AROUND THE WORLD IN 228 DAYS : That’s How Long It Took Dan Byrne to Sail 2,700 Miles Single Handed; Now He’s Planning to Do It Again

If you are bored with your job, tired of the rat race and longing to get away from it all, maybe now is the time to try something completely different. Maybe something like sailing around the world. Alone.

That ought to do it. But first, better make a little list of what you might find necessary for a comfortable journey. You will need:

--A boat.

--About a year off from work.

--Your head examined.

In just about a year, about 30 sailors from around the world will try to sail around the world. Each will do it by himself in a race against time, each other and, of course, nature, against which they do not expect to score an outright victory. The best they can hope for there is to break even.

They will leave Newport Beach Aug. 30, 1986. The course is 27,000 miles long, with stopovers in Cape Town, South Africa; Sydney, Australia, and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, before finishing back in Newport.

This is the second around-the-world race for single-handed sailors, called the BOC Challenge after the British multinational corporation that sponsors the event.

The type of people who will enter this race are not normal folks. They are not even normal by sailing standards.

You have to like, really like, to sail a boat because you’ll probably spend about 200 days on the ocean. You also have to like being by yourself, because single-handed sailing means there’s no one else on board, not even your mommy.

For some people, sailing single-handed around the world is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But for Dan Byrne of Santa Monica, sailing around the globe is going to happen for the second time in his 56-year-old life.

Having done it once, why in the world--or around the world--would he want to do it again?

To win, naturally.

“The first time, I had this 40-foot cruising boat and a wonderful opportunity for achieving this dream of every sailor of sailing around the world,” Byrne said. “It was a race in which I didn’t expect to do particularly well. In a sense, perhaps that gave me a cop-out the first time around.

“This time, the romance isn’t there. I see no particular attraction or repugnance in being out on the sea alone. I want to get out there and I want to win.”

Byrne sailed “Fantasy” around the world in 228 days and he will probably be the only American from the first race to enter the second.

He will compete in a new, 60-foot boat called “The Spirit of Los Angeles.”

Construction is scheduled to begin Sept. 1 at the Port of Los Angeles and should be completed in February. Byrne is looking for both corporate and private donations to finance the construction of the boat, which may cost as much as $500,000.

Byrne plans for the “The Spirit of Los Angeles” to extend further than the name of a boat. A City Council resolution was made in support of the project. Byrne has proposed a two-year learning program to the Los Angeles Unified School District on such subjects as geography, navigation and oceanography which would coincide with the race.

That Dan Byrne should have sailed single-handedly around the world even once requires a rather large leap of faith. He had not sailed until 1964, when he was 35 and he bought a 14-foot dinghy and tried it on a reservoir near Phoenix.

Byrne moved to Los Angeles two years later and worked for 13 years at the Los Angeles Times before retiring in 1979. In 1980, he sailed 2,200 miles in a single-handed race from San Francisco to Kauai.

His around-the-world single-handed sail became the natural progression of a long-standing hope.

“The dream that I’ve harbored since I was a child is kind of an escapist’s dream,” Byrne said. “For years, I’d go to bed and read books about sailing. I’d read the darndest stuff, just for the romance of sailing.

“That’s what single-handed sailers have in common. More than being loners, we are romantics. You get on a boat, the wind is blowing and you’re doing the same damn thing Columbus did.”

The difference, of course, is that Columbus had no choice about his little sailing trip. Queen Isabella would have been royally upset if he’d stayed home. Nobody is forcing Byrne to go out on a boat by himself and spend a couple of hundred days there, especially since he’s already done it once.

Byrne’s wife, Patricia, who met Byrne at each stop on the first single-handed race, said her husband belongs to a select group.

“They’re different, all right,” she said. “It’s not for everybody. But it’s not a question of them being unbalanced. How many people get this kind of opportunity twice?”

In the first race, 17 boats started at Newport Aug, 28, 1982. Three sunk, four dropped out and 10, Byrne’s among them, finished. Byrne was officially charged with 228 days at sea, but that count included six days for boat repair after he’d had to return to Cape Town.

Struck by 70-knot winds, “Fantasy” was hit by a wave that knocked the boat to its side. The ignition switch began shorting out and when Byrne tried to start the diesel engine, the ignition wires burst into flames.

