Newlyweds to Test Marriage’s Sea Legs on 1,000-Day Voyage

First he built the boat. Then he wooed the girl.

But before he started courting her, before he even kissed her, he asked if she was strong and healthy. No point falling in love if his beloved couldn’t help sail a 70-foot schooner around the world. Three times.

Health matters out of the way, he asked her to join him in the adventure of a lifetime: 1,000 days at sea, just the two of them, with no visitors, no resupplies, no provisions except those they can carry or catch or grow. In other words, lots of rainwater, dried fish and sprouts.

“We will leave the touch of terra firma longer than any human being,” Reid Stowe says exuberantly, as he readies his boat, moored at Pier 63, for a 200-day trial run.

It could be the longest recorded nonstop voyage in history. The record is held by Australian Jon Sanders, who, from 1986 and 1988, sailed around the world three times in 657 days.

Stowe is more than just your average longhaired, wind-swept adventurer who sails across oceans on a hand-built gaff-rigged schooner, outracing hurricanes, outwitting pirates, surviving whales and storms and dismastings--and winning the heart of a beautiful woman along the way.

At age 19, he built a 27-foot plywood catamaran and sailed it across the Atlantic from North Carolina to Portugal. In his little schooner Anne, he has journeyed up the Amazon, around Cape Horn, through the icebergs of the Antarctic.

Three years ago he stopped to repair his boat in La Rochelle, France, and fell in love with a boat-builder’s daughter. He was 44, twice-married with an 18-year-old daughter, no money, and salt water in his soul. She was 23, fresh out of art school. She disliked sailors: too rough and uncouth. And she had never been to sea.

But when Stowe ushered her onto Anne’s pistachio-green deck and into the heart of his magical kingdom, Laurence Guillem was smitten. “There was so much art,” she says. “It was so beautiful. I thought, this wasn’t like any boat, or any man, I’d ever seen.”

The ship is as exotic as its owner: the interior, floor to ceiling, hand-carved from rare tropical hardwoods gathered after Caribbean hurricanes. Each carving tells a tale: bearded philosophers that remind Stowe of his grandfather, Buddhas that reflect the influence of his hero, Frenchman Bernard Moitessier, a long-distance sailor whom he met in Tahiti at the age of 21. Mermaids and dragons and African queens.

In the main cabin are two magnificent beams of golden wood shaped into long, curved genies, with gilded swirls of smoke and heads that resemble Maori war masks. Stowe was in New Zealand when he carved them.

“I got what I wanted,” Stowe says, stroking the wood. “I rubbed the pot and the genie came out, and I can’t put it back. Now we just have to see what I do with it.”

Stowe talks in dreamy terms, and a soothing North Carolina lilt, about his life’s quest: to test the limits of his vessel and himself, and to learn more about both in the process.

He has no time for competition. In his mind, racers barely see the ocean, let alone feel its beauty as they tear from shore to shore. Stowe likens himself to the tortoise in Aesop’s fable. While everyone else is hurtling through life, he is rolling with the rhythm of the waves, slowly but surely getting where he wants.

Inspired by his mythological muse, the course for his 200-day voyage will trace the pattern of a giant sea turtle in the South Atlantic. “The ultimate work of maritime art,” Stowe says.

It’s as good a place as any to contemplate such things, sitting on Anne’s deck, the hum of Manhattan all around. The Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building and the World Trade Center are visible in the distance. On-line skaters zigzag to the thump of rock ‘n’ roll on a neighboring pier.

Yet Anne, like her owner, is blissfully serene, bobbing in her berth beside a rusting fireboat.

Stowe built his steel and fiberglass vessel 21 years ago, with help from his parents and siblings at the family beach home in North Carolina. She is named for his mother. The masts were hewn from pine trees that Stowe chopped himself.

“I crawl all over her and touch her everywhere, every part,” he says, “and she talks to me and tells me what she needs.”

Right now she needs some sails patched and her hold cleaned to make room for provisions for the voyage. Supplies include 200 pounds of sprout seeds, 200 pounds of oats and dozens of cases of cat food and litter for the couple’s two cats, one French, one American.

Stowe and Guillem have a few needs of their own, the most pressing being more sponsors for their voyage. Stowe says they have raised $200,000 of the $500,000 required.

Most of the donations are products: olive oil and Parmesan cheese from Italy, chocolate and biscuits from France, organic raisins, tea, herbal medicines. They’ll grow sprouts in a little indoor greenhouse and catch fish in nets slung from the deck. They gave up on the idea of a garden above deck when their home-grown spinach and lettuce blew overboard during a storm.

But there are many things they don’t have: a life raft, a satellite phone, any link to shore other than e-mail and a ham radio.

And they are still trying to interest NASA, noting that space can learn a lot from people who spend 1,000 days away from land. Stowe has dubbed the voyage “Mars Ocean Odyssey,” partly because a trip to Mars is expected to last 1,000 days.

Guillem tries not to worry about getting sick on the voyage, or about falling overboard as she nearly did in a storm. She tries not to think of how she will miss her friends.

“If you start to worry,” she says, “you don’t live your life.”

Stowe doesn’t worry at all. He is looking forward to the freedom and the solitude and the romance: watching dolphins by sunset, admiring striped pilot fish shimmering through the window on the floor of their cabin, painting each other every color of the rainbow as they dance on deck.

“An extreme mythical honeymoon,” he says.