A New Voyage For An Old Salt

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied.
—JOHN MASEFIELD
Sea-Fever

For all their fiercely independent ways, the intrepid mariners who ply vast oceans alone in small sailing vessels have two traits in common: an advanced case of sea fever and an overdeveloped sixth sense. So says Tristan Jones, the Welsh explorer, adventurer and author who has logged more miles in small sailboats—350,000 at last count, 200,000 of those by himself—than anyone else on the planet. Jones's record mileage, in fact, exceeds the distance to the moon, which may account for his claim that singlehanders, their senses whetted by the primal forces of the sea, develop a certain otherworldly gift for "perceiving the future."

Last summer, for example, while holed up in Key West finishing the latest of his richly evocative books about his adventures at sea, Jones didn't really feel like flying to San Diego to give one of his patented lectures on the joys of long-distance cruising. But he accepted the offer anyway, he says, because of "an incessant, nagging feeling that somehow destiny was pushing me." Indeed, barely had he touched down in San Diego than the premonitions were hard upon him. "This is where I'm meant to be," he said solemnly. "This is where my next voyage will begin."

No matter that Jones had just turned 59, or that he had been shorebound since March 1982, when, because of complications from a World War II shrapnel wound, his left leg was amputated above the knee. If the medical expenses had so drained his modest resources that he had neither a boat nor the means to float a loan, much less an ocean voyage, so what? Destiny had spoken.

So had Jones, avowing, "Nothing can keep me from the wide waters of the world!" Remarkably, nothing has for long in 45 hard and often harrowing years a-sea—not the hit-and-run whale that shipwrecked him in mid-Atlantic; not the typhoons and torpedoes that sank five other boats under him; not the clashes with pirates in Indonesia, assassins in Zanzibar and drug-runners in Cartagena; not even the shelling by Arab guerrillas that blew him out of the Royal Navy with a spinal injury. Though partly paralyzed, Jones refused to believe the doctors, who said he would never walk properly, much less sail a boat again. Instead, by dint of willpower, he not only got his sea legs back, but he also shoved off in a converted lifeboat with a one-eyed, three-legged, beer-drinking Labrador named Nelson and, while seeking to sail farther north than any man—or dog—had ever dared, was trapped in an Arctic ice pack northeast of Greenland, subsisting on little more than raw seal blubber for 366 days. He killed the seals with a harpoon.

Clearly, it would take more than an amputation and destitution to beach Jones, a gritty campaigner who has sailed, portaged and, when necessary, dragged his oceangoing vessels through forbidden waters patrolled by Soviet gunboats, across the steaming Sinai desert, up the snow-capped Andes, down uncharted jungle rivers and in and out of Times Square traffic. And through it all, through the seaquakes, hurricanes and avalanches, through the strafings, bombings, arrests and imprisonments, through the near-fatal bouts with malnutrition, malaria, dehydration and dysentery, and through the attacks of piranhas, vampire bats, poisonous spiders, a 15-foot boa constrictor, a ravenous polar bear and what he considers the most predatory and dangerous of all man's natural enemies—customs officials—Jones never failed to rail against every injustice he encountered, from the suppression of freedom in Argentina to exorbitant berthing fees in Tahiti. All the while, Jones was establishing nine world records for sailing craft under 40 feet, including most transatlantic crossings (18) and most circumnavigations (three), without being able to swim.

For Jones had a clear call: He must, he damn well would, go down to the seas again. Right there in San Diego. He was certain of it, he says, because of a compelling sense that he was being led by "synchronistic fate," occurrences that others call coincidence but which Jones sees as "fateful meetings that at first do not seem to signify anything but in which, in retrospect, the presence of some guiding hand, call it God or what you will, is startlingly clear. There have been so many instances of synchronism in my life that the navigator in me will not allow me 10 believe they were mere accidents. "

Don't scoff Just know that within a few hours of his arrival in San Diego, Jones experienced a fateful encounter with a group of strangers, the upshot of which was that, just as he had foreseen, against all odds and in defiance of every obstacle, he set sail from San Diego on Oct. 17 on his fourth voyage around the world And not just in any old tub, but in a sleek new $180,000, 36-foot trimaran of such advanced design, including yet another "secret Australian keel," that, Jones says, "She is nothing less than the first of the great cruising vessels of the next century."

The trimaran is also the prototype for what Jones envisions as a great fleet of multihull sailboats built specifically for the handicapped. "That's the whole point," the noted singlehander said shortly before his first voyage single-legged. "I'm not doing this for thrills. I'm doing it to give some hope and inspiration to people who've been disabled like me, especially the young people. I want them to say, 'Look, if that old bugger can do it at 60, maybe I can do it at 18.' "

Jones's yarns and his accomplishments make him seem almost a fictional character—and he looks it. From his rumpled skipper's cap, scrubby gray beard and tiny blue star tattooed on his left earlobe right down to his growing assortment of peg legs, one of which is a magnificent specimen hand-carved from a yardarm of Burma teak, he appears to be the very personification of the crusty old sea dog. Jones rankles at the notion, yet the gruff manner and salty language he uses to reject the "romantic claptrap," rendered in accents as rich and resonant as the green valleys of his boyhood in Wales, only sharpen the image.