“I could have turned the switch off and killed all the electricity, but that would have stopped my auto pilot and that was steering the boat,” Byrne said. “I wasn’t going to spend any more time on deck than I had to.”

Instead, Byrne rode out the storm, cowering in his bunk.

Byrne thought about pulling out of the race on his way back to Cape Town and wondered what he would tell Patricia. He considered a story about hurting his back.

“But, hell, I couldn’t lie to her,” he said. “It took me 24 hours to get back to Cape Town. My wife was waiting at the dock and when I tossed the line, I knew I was going back again.”

After the repairs were made, Byrne rapidly closed the gap on the rest of the fleet. He said the race leg from Cape Town was “magical, like a movie.”

Byrne’s time for the leg was the fastest of any boat in his class except for the leg’s winner, Jacques de Roux, who was to sink the Pacific Ocean later on.

Byrne did not sink. He finished the race fifth in Class 2, which was for the smaller yachts.

“When I stepped off the boat at Newport at 6:30 that morning, I had a tremendous sense of achievement,” he said. “I thought: ‘I sailed around the world. I sailed around the world.’ It was so peaceful for me out there. I left my wife to face the music.”

Patricia kept in touch with Byrne by radio and through ham radio operators. She had two primary worries, family finances and Byrne’s safety. Byrne told her to sell the Porsche, but she refused. The money problems were worked out, and Byrne’s safety was never really an issue.

That was because he learned to get along with the sea and the wind in their own arena, Byrne said.

“If there is one lesson you come out of a race like that with, it is that you have to cooperate with the elements,” he said. “You get along. Don’t insist on going directly from Point A to Point B. Be content with A, Z, Q, R, T to get to B, because if you don’t, nature will break the boat. It’s just too big and powerful.”

Patricia Byrne said that she was also been concerned about what might happen to Byrne alone in the ocean, but that she was not going to let her fear erode her backing for him in the race.

When she married Byrne, she had expected a somewhat different hobby from his retirement.

“I thought he’d be a gardener,” she said. “But he turned out to be an adventurer. So what am I going to do? Tell him he can’t go? He can do anything he wants--as long as nothing happens to him.

“My only questions have been ‘How dangerous is it?’ and ‘Is he going to be able to handle it?’ Well, he answered them both, so I support him. I think the one who should support you the most is the one who loves you the most.”

“And now he’s going to do it again,” she said. “I think it’s great. We only live once.”

The sport of sailing around the world alone is not a new one and its history is full of peculiar events.

Joshua Slocum was the first to single-handedly circumnavigate the globe.

A naturalized American born in Canada, Slocum set out from Boston April 24, 1895, aboard a 36-foot 9-inch cutter called “Spray.” Three years, two months, two days and 46,000 miles later, Slocum sailed into Newport, R.I., ending a history-making trip.

Slocum had made many stops on his long journey, but he nevertheless established a standard.

Slocum did not attempt a second around-the-world sail, and in 1909, both he and his ship were lost in unknown circumstances.

In his book about single-handed around-the-world sailing titled “The Ultimate Challenge,” Barry Pickthall wrote about the disappearance of “Spray” with Slocum aboard:

“Did she spring a leak and sink during a storm, a fate Slocum always worried about, or was the ketch run down unseen at night? It remains a mystery, and though Slocum’s loss started an argument that has continued ever since as to whether sailing single-handed is fundamentally unseamanlike or not, it has not stopped an ever-growing number from taking up the challenge.”

Perhaps the most famous seaman to accept that challenge was a 65-year-old Englishman named Francis Chichester, who spent 227 days at sea alone, sailing around the world and making only a single stop. Chichester and his 53-foot Gipsy Moth IV, returned to a hero’s welcome at Plymouth, England, May 28, 1967.

After Chichester’s feat, there was only one more challenge remaining for single-handers--to sail around the world non-stop. The Sunday Times in London offered two prizes of 5,000 pounds each, one for the first to complete the course and another for the fastest time.

Nine sailors set off from Falmouth June 14, 1968, in the strangest ocean race of all time.

One competitor committed suicide after pretending for nearly six months that he was sailing the course when in fact he was circling in the South Atlantic. Another tormented entrant committed suicide months later, and a third passed up a good chance of winning by sailing off to Tahiti to “save my soul” after spending a numbing 307 days at sea.

