A Triumph of Will : * Adventure: Frenchman Gerard d’Aboville survived typhoons, 38 capsizings, a broken rib and months of total loneliness as he rowed across the North Pacific.

Every day at 4:30 GMT from August to November, Fred Boehme waited patiently, anxiously at his home in Hawaii for a staccato, French-accented voice to crackle across his ham radio at 14.313 MHz.

“This is Tango Mike 6 Alpha Bravo Oscar,” the voice called out. “How do you read me?”

And nearly every day, relieved and amazed, Boehme would call back, “Hello Gerard, we read you! How’s it going?”

The response was always “Fine!” Boehme says, but he knew that laconic answer hid pain and hope as vast as the seven seas.

For his correspondent was Gerard d’Aboville, the first man ever to attempt to row solo across the north Pacific Ocean. And each day the 46-year-old Breton reported back, he was 40 or more miles closer to his extraordinary goal. It was a journey of unspeakable courage across 6,300 miles of high seas, typhoons, wildly varying winds, a capricious current and total loneliness.

“It is an enormous undertaking,” said veteran San Francisco yachtsman Doug Miller a day before D’Aboville’s arrival on U.S. shores, “somewhere between foolish and heroic.”

Rowing 10 to 14 hours a day in swells as tall as four-story buildings, D’Aboville capsized 38 times, swallowed gallons of saltwater, lost two anchors and a set of oars, broke a rib and repeatedly smashed his face until it bled. Yet still he rowed. And rowed. And rowed.

When finally he landed he declared: “If I had known it would be like this when I started I would never have started.”

D’Aboville’s heroism captured the French imagination during the past summer and autumn. Most countryside towns in France are divided by rivers, many of which have slalom gates for the pleasure and competition of popular canoe and kayak clubs.

Every major French TV and radio network, magazine and newspaper sent reporters and photographers to cover his landing near Astoria, Ore., last Thursday, 134 days after he started. One network and a photo agency paid up to 2 million francs, or $350,000, for the exclusive right to first film his approach to land. Their competitors meanwhile devised elaborate and expensive plans to scoop them.

“The news is so bad in France right now, with our gloomy economy, strikes all the time, and violence, that it’s just the tonic for us to have a made-in-France success story,” said Jerome Godefroy, the U.S. correspondent for Radio-Televison Luxembourg.

“It’s such a pure event. You start in one place, and either you finish or you don’t. No points for trying.”

Balding, pale, a little stooped, D’Aboville is hardly the image of a world-class athlete. He began his journey July 11 at age 45 at Choshi, Japan--a fishing village on a peninsula that juts due east from Tokyo toward North America.

By coincidence, it was 11 years almost to the day that he had begun a similar journey: In 1980, he became the first man to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean from the mainland U.S. to the mainland of Europe. His crossing from Cape Cod to Ouessant, France, in 72 days has not been equaled, though one man tried and failed as D’Aboville was himself rowing across the Pacific.

That transatlantic journey made him the toast of France. A former army paratrooper, he was hailed as the new Lindbergh and awarded the government’s prized Chevalier du Merit du Legion d’Honneur. He gave hundreds of lectures and wrote a book.

The professional adventurer swore to friends that he would never again do such a thing, but soon his life became more unsatisfying, perhaps even boring. He designed motorboats for a race down the Niger River in Africa; made a record solo catamaran crossing of the China Sea from Hong Kong to Manila; navigated a car in the Paris-Dakar desert off-road race, and organized a short-lived series of catamaran races in the Philippines.

“I got the feeling he didn’t know where to be exactly; this life was difficult for him,” said a friend, French radio journalist Gerard Fusil. “He didn’t have enough money, even though he is from an old and noble family. But he didn’t want to have a job like everyone else.”

Then D’Aboville hit on the idea of a transpacific crossing.

“I think he finally decided that before he got too old he wanted to do something even more incredible than the Atlantic” Fusil said. “He wanted a new start in life.”

Still, the Atlantic barely prepared him for a jaunt of this magnitude. Potential sponsors sensed it. One after another turned him down until Sector, an Italian manufacturer of sport watches, decided that his goal perfectly matched its new marketing slogan: “No Limits.”

They underwrote the project to the tune of $1 million--a risk that seemed foolhardy, according to a marketing executive at the firm who declined to be named. The Pacific is not only twice as wide as the Atlantic, but its currents are harder to catch and the storms far more rude.

And D’Aboville was planning to do it the hard way.

Nine years ago Peter Bird, an Englishman, rowed solo across the South Pacific from San Francisco to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in 292 days. A representative phoned D’Aboville’s team on Wednesday to remind them that Bird is listed in record books as the earliest solo transpacific rower.

