French Rower Finishes Trip Across Pacific : Journey: Gerard d’Aboville arrives battered but not defeated in his solo battle with nature. ‘If I had known it would be like this, I would never have tried,’ he says.

Braving 40-foot waves, 80-m.p.h. winds and loneliness as vast as the seven seas, a French mariner Thursday became the first man to row solo across the north Pacific Ocean when he entered the mouth of the Columbia River.

Gerard d’Aboville, a 46-year-old Breton whose great-great-great grandfather commanded the artillery for Gen. Washington at the Battle of Yorktown, conquered the roughly 6,000-mile route to America from Japan in 134 days. His custom-built rowboat, “Sector,” which looks like a 26-foot sailboat without a sail, gleamed white under the high-noon sun as he rowed the final strokes to a dock where his wife, son and daughter waited with tears of anguish running down their cheeks.

The anguish came from the sight of this man. A voice in the crowd of about 500 well-wishers murmured, “He looks like he just went 10 rounds with a heavyweight and lost.”

A huge, deep scrape arced from one eyebrow to the other, a festering wound appeared to bleed over his left eye, his skin was sallow and his cheeks hollow under a stubbly growth of beard.

Over the course of the 4 1/2 month journey, he had taken extraordinary knocks. His boat capsized 39 times, many of them at night and in succession amid howling North Pacific typhoons that shot his delicate craft end over end through waves as tall as four-story buildings.

“If I had known it would be like this,” he told reporters. “I would never have tried.”

Peter Bird of Britain became the first person to row across the Pacific when he traveled about 9,000 miles from San Francisco almost to Australia in 1982-83. D’Aboville’s west-to-east journey was considered more difficult because of the ocean currents and weather.

Eleven years ago, D’Aboville, a former boat-builder and race organizer, was the first man to row solo across the Atlantic from mainland North America to mainland Europe. His crossing from Cape Cod, Mass., to Ouessant, France, of 3,500 miles in 72 days has not been equaled, though one man tried and failed as D’Aboville was himself rowing across the Pacific.

He used his Atlantic experience to build a boat from Kevlar, a high-tech composite material that made the boat extremely light but strong. It has three compartments: forward, he stowed gear; in the middle, he rowed backward in an open cockpit by rolling back and forth on a sliding seat; to aft, he slept and ate, talked on the radio and typed on a telex. Screwed to the outside were solar panels that charged his radio batteries.

But the key to the operation, he said, was an innovative desalination pump activated by the pumping of his oars. Without the device, which generated up to three liters of water an hour, he could not have attempted the trip.

“Once I believed that maybe it was possible,” he said with a wink when asked why he ever started, “it was all over.”

The one thing he could not engineer out was moisture.

Everywhere, always, it was wet--and, he admitted, miserable.

“I do not want to complain,” he said in answer to a question, “but the discomfort level was 100%. First there were injuries, second I had to row 10, 12, 14 hours--up to 24 hours a day at the end. And last, dry clothes never lasted more than five minutes.”

Highlights were scarce.

“There are no good moments in such a trip,” he told a crowd of 200 journalists and proud Astorians at a press conference held in the Columbia River Maritime Museum. “There are some nice times when the weather is a little warmer and the clouds are pretty and the light is fine, but then you realize you are not on a beach but in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and must keep rowing to get home. . . . Bad moments are much more frequent. I thought more than once that I would die.”

Always compounding the terror was foul weather. He launched from Choshi, Japan, on July 11, two months later than he planned, and a month later than Japanese oceanographers warned was wise. He learned the folly of that idea quickly, because a typhoon nearly blew him back onto the Japanese coast just five days after he started, and another typhoon held him in one place for more than a week despite backbreaking rowing.

“My position is so miserable,” he wrote in his captain’s log on Aug. 5, “I can scarcely transmit it. . . . I’m in exactly the same place as I was eight days ago and my morale is at rock bottom.”

But he managed to reach the Kouroshivo Current and soon was cruising. He saw whales and dolphins, but lost his fishing gear in a storm and could not catch fresh food. He also encountered pollution that broke his heart. “It’s sad when you are in the middle of the largest ocean in the world and you see floating cups and paper,” he said. “You cannot escape pollution. If I collected it all in a net it would be a mountain.”

Reflecting upon the voyage, D’Aboville said the last few days, approaching the Oregon coast, were the hardest.

He originally planned to reach America by rowing calmly, heroically, poetically under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, but currents and high winds over the past month forced him to stay on the 46th parallel toward Astoria.

Unfortunately, that meant he had to cross the unspeakably turbulent Columbia River Bar, a long spit of sand smashed by Pacific rollers that is widely recognized by sailors as the most treacherous river entrance in the world. Charterboat skipper Ron Miller said about 12 people die there each year, including experienced mariners.

Late Wednesday night, famed French yachtsman-writer-TV celebrity Olivier de Kersauson was the first to intercept the tiny rowboat in a howling rainstorm paced by 60-knot winds. By chance, the Sector was overturned in 40-foot seas; inside, strapped to his safety harness, D’Aboville struggled as he had 37 times before to pump his water ballasts to right the boat. He said he was exhausted and felt that he might finally give in and die.

Instead, he managed to right the boat, only to hear the voice of his cousin, De Kersauson, offer to tow him the rest of the way in past the bar.

“I know what it is to take a risk,” he said, “but I did not want to risk the lives of Coast Guard men who might come to rescue me. It was a wise decision, I feel. Fellow mariners will understand.”

And so, the long voyage ended with a rather anticlimactic tow at the end of a long rope until he met the harbor and the television cameras.

Reporters on a second boat who met him at dawn were still impressed, however. Approaching within 25 yards of the Sector in a fishing vessel amid heaving 15-foot seas, the 5-foot-wide rowboat appeared as insignificant as a fly in a swimming pool. Unless both the fishing boat and rowboat were at the crest of waves, the Sector was invisible.

As it dragged along, a French radio journalist leaned over, shoved a mike in his face and asked, “When you were in danger did you pray to God?”

He stared the man down and answered passionately, “No, my God was action. Whenever I felt I could not go farther, I just did something.”

With the adventure over now, D’Aboville says he plans to write a book if he feels “courageous enough.”

Thirty pounds lighter and beaming in the long-anticipated presence of his mother, father, eight brothers and sisters and assorted in-laws, he reported that medical experts gave him a clean bill of health.

“The doctors said it’s all in my head,” he said, “and it’s not contagious.”