past June, where he visited a daughter after his 25,000 mile voyage. Fleetwood waits his return after he leaves this area about the first of December to go back to head down the Inter Coastal Waterway to Florida where he’ll do needed boat maintenance. His plans sound both exciting and a bit daunting to those of us who aren’t doing what he’s planning: to sail next through the Caribbean, cross the Atlantic in June and July to the Azores and arrive next August in Holland, where he was born. From there he would like to go down the Danube River and into the Mediterranean.
“I’d like to go to the Black Sea, to the Bosporous and Turkey. I’d like to have my kids (he has five grown children and was visiting another daughter in Fife recently) and my grandchildren come to visit, see the world from the water, perhaps in 2009.
“Then maybe I’d go stay for a year in Colombia—I’d like to learn more Spanish. From there through the Panama Canal, maybe cross the Pacific again.” He doesn’t have to be too specific. He just wants to go “around the world before 80 years.”
He calls Fleetwood a “big Thunderbird.” The NAJA sloop has a triple chine with clear finish on her 1/2” plywood hull, and was built in Edison near Anacortes almost 30 years ago. She’s a comfortable boat for single-handed cruising and racing, with a snug nav station and Monitor wind vane. He sailed her in the 1982 TransPac single-handed race. He wrote in his log that “Fleetwood was not my first choice for this type of sailing but she has performed outstandingly. In the heavier air on a tight reach with reefed main and small head sail, she just sits on that third chine and moves easily through the seas.” Jack was born in Amsterdam where the relatives on his mother’s side were all sailors. He said that 75 percent of Dutchmen are sailors and he started sailing as a teenager. “My grandfather was a mastmaker. As a small child my twin brother and I would play in the piles of wood shavings from the Pitch Pine and Douglas Fir masts. We would fill gunny sacks full with the heavy shavings to sell to the bakers who fired up their ovens with them. The smell of pitch and turpentine stayed with me from that time forward. “Our grandfather would take my brother and me by the hand when we were barely able to walk and take us to the water’s edge and teach us the names of all the different types of commercial sailing barges.” No wonder he became a sailor. But when he was 7 years old he had a frightening experience. It was during World War II and his mother was in the Dutch Resistance. She was arrested because of her work and spent more than a year in the concentration camps of Dachau, Ravensbrueck and Vught. She was released at the end of the war. She was not interned because she was Jewish, but because of her belief in the Resistance. Jack and his brother were raised in the Catholic faith. Jack’s parents were also friends of Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank, the young teenager who wrote the famous diaries of her family’s life in hiding from the Germans during the war. “My father had one of the diaries but loaned it to a friend and it was later lost,” he said. Meanwhile, back at sea, Jack said his longest ocean passage was from Santa Barbara to the Marquesas at the beginning of his voyage. He left the California port on April 23, 2005 and arrived in Hiva Oa in the Marquesas in the night of May 21. In his log he wrote, “It was a fast 28 day trip for the 3000 mile voyage, considering the 30 foot length of Fleetwood. There was lots of wind from unexpected directions. The usual northwesterly down the California coast blew mostly from the West and South West. I even had two days of tacking on a Southerly. The Pacific High had moved far south of its normal location. The S.E. trade winds I expected from latitude 25/20 only developed for part of the day close to the equator. The doldrums manifested themselves in two consecutive afternoons of slapping around. “On the first afternoon when I ran the engine, I discovered that I had raw water in the engine. Fortunately this seems to have been caused by seawater entering through the exhaust when I was running the engine in idle in rough seas to pump out the bilge and not due to a broken head gasket or head.” Nearly a year after he left Gig Harbor he wrote in his log, “Somehow it still seems unreal that I have crossed the South Pacific. Fleetwood just does not fit the mold of the typical long distance cruising yacht. I sometimes feel like I started out on a sail from Gig Harbor to the Canadian San Juans in a typical weekend racer-cruiser and just made a wrong turn at Port Townsend and somehow ended up in the South Pacific. The only item that might throw me out of the San Juan cruiser class is the Monitor wind vane. Who knows? I might just continue like this and circle the globe. Stick around for the next edition which should be from Saigon.” Jack said his favorite country to visit is Vietnam. He was there when he served in the Army in 1961 during the Vietnam war and returned with his wife later. They lived in Saigon for one year when she taught English as a Second Language. “This was one of the richest experiences in our lives, and it was a stop for Fleetwood and me in April and May of 2006. Vietnam is a very beautiful country, the people are very kind, it is a very interesting place, there is so much to do and I love the food.” South Africa is the most difficult place to sail, he said. Mozambique Channel is notorious for nasty weather. He said that just before reaching his first South African port, Richards Bay, on the way from Mozambique, he had a nasty knock down. “I was sitting at the chart table, running under bare poles in 30 to 35 knots of wind. All of a sudden I heard a breaking wave rolling in, louder than any of the usual breakers. The noise was incredible and scared me. The next moment Fleetwood, with the 1/2” plywood hull, was lying flat on her port side. The top of the mast was in the water. The wave had ripped through the dodger, bent its frame and broke the wind vane. Everything in the cockpit, the winch handle, binoculars, fishing gear, bucket, prescription glasses, was lost. The whole thing lasted maybe 15-20 seconds. “Fortunately I was wedged in the nav-station, listening to the 7 a.m. weather, otherwise I would have been thrown all over the boat with the rest of the unsecured items. The starboard lower lockers spilled into the port lockers. I was finding nuts and bolts that broke out of their boxes for the next few months. “I had just two of the wash boards in the companion way opening. The water spilled through it, fortunately into the galley and not on the nav station with its vulnerable equipment. “But then this coast is infamous for nasty waves.” He also has some good memories of South Africa, for it was in Durban where he met up with five other single handed male sailors. They were not young macho men who were perhaps testing their abilities but slightly older fellows who were circumnavigating alone just because that’s what they wanted to do. They ranged in age from 58 to 75, and were from France (where Jack says the best sailors are) to England, Canada, Australia and of course Jack from the U.S. The men in this unusual group were well educated, interesting and full of fun, he said. Three of them, including Jack, had never taken crew or passengers on board during their voyages. He did say he had the worst time sailing upwind toward Bali along the east side of Sulawesu in 35 knot winds. “One day my total distance was five nautical miles, the wind so strong I had just the little jib with no main, I couldn’t point, kept falling off the waves and had a strong current against me. The same thing had happened two days before in Fiji.” He also had bad winds around the Cape of Good Hope when the boat was going sideway slowly and the rigging and mast were shaking violently. And like most circumnavigators he takes the bad with the good and just keeps on sailing. Jack said he basically owns his boat and a bicycle (in fact he’s had several) and that’s about it. He said people of any age, but perhaps especially those who are older, should realize that it’s not necessary to have a lot of money to cruise as he is. “You don’t have to have a really big boat, mine certainly isn’t, and you don’t have to be rich. I’m doing my sailing on income from my Social Security plus some writing.” In other words, friends, don’t be afraid to follow your heart. Jack has kept a lengthy, interesting log with photos of his voyage which he has posted on his website at www.cometosea.us Jo & Carl are authors of Gunkholing in South Puget Sound, a Comprehensive Cruising Guide from Kingston/Edmonds South to Olympia and Gunkholing in the San Juan Islands, a Comprehensive Cruising Guide Encompassing Deception Pass to the Canadian Boundary. Both books are at bookstores and chandleries. Jo & Carl can be reached at gunkholing.jo@gmail.com of 360-297-8030 for slide show presentations of cruising in Northwest waters. |