But Paolo Martinoni, a D’Aboville partisan, dismissed the call with the wave of a hand:

“Bah, it’s so much easier that way. You have strong trade winds, warm weather and plenty of islands to rest at.”

From the moment he launched, rest and warmth were scarce for D’Aboville, in his losing battle to beat winter storms across the sea.

He had hastily cobbled together solutions to boat-design problems, flown his boat, the Sector, to Japan in May and planned to leave in early June. But unexpected typhoons forced delay, and government oceanographers in Tokyo warned him not to even consider leaving after the end of June because of the increasing storm danger.

But he was in a hurry to leave, according to Gilles Klein, a photographer who helped plan the trip’s logistics.

“Before he left, he had no time even to train. His arms were like mine,” said Klein, 42, pointing to his own reedy biceps. “I call him an athlete of the mind. He said his muscles would get plenty of practice once he got in the water.”

The 26-foot boat D’Aboville finally slipped into the water at Choshi was built from experience as much as from the high-tech material Kevlar. The light but strong Sector has three compartments. In front he stowed his gear. In the middle he rowed, backwards in an open cockpit on a sliding seat. Aft, 12 inches above the water line, he crawled into a watertight cabin to sleep and eat.

A system of hand-pumped water ballasts made the boat self-righting in case it capsized. A “global positioning system” corresponded with satellites to confirm his position. A ham radio kept the mariner in touch with France and the network of Pacific radiomen who included Fred Boehme in Hawaii. A tiny Telex let him dictate his captain’s log. To eat, he had dehydrated food, a gas stove, a stash of PowerBars and a bottle of brandy; for another necessity, he carried 10 rolls of pink toilet paper.

But the key to the operation, D’Aboville said, was an innovative desalination pump activated by the motion of his oars. Without the Rube Goldberg device, which purified up to three liters of water an hour, he could not have attempted the trip. Without it he would have had to carry an impossible 1,300 pounds of water.

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

The start of the journey was the most difficult, because even without a heavy load of fresh water, his rowboat weighed half a ton.

D’Aboville’s plan to keep to a tight schedule on the water: six hours rowing in the morning, a two-hour lunch break and another six hours rowing in the afternoon.

The weather, however, often confounded that strategy. A typhoon nearly blew him back onto the rocky 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.”

His condition deteriorated with the exertion. Chafing rashes and boils appeared on his backside, knees and elbows. An old shoulder injury made him grit his teeth as he pulled the oars. And the heaving seas made him sick.

That made him appreciate all the more the occasional company of dolphins and whales. Yet as days in late August went by, the strength of the vital Kouroshivo current diminished, and a long series of storms tormented his craft.

On Aug. 25, the Sector capsized for the second time. He was tossed around his cabin like a rag in a washing machine as he fought for 85 minutes to right it. The next morning, D’Aboville made a nearly fatal error in judgment, trying to take advantage of the strong winds by rowing as hard as possible.

His boat surfed down the side of a swell and capsized. Because he was rowing at the time, he was thrown into the sea and his safety harness became a trap--tangling in the sliding seat and preventing him from leaving the overturned cockpit. He doubled up to breathe air trapped under the craft, but huge swells pounded into the space, forcing him to hold his breath for a minute at a time. Only after 30 minutes of desperate struggle could he disentangle the safety net and right the boat.

“I thought more than once that I would die,” he said later.

By Sept. 3, he had capsized six more times. “I’m going through hell here,” the rower told his support crew in France when he could finally send a message. “Sector is receiving the most terrible punishment. . . . I just concentrate on staying alive. This ocean is terribly big and more than anything else, empty.”

A couple of days later, D’Aboville celebrated his 46th birthday by breaking open the bottle of brandy. But the weekend of Sept. 14-15 brought another vicious typhoon that tossed the slender Sector end-over-end through 30-foot swells, soaking and damaging its power-generating solar panels and throwing D’Aboville against his cabin walls, breaking a rib.

His diminished ability to use radio batteries hurt worse than his chest. “My favorite pastime on board is radio contact,” he wrote in his log, “because the most difficult thing to cope with is the solitude. The radio is my good-humor pill but it doesn’t last long because of power problems.”

Still, by Oct. 3 he only had another 2,117 miles to go. But it would not get easier. Unfavorable head winds throughout the month made him throw out a large floating anchor repeatedly to avoid being pushed backward. Winter neared, and the cold and damp were constant companions--the “discomfort level reaching 100%,” he would later say.

