Local Man Sets Sights on the Long Row Ahead

Three years ago, Mick Bird set out to row around the world--alone.

On a dock at Channel Islands Harbor in Oxnard, he kissed his wife, Stacia, and waved a brave goodbye to a few dozen cheering friends.

But the winds and currents were unkind, and the trip lasted all of four days.

On the next try, Bird got it right. He skirted the balky currents by rowing out of Fort Bragg in Northern California. In three legs of his global journey, he has rowed 7,200 miles--1.6 million strokes, he figures--to the coastal Australian city of Cairns.

He has rowed for days in the great, frustrating loop-de-loops of currents and countercurrents. He has rowed through 40-foot waves, across savage reefs, and into close calls with tankers the size of mountains. He has rowed despite aching knees and sore shoulders and a computer breakdown that left him out of touch, out in the blue.

And he just keeps on rowing. Because it’s there. Or because he’s there--and what’s there to do in a rowboat but row?

On Tuesday, Bird was back in Ventura County, trolling for funds and updating supporters on plans for the next--and longest--leg of his trip. In April, he’ll rejoin the boat he left in Cairns last August, head for the rough patch of water between Australia and New Guinea, and cross the Indian Ocean to South Africa. Over six or seven months, he’ll paddle 5,000 miles.

“I’ll be OK if I just keep plugging along,” he said. “If I can just keep it going, just keep heading west . . . “

Bird is one of those people who make you think perhaps your life is a little bland, in much the same way the Pacific is perhaps a little moist.

At 43, he has been a country songwriter, a musician and a champion skydiver. He has run marathons, crisscrossed the United States on a bicycle, and kayaked from Florida to Nova Scotia. And, oh yes, there’s this little outing in the custom-crafted rowboat called Reach.

It’s no ordinary dinghy. Twenty-eight feet long and 6 feet wide, Reach is so unusual that Jack Broome, a local rancher and philanthropist, cut Bird off at a stoplight in Oxnard as he was towing it to Fort Bragg.

“I had to know more about it, and that was the only thing I could do,” said Broome, who invited three dozen friends to a fund-raising lunch for Bird on Tuesday. “We’ve been friends ever since.”

A gregarious man, Bird worked the dining room, shaking hands, telling stories, and generally giving the impression that a never-before solo row around the world is as logical a goal as adding to your IRA.

“I keep trying to tell this to my wife and mother, but they don’t buy it,” he said. “Rowing around the world really isn’t all that dangerous.”

Of course, he acknowledged some minor problems.

Bird’s boat might look imposing as it’s hauled down Pacific Coast Highway, but it has no motor, and just a small emergency sail. In a flat sea, he can row for an hour and go just about a mile and a half. In fierce currents, he can’t even hold his own. He once rowed in expanding circles for 18 grueling hours, only to find that he had lost two miles.

“If you go backward, you just have to keep reminding yourself that you’ll come out of it sometime,” he said. “You just have to have faith.”

Despite the ever-present sharks and the stinging jellyfish, Bird enjoys his daily swim.

“I like to drop a coin and look down to watch it fall, and freak myself out knowing that it’s four miles deep,” he said. “Then I climb back in.”

One balmy afternoon 500 miles from nowhere, Bird went through his daily ritual: Tether himself to the boat and go for a dip. Only after he clambered back in did he discover that in his exuberance he had forgotten to fasten his tether to the boat.

“Suddenly I was hit by a wave of realization about how serious this is,” he said. “If I’m separated from the boat, it’s over. It’s as simple as that.”

That kind of finality might be frightening, but at least it keeps the tedium--stroke after stroke, a million times over--at bay.

Bird said boredom hasn’t struck. There are too many navigation readings to check, too much e-mail to write. Every day, Bird sends a cheery note to his wife, a record company executive, and their 3-year-old twins. He also updates his Web site (https://www.naau.com) and keeps in touch with avid correspondents in classrooms from Peru to Peoria.

And he eats. Pulling the oars 10 hours daily, Bird burns up 9,000 calories worth of pasta, cheese, rice, tuna and other hearty fare. In each leg of his trip, he has lost an average of 40 pounds.

He doesn’t encounter humanity often, but when he does, it’s always an event.

There were the Taiwanese fishermen who gave him watermelon and pineapple, and watched in amusement as he instantly scarfed them down.

There were the loincloth-clad tribal members in the Solomon Islands who threatened him with slingshots and blowguns before helping him haul his boat over a reef.

And there were the sailors on an aircraft carrier looming perilously close, swabbies who could talk to him via radio but barely make out his speck of a vessel.

“I’m in a rowboat out here,” he told the crew.

Silence.

“Say again?”

“A rowboat. Out here.”

In a minute, choppers were swooping low over Bird and his rowboat, their pilots leaning out to assess this bizarre sight.

“Do you need help?” asked the concerned voice on the radio. “Do you need water? Emergency supplies?”

“I’m fine,” Bird replied. “You guys need any chocolate chip cookies? Any Spam? Any tuna?”

It would be two months before he saw human beings again.

Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.