Author: timzimmermann

TJV Update–It’s Over and It Was Kind of Boring Since Sunday, the multihulls and monohulls have been streaming across the finish line in San Salvador Brazil. It was a tight tactical race in the early going, but turned into a thrill-less parade once the boats had crossed the Doldrums and the Equator. Check here for all the news and results. TWC apologizes for any damage caused to your face or keyboard due to narcoleptic seizures……



Alain Gautier Parties With Co-Skipper Ellen MacArthur and a Local: “Alors. We finished 9th so all that kept me going for the last 2000 miles was the thought of a threesome….”

(Photo: Transat Jacques Vabre)

Southern Ocean Row Update–Shekhdar Slammed!: Well, it’s over not long after it started. Yesterday, our favorite Wetass’s attempt to row from New Zealand to Cape Town, via Cape Horn, came to a violent end. A nasty storm–with high winds and vicious seas–crossed paths with Jim Shekhdar and somersaulted his custom boat end for end. Here’s Jim’s description:

“…at about 0800 this morning (1900Z), from absolutely nowhere I was pitchpoled with horrendous force, my head tried to get out of the closed hatch, breaking off one of the two catches and I bounced back into the cabin surrounded by everything from both cabins. After stopping the blood from the head wound, several hours in the washing machine now in my 4 point harness with helmet, it was quite surreal watching the ocean go upside down outside my door! By 2350 I had taken the decision to try to get out…”

The storm was nothing unusual for the Southern Ocean, which is why Shekhdar’s voyage was such a monumental odyssey, and you have to wonder why he wasn’t wearing his helmet to start with (as well as whether he made any other preparations for the storm–which he had been warned about–such as deploying his sea anchor). But mostly it’s a shame that such a bold, interesting, gamble is over. Shekhdar is due to be picked up by a New Zealand research vessel, and is hoping they will crane his boat aboard too. When he gets back to land, things will only get worse. “I had a lot of plans for after I made it but none for when I didn’t,” he laments. “I may even have to get a ‘proper’ job!!”. Ouch. Say it ain’t so, Jim…



Rock and Roll: “Damn, just as I was about to eat breakfast….”

Annals of Hype–Bethany, Baby!: First, Jessica Lynch. Now Bethany Hamilton. America’s celebrity hype machine loves blondes. According to the NY Daily News, TV producers and agents are all over the surfing 13-year old shark attack victim, dangling all sorts of deals in the race to get the first interview. Book deal? Cool. Wanna go on MTV? Cowabunga. Oprah calling? Please hold. Matt Lauer? Isn’t he the Dude with the gnarly hair implants? Larry King? Who? It goes on and on. “Inside Edition” is even rumored to have offered to pay for a state-of-the-art prosthetic arm. I can just picture the scene. Arm snaps into place. Swell violins. Bethany steps on a surf board. Close-up of Mom crying. The kid just wants to surf and she needs the money, so you can’t fault her for taking advantage. And I hope her agent screws the media hyena out of every cent possible. But feel free to be utterly sickened by modern American culture……



The Un-Garbo: “So, like, will I be able to keep the Hummer?”

(Photo: bethanyhamilton.com)

Annals of Over–Kirk Jones, Circus Freak: Meanwhile, emerging from the back end of the celebrity sausage machine is Niagara jumper Kirk Jones, who might start wishing he never survived the Falls. He won’t be going on 20/20, starring in his own reality show, or chatting with Larry King (wait, maybe he did…). What will he be doing? Jones–and I swear I am not making this up–will be trolling for dollars as a circus act . Billed as “The World’s Greatest Stuntman” in the Toby Tyler Circus–currently knocking them dead in a motley assortment of Mexican border towns–Jones will….well, it’s not exactly clear what he will be doing, but the circus promises it will be “spectacular” (I assume this does not refer to the fact that Jones will be helping clean up after the elephants, which is also part of his contract). Just in case the circus doesn’t launch him to stardom, Jones is pitching a book called “You’re Kidding Me: A Knucklehead’s Guide to Surviving Niagara Falls.” Hey, wasn’t TWC the first to call Jones a Knucklehead? We’ll sue…he’s broke, but so are we.



