IT’S NOT A SMALL WORLD

At 30, Brad Van Liew was as fresh as a sunrise at sea when the Around Alone sailing race started last September, and it was reasonable to wonder if he would see 31.

In these single-handed sailing exercises in insanity, the worst thing that can happen isn’t only your mast falling down, which his eventually did. This is racing your little sailboat around the world, meeting nature on her terms. The only place to hide is at the bottom of the sea.

This time the youngest competitor among 16 starters was from Los Angeles, a rare American--ultimately, the only one--in a game dominated by Europeans.

So it seemed only a matter of time before search-and-rescue teams would be looking for Van Liew and his 50-foot purple boat, Balance Bar. But something interesting was happening in the Southern Ocean, even before the fleet reached Cape Horn.

Van Liew celebrated his 31st birthday, and he didn’t need rescuing. In fact, he was trying to rescue others.

First, there was the spectator plane that crashed near his boat after the start of Leg 3 from Auckland, New Zealand, to Punta del Este, Uruguay, killing its two occupants.

Then, three days later:

“Gartmore Investment lost its mast and rigging and I was diverted to intercept [Britain’s] Josh [Hall] until this morning, when he was certain he was out of any danger. . . . The seas have been big and ugly and the boat was pounding badly. I feel sad for Josh.”

Van Liew might have saved his sympathy for himself. At least Hall, towed to safety at a remote island, was out of the race. The remaining 10 sailors faced an ominous forecast: “A storm advancing that will blast the racers with winds in the 40-60-knot range, and 25-30-foot seas. Everyone is going to get hit with this one.”

And then there were nine.

Isabelle Autissier’s boat capsized, prompting a rescue by a Class I rival, Giovanni Soldini of Italy.

Van Liew, 800 miles behind in Class II for smaller boats, wasn’t close enough to help but broadcast an emotional message:

“The display of seamanship, compassion and courage by Giovanni toward the rescue of his rival is a prime example of the fiber that makes up Around Alone. I am proud to be a part of it.”

But he could have done without his own disaster. That occurred April 11 on the fourth and last leg, which he will complete this month at Charleston, S.C. (Giovanni Soldini finished early Saturday morning).

It seems to happen a lot in this race--shipwrecks, masts falling down, sailors lost at sea. Four years earlier, Autissier lost her mast, rigged another at a nearby island, only to have a rogue wave roll her boat 360 degrees into wreckage. She was rescued by an Australian destroyer.

In that same race, Harry Mitchell, a 70-year-old Englishman, simply disappeared.

Two years ago, in the similarly conceived Vendee Globe race, in the same waters, Gerry Roufs vanished after describing waves “as big as the Alps.”

In this race, another American, George Stricker of Kentucky, dropped out after insurmountable breakdowns, and Robin Davie, a Brit living in Charleston, where the race began last fall, endured incredible grief before his battered boat limped into Auckland two days after everybody else had left.

Another veteran, Mike Golding of Britain, wrecked his boat when he ran aground at New Zealand.

Autissier, Golding, Davie, Hall--all veterans. All out. Van Liew no longer seemed such a longshot.

When the final leg started, he was third in Class II, only 9 1/2 hours behind Britain’s second-place Mike Garside. Then, only a day out of Punta del Este, in big waves and big winds . . .

“I was down below and all of a sudden I could feel us falling into this big pothole,” Van Liew said. “The boat landed on its side. There was a big crack.”

A rod-end in the rigging that supports the mast gave way and the mast, which had survived the worst of the Southern Ocean, snapped six feet above the deck. Glumly, Van Liew hacked away the debris, set a makeshift rig and headed back to Uruguay.

He called his wife Meaghan, who was joining him at every stop and still was in Punta del Este.

“Total devastation” was how she described his mood.

But as he limped back, his resurrection was underway. Other teams offered spare sails. Balance Bar’s shore boss, Alan Nebauer, was working on getting another mast. It would cost $40,000, but the sponsor, Balance Bar, offered to match whatever Van Liew could raise elsewhere.

A few days later, a new mast was delivered and Van Liew was on his way again, nine days late. Recent progress indicates he may even pass two or three boats, finish fourth on the leg and finish third overall.

“It feels like the world has picked me up by the scruff of my neck and said, ‘You will not stop here,’ ” he said.

Van Liew’s team is, basically, Nebauer, his Australian project manager who sailed the boat to fourth place in the previous race; Meaghan, who juggles the finances; and Tracy Hughes, a high school friend who helps Meaghan with public relations and marketing.

When Van Liew realized in Auckland that his main sail was disintegrating, Meaghan began a successful $100,000 campaign at their hometown California Yacht Club in Marina del Rey so he could buy a new one.

Van Liew graduated from USC, where he prepared for sailing around the world by majoring in, uh, urban development.

Of more value was his youth. He sailed with his uncle, delivering boats to the East Coast and the Caribbean, and racing around buoys at San Diego and Marina del Rey.

Van Liew caught the solo sailing bug when he helped another American, Mike Plante, prepare for the 1988 race, when it was called the BOC Challenge. A few years later, Plante was lost in the Atlantic.

When this race started, Van Liew--and Meaghan--knew exactly what they were getting into.