The winner, an Englishman named Robin Knox-Johnston, returned to Falmouth on April 22, 1969, 313 days after setting out. He became the first to circumnavigate the world, port to port, single-handed.

As storied an achievement as Knox-Johnston’s was, it was almost lost amid the bizarre occurrences at sea, particularly that involving Donald Crowhurst, who was to sailing what Rosie Ruiz was to the Boston marathon.

Crowhurst, a 33-year-old Englishman, thought he could fool everyone by faking the race. He kept two logs, one of them false, refused at first to radio his position and then turned his transmitter off, sailing in the South Atlantic for months with the idea he could show up at Falmouth at an appropriate time and claim the first-prize money.

But after nearly six months, Crowhurst grew despondent, according to his ship’s logs, figuring that he would be found out. So he changed his plan. He decided to finish second behind Nigel Tetley, who appeared as the likely winner at the time.

Tetley’s trimaran broke up, however, and so, apparently, did Crowhurst. He wrote in his log:

It is finished It is finished IT IS THE MERCY Then, Crowhurst apparently jumped into the sea. Rescuers found his boat and his two logs. Crowhurst’s body was never recovered.

Thirty-three months later, Tetley hanged himself. Although it was never proven, there was speculation that Tetley had become distraught by the specter of Crowhurst’s fraud, somehow believing that Crowhurst’s pushing him for the lead had caused the breakup of his boat.

There were also questions about the stability of Frenchman Bernard Moitessier, who passed the Cape of Good Hope a second time and sailed straight on to Tahiti instead of heading back to Falmouth and the finish line.

Moitessier’s wife thought her husband had become temporarily unbalanced after seventh months of solo sailing.

When he finally dropped anchor in Tahiti, Moitessier had sailed nonstop for 10 months and covered 37,455 miles.

Apparently realizing what the world would think of him, Moitessier wrote a letter to his publisher. The letter included a passage in which Moitessier explained why he continued sailing when the end of his journey was nearly in sight:

“Why am I playing a trick like this? Imagine yourself in the forest of the Amazon, looking for something new, because you wanted to feel the earth, trees and nature. You suddenly come across a small temple of an ancient, lost civilization. You are not simply going to come back and say: ‘Well, I found a temple, a civilization nobody knows.’ You would stay there, try to understand it, try to decipher it. . . . And then you discover at 200 kilometers further on in another temple, only the main temple this time. Would you return?”

Byrne does not believe he is a slightly off-center participant in a sport that often seems to attract those who tilt a little to port.

“In that race, what we had was not a bizarre event, but a bizarre personality,” Byrne said of Crowhurst.

But Byrne decided to find out if he was really as normal as he thought.

Not long ago, he took a stress test and, none to his surprise, was found to be acutely normal.

After his around-the-world race, Byrne also had taken a test, that one to determine if his personality had been changed by spending so much time at sea. Byrne graded out with no lingering problems.

So now, Dan Byrne is answering Moitessier’s question.

He is returning, not to land, but to the sea and his dream. He will be 58 when he finally steps off the boat at Newport in 1987 and he will have spent Christmas Day, New Year’s Day and his birthday alone at sea.

He will have consumed the contents of countless bags of freeze-dried food ranging from scrambled eggs--”Just incredible”--to tuna fish salad--”A glucky mess.”

He will have spent more than 200 days sailing the ocean alone and he probably will consider it all worthwhile.

That is because for a second time, Byrne will have accomplished something that used to exist only in his mind.

If you think about it, perhaps it is not surprising that his only true hero is a sailor named Philip Weld, who in 1980 set a single-handed speed record for crossing the Atlantic. Weld was 65 at the time. His boat was called “Moxie.”

“He went out, rather late in life, and really achieved something,” Byrne said.

“I think there are so many people that really would like to do something in their lives, something like what I’m going to do. To pursue a dream. But they’re so hung up in their jobs that they don’t dare.

“I feel so fortunate that I did this once. The desire to do it again and do it better is so strong. I will feel blessed, twice-blessed.

“Many people have their dreams, to do something different, whether it’s to open up a lodge in Alaska or sail around the world, but they don’t get to do it. I did.”