Polson man recounts sailing voyage
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Although he’s become more accustomed to sunshine and the Pacific Ocean than snowy days and Flathead Lake, Kevin O’Brien came home for the holidays and took the opportunity while he was here to share with locals some of his sailing adventures.
A 2001 Polson High School alumnus, O’Brien was guest lecturer at the Audubon Society on Dec. 21 and recounted his recent seven-month sailing trip from Hawaii to New Zealand.
O’Brien and friends Ken Bwy and Britton Warfield journeyed from Kailua, Hawaii to Whangerei, New Zealand, more than 4,000 miles across the open ocean, aboard the Shannon. The Shannon is a 36-foot cutter, built in 1976, with two headsails and a mainsail. After four years of refurbishing and adding improvements such as a wind generator to run the engine, computers and lights, the boat and the friends were finally ready to set sail in April of 2010. They did not get underway until May of 2010.
The Shannon was loaded with $1,500 worth of food, 120 gallons of water, 50 gallons of fuel, six pounds of peat moss for a composting head and about 8,000 lbs of books and other items O’Brien explained during the lecture.
The first leg of the trip was from Kailua to the Marquesas, 2,400 miles “beating into the wind,” O’Brien said. The men ran out of fresh veggies and had to substitute “nasty powdered green stuff.” Fresh fish was always available for everyone except O’Brien, who is allergic to fish.
Alina Madadi Bwy and Christina Hoe, another PHS graduate, flew into the Marquesas to meet the guys and continued the trip through the Tuamotus, Palmerston, Poor Knights, Rarotonga, the Cook Island and Tonga before ending up in New Zealand.
O’Brien said the islanders in the Marquesas were friendly and “lived an incredible leisure-filled lifestyle.” They also loaded the sailors down with fruit, like mangos and pamplemoose, an extra large grapefruit. There was a cell phone tower on each island in the Marquesas so cell service was available.
Every island has electricity part of the day, according to O’Brien, and boomboxes are a big deal. He noted that on almost every island people were practicing for dance contests.
While the group didn’t get in on the dancing, they did explore underwater caves on Niue, swimming from cave to cave.
Alina, Hoe and O’Brien also documented the trip for Reach the World, an organization which pairs adventurers with inner city classrooms. Short videos the trio sent to their classes included one of lots of banded sea kraits swimming towards the group. Sea kraits are extremely poisonous, 10 times more than a king cobra, and also curious. The snakes were interested in people, O’Brien explained, getting up in faces and around arms and legs. To quiet his alarm, O’Brien reminded himself that the snakes’ fangs were located near the back of their small mouths, making it harder to bite.
Other videos were shot at the bottom of a volcano on Tonga and in the ocean where a humpback whale male, about 50 tons, was teaching his calf to sing.
The group reached Opua, New Zealand, on Nov. 9 and stored the Shannon in the Norsand Boatyard at Whangerei, New Zealand, on Nov. 29. O’Brien estimates it might be 2012 before the group breaks the boat out of storage for another voyage.
(More information about the trip can be found on O’Brien’s blog www.sailblogs.com/member/voyageoftheShannon)