“When I met Brad,” Meaghan said, “I knew he was going to end up doing this at some time in his life. We had some pretty intense discussions about when the best time was, and decided [that was] when he was still young enough to be competitive and we didn’t have children.

“You put yourself in a very precarious financial position, so we decided when we were 28 and 30, if we got in trouble we could recover.”

Their budget is about $1 million. Balance Bar, the energy-bar company, doesn’t cover all of it, but sometimes dreams are expensive.

“This has been a dream of Brad’s for 12 years,” Meaghan said. “He actually wanted to do the 1990 race but fell short financially. Brad promised me that he was not going to do it if there was any question of sacrificing safety for lack of preparation or money.”

All they have sacrificed so far is their careers, at least temporarily. Van Liew, a commercial pilot, taught flying and ran an executive air-charter company in Santa Monica. Meaghan was business manager for a public relations firm in Century City.

She said, “I am just as positive that this was the right decision for me, as far as leaving my job to work on the campaign. It’s such a different lifestyle . . . changing from a predictable, stable, planned career to something that is not only entrepreneurial but definitely unpredictable.”

There were risks beyond the sea.

“A lot of people are not able to keep their relationships intact,” Brad said.

And although Meaghan has met Brad at all three stops--they went on safari at Cape Town--the monthlong separations filled with anxiety are difficult, despite the availability of satellite communication.

One e-mail from Van Liew: “My Valentine’s Day brings me 40 knots of arctic southerly winds and 20-foot seas. This is not exactly cuddling up with my wife!”

Said Meaghan: “I’ve struggled with it a little bit, but I do enjoy it, and the people I’ve met and the places I’ve been make it incredibly worthwhile.”

And she knows that Van Liew is meticulous in his preparations. Whereas some of his rivals seem to be comfortable wearing a cavalier’s cloak of uncertain destiny, Van Liew leaves nothing to chance.

“I’ve got rules that I won’t break,” he said. “And my rules are very seriously embraced by the guy who runs the boat, Alan Nebauer. The two of us offer a good system of checks and balances to make sure that everything is really ready to go.”

The flawed rod-end, he said, was undetectable until it failed.

Van Liew’s boat isn’t a new boat, but it’s a good one. In fact, it’s better upwind and in light wind than those of the Class II leaders, which Van Liew considered as he recrossed the equator last week.

Speaking from his boat, with water sloshing in the background, he said, “The weather they’ve had on this leg has been the weather I was hoping for to lock up second place overall and try to get a leg victory.”

Until the mast fell, Van Liew had found few unpleasant surprises. Although he acknowledged having “knots in my stomach” as he sailed into the notorious Southern Ocean for the first time on Leg 2, he later said it was predictable and reliable--”reliably bad.”

There were worse days as he neared Cape Horn, a graveyard of seafarers for centuries.

“I had to take the teeth of the storm,” he reported one day. “We sustained 50 knots [of wind] for 48 hours [and] 70 knots for 24 hours. The waves were huge--far higher than the mast. We got knocked down [on one side] at least a dozen times. Once I thought we were doing a 360. I’m amazed the boat’s still in one piece.”

And, yes, he felt a little sorry for himself:

“The weather didn’t give me a break. It got frustrating and exhausting. Why me? Why me?”

And there was this chilling realization:

“This isn’t a Sydney-Hobart [race] where you can call in a helicopter and somebody’s gonna come and get you. I had my radar on for two days and didn’t see any sign of a ship. The only option is to continue. There is no way to give up.”

Van Liew was asked whether the experience has encouraged or discouraged him from doing another Around Alone, considering that he has survived nature’s throwing its worst at him.

“That’s a good question,” he said. “I’ve seen the big mama and got a get-out-of-jail-free card. I’ve paid my dues. I enjoy 98% of it, but it’s like aviation. When the 2% gets ugly, it’s sheer terror.”

Cape Horn, he said, was “absolutely beautiful--the best day of the leg.”

And a few days after he restarted the last leg he related this encounter:

“The pod consisted of six to eight huge whales that were [getting] closer and closer. [Suddenly] they were flirting with Balance Bar, blowing just aft of the old girl, diving beneath her and rolling their big white tummies up as they twisted just under the boat to come up just in front of the bow. It was beautiful--and very intimidating.

“I was getting more and more nervous. I know they were 50 feet in length each because they easily measured up to the not-so-mighty Balance Bar. Finally, my friends lost interest.”

Despite his struggles, Van Liew has found no malevolence in his element, as in a “cruel” sea or a “treacherous” sea.

“I never created a relationship with the sea,” he said. “I created a relationship with my boats and the sea life, and I do talk to myself here and there.

“I enjoy it a great deal. I don’t know that it’s ultimately romantic. You have to respect it. There’s a lot of wonderful life in the sea . . . birds, sea life and sunsets people never see unless they get offshore. So it’s a beautiful place. It can also be a very ugly place. It’s done a lot in the past to lift my spirits and a lot to degrade who I was and destroy my spirit.

“It’s an ocean. It’s what it is. You can never conquer it. You can’t beat it down. You can’t control it. You need to just work with it. It doesn’t have a personality. It is what it is.”

What it is, is bigger than life, a fact Meaghan Van Liew has come to recognize as she considers returning to a workaday world.

“I’m kind of concerned,” she said, “about going back to real life.”