Another unwelcome partner: Trash. “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 after arriving. “You cannot escape pollution. If I collected it all in a net it would be a mountain.”

On Oct. 29, he crossed the path of a Soviet freighter bound for Vancouver. Its crew took D’Aboville for a madman lost at sea. He had to talk them out of winching him aboard.

The mariner had plenty of time to regret his persuasiveness as he drew closer to America, for after 100 days at sea the hours of daylight fell to 10 and the cold intensified.

He had originally planned to reach America by rowing heroically, poetically under the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco. But he lost his large anchor and, unable to prevent contrary winds and currents from forcing him north, was forced to bear east on the 46th parallel toward Portland.

This horrified his support crew in France, for the only way to land along the northern Oregon coast was to cross the Columbia River bar--a long, sunken spit of sand smashed by Pacific rollers that is recognized by sailors worldwide as the most treacherous river entrance on Earth. Dozens of oceangoing vessels have perished there in the past 100 years. To cross in a rowboat was unthinkable.

“My guess is that as good a seaman as he is, he’s never seen water as turbulent as this,” said veteran charter captain Ron Miller in Ilwaco, Wash., the first harbor D’Aboville could reach. “If he goes end-o in there, there’s not a rescue boat made that could help him.”

At the D’Aboville chateau in Brittany, portraits from the family’s celebrated past stared down at Gerard as he grew up. One direct ancestor commanded the artillery for Gen. Washington at the battle of Yorktown and later escorted the Pope to Napoleon’s coronation. Another is lionized at the Arc de Triomphe in Paris for bravery at the Napoleonic battle of Wagram; the general continued to command forces after having his shoulder blown off, and aides-de-camp could see his lungs pumping through the hole.

“When you know the family history,” said Ara d’Aboville, the oarsman’s sister-in-law, “what Gerard is doing becomes comprehensible. There is no empire any more, so he does this.”

The proud and happy woman didn’t realize that roughly at that moment, 7 p.m. Wednesday, D’Aboville’s situation at sea was perhaps the worst of his trip.

Famed French yachtsman/writer/television personality 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 immense swells when he approached in a chartered 45-foot shrimp boat; inside the rowboat, D’Aboville struggled as he had 37 times before to pump his water ballast to right the boat. He recalled later that 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, plaintively begging to tow him the remaining 20 miles to shore.

“I know what it is to take a risk,” D’Aboville told reporters later, explaining why he ultimately accepted the offer, “but I did not want to risk the lives of Coast Guard men who might come to rescue me. Fellow mariners will understand.”

At dawn, reporters and supporters who intercepted the Sector by fishing boat in gut-wrenchingly turbulent 15-foot seas were moved to tears. While it was anticlimactic to see the tow rope, the five-foot-wide rowboat looked improbably inadequate to suffer the Pacific Ocean. Unless both the fishing boat and the rowboat were at the crest of waves, the Sector was invisible.

“Until now it was just a project,” said the burly president of the Sector watch company, Filippo Giardiello, wiping his eyes. “Now I am so emotional. I cannot understand how such a small boat could make such a long journey.”

As the Sector dragged along toward shore, D’Aboville bent over and cried. A French radio journalist leaned out from a second boat, shoved a mike in the seaman’s face and asked, “When you were in danger did you pray to God?”

Wearing a blue sweater, orange jumper and blue wool hat, the grim-faced mariner stared the man down and answered passionately, “No. My God was Action. Whenever I felt I could not go farther, I just did something.”

And so the long voyage ended: with boatside interviews and the whop-whop of news helicopters circling overhead. As D’Aboville calmly stroked into Ilwaco harbor, the white rowboat gleamed under the high-noon sun and 500 local well-wishers cheered and applauded and waved French flags.

At the dock, D’Aboville’s wife, Cornelia, son Guillaume, 15, and daughter Anne, 10, waited with tears of anguish and delirium. The anguish came from the sight of this man, who looked like an escapee from hell. A huge gash arced from one eyebrow to the other, his skin was sallow and his cheeks hollow under a stubbly beard. Rather than embrace them immediately, he carefully strapped his oars to the Sector, then invited his wife aboard for a fragile first hug.

At a news conference Thursday afternoon--30 pounds lighter than he started, shaven and beaming in the long-wished-for presence of his father and mother, the count and countess, and eight of his nine brothers and sisters--he reported that he got a clean bill of health in a medical examination.

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

Trans-Pacific Journey

French adventurer Gerard d’Aboville ended his 6,300 mile solo-rowing odyssey across the Pacific Ocean by landing in the small fishing village of Ilwaco, Washington.

Departure: Choshi, July 11

Arrival: Ilwaco, November 21