Would You Pay Money To See This Guy?: Now, if they shot him from a cannon ACROSS Niagara Falls…that would be big

Annals of Aviation–Fossett Flies Far, Really Far: Thank God, we’re back to some real news. Steve Fossett, uber-adventurer and Wetass extraordinaire, just added to his hefty world record collection by nailing the glider distance record. Flying with co-pilot Terry Delore, Fossett set out from Esquel, Argentina over the weekend and flew out and back over a distance of 2002.44 kilometers. That broke the existing Out and Back record by almost 300 kilometers, and Fossett and Delore did it going head to head against the existing record holder, German pilot Klaus Ohlmann, who set out from Esquel the same day. The reason Fossett and Ohlmann were bumping wings in Esquel is that the Andes mountain range can create perfect gliding conditions–known as a “mountain wave”–as winds accelerate over the top of the peaks. Ohlmann flew south, and Fossett and Delore flew north. North paid, and Ohlmann was back first–in time to congratulate Fossett after he landed. Fossett also is targeting the glider height and speed records. And just to keep busy, he has yet another world record project cooking, for 2004. He wants to become the first solo pilot to fly around the globe non-stop (with no refueling), a project which is being backed by Virgin Atlantic and his buddy, adventurer-in-arms, Richard Branson. Fossett is hoping to get around in about 80 hours, and if he does he will have been the first to solo the globe non-stop in both a balloon and a plane. I told you he was a Wetass….



Fossett’s Global Flying Machine: But would it be powerful enough to get Kirk Jones across Niagara?

(Image: http://www.virginatlanticglobalflyer.com)

Adventure Mag Scan…Best of Outside: Every month (okay, whenever I feel like it) The Wetass Chronicles will take a look at the online offerings of the adventure mags. Usually, issues are put online about a month after publication (when the newest issue hits the newsstand), and I’ll focus on the stuff that arrives online…so I can provide links (and you can read it for free). The November 2003 issue of Outside is now available online, and its got some great stuff for climbing and adventure addicts.



The cover story about K2 elaborates on a theme that TWC and the ExplorersWeb have already written about: namely that K2 is a bitch–much deadlier and harder to climb than Everest. But author Kevin Fedarko–who’s a vivid and nimble writer–digs into the history and quirks of K2 in detail that is both gruesome and enthralling. Here he is on one of K2s grizzlier oddities:

We started up the Godwin-Austen Glacier, which cuts along the foundation of the mountain’s immense southern face. As we walked, Jordan told me about the postmortem K2 performs on the climbers who perish here. The ridges and escarpments of this peak are so sheer that the dead are rarely entombed on the mountain itself; most are scoured off by avalanches and rockfalls, and when their bodies hit bottom they become encased in the glacial field, where they are slowly torn to pieces.

“It’s kind of like a bread mixer,” Jordan observed as we picked our way around thin crevasses and frigid pools of Windex-blue meltwater. “The worst of the violence is the avalanches, but there are also the years of tearing and crushing in the glaciers. The movement churns them up in summer, back down in winter. Appendages get torn off in the disgorging process. When they surface, they’re almost all headless, because that’s the weakest link in the body. Mostly you find legs–very few arms.”

Fedarko also writes in detail about the famous 1953 American attempt to climb K2 (it failed, but in spectacularly dramatic fashion). Check it out.



An American Team Didn’t Get To the Top Until 1978: “I can believe it took so long to clim this fu*$ing mountain….”

(Photo: Jim Wickwire via Outside)

Also: Greg Child, an excellent climber/writer, has a short piece on a heated controversy over uber-climber Reinhold Messner’s forthcoming book account of how he lost his brother Gunther, after summitting Nanga Parbat in 1970:

“The epic that ensued–Gunther and Reinhold’s two-day descent down uncharted territory, Gunther’s June 29 disappearance in a reported avalanche, and Reinhold’s frantic search of the debris field and grief-stricken escape through the Diamir Valley, is the defining experience of Reinhold Messner’s life, and it’s described in his 40th book, The Naked Mountain, to be published for the first time in English in November by The Mountaineers Books. What U.S. readers may not hear about is the firestorm that the German edition sparked in Europe. In books written as direct rebuttals to The Naked Mountain, two members of the expedition claim that Messner’s story is a whitewash of the truth–that he abandoned his brother on the peak.”

It’s an incredible accusation, if true. Cain and Abel at 8,000 meters……



Young Messner (center) on Parbat: “Hmmmm, what’s it going to take for me to get famous on this peak…..”

(Photo: Reinhold Messner via Outside)

Pre-Weekend Sailing Update–VDH, TJV…LBJ, JFK (oops, got carried away): “Wrong Way” Jean Luc Van Den Heede (phew, I’ll stick with VDH) is cruising south in the trades, which are a bit weak and a bit slow. He’s in fine form, though, and still about 126 miles ahead of current record holder Philippe Monnet’s comparative track.



Sacre Bleu, Eeet Eeez A Long Way to Go: Monnet is in blue, VDH is in red……

And in the Transat Jacques Vabre the leading trimaran is already through the Doldrums and into the southeast trades, blasting toward Brazil. The Doldrums are a tortuous zone that straddles the Equator, full of either windless holes or knockdown squalls. For shorthanded sailors it is a nightmare because they have to get full sail up when the wind dies, but be ready at a moment’s notice to take it all down if a squall approaches. If the monohullers are slow, they can get a good dunking as the boat is blown flat to the water. If multihullers are slow, they can get a permanent dunking because they’ll be upside down and out of the race. Here’s how Open 60 monohull ECOVER’s Brian Thompson describes the night:

“Last night [co-skipper] Mike [Golding] and I took turns to drive whilst the other one slept and if we saw a cloud approaching we’d wake the other one up to come up on deck. The clouds have killed the wind a bit really, we’ve had a few sprinkles of rain, nothing dramatic though. That’s good for us as we don’t have such a big sail wardrobe anymore. We need to keep a real eye out, though, until daylight, as we have no radar working and the worst time is the first half of the night up to midnight when there is no moon and you can’t spot the squalls. The second half, the moon is up, which means you can see the cloud line better. We did see Biscuits La Trinitaine [an Open 60 trimaran] sail past us, which was surreal!”

Once all the boats are through the Doldrums and into the Southern Hemisphere, they’ll catch a fast ride all the way to Brazil, on strong trade winds south of the Equator. That part of the race often turns into a parade with few passing opportunities. So the Doldrums is the last chance to really shake up fleet positions……



Fast Cruising: What the Trimarans Would like to Be Doing…..

(Photo: Transat Jacques Vabre)

Annals of Inanity–Kill a Shark, Any Shark: Strange footnote to the Bethany Hamilton shark attack story. The LA Times reports that Hamilton is recovering well from losing an arm to a tiger shark off Kauai, which is good to hear. The attack predictably led to a public outcry in favor of slaughtering any sharks that could be found in the area. That didn’t happen, which is also good to hear, because the National Marine Fisheries Service has adopted a shrewd preemptive strategy to placate all the idiots:

“In the past, after a serious incident, we have selectively removed an animal or two mostly to reassure the public, but also to keep fishermen from going out and killing a lot more,” said John Naughton, a biologist for the National Marine Fisheries Service. “But we have known all along that this is not the way to go. It’s an archaic way of managing fishery resources.”

I guess you could say it’s a good deal: kill a few to save a lot. But you could also say that public emotion is an ugly, unreasoning beast. Hawaii averages only about 4 shark attacks a year. More people probably die falling off bar stools, and shark populations are still trying to recover from the sharkocide sparked by “Jaws”…..



Tiger Shark: “It wasn’t me, I swear…. And if it was I thought I was eating a seal……”

TWC Photo Archives: LA just got whacked by a storm cell that dumped 5 inches of rain and lit up the sky. It was quite a show….



God is in the Gigavolts….

(Photo: Mel Melcon / LAT)

Annals of Extremism–Cliff Jumping The ski season is approaching. Are you bored with gliding down groomed cruiser runs? Want to try something a little different this year? Something that will get the blood racing, the wind roaring, the intestines knotting…and the bones breaking? How about skiing off a cliff….a big cliff….a really, really big cliff. Skiing magazine is not so sure the rush for big air is good for the sport, but that doesn’t make its take on cliff jumping or its whacked-out addicts any less interesting. We get to meet a surly, 30-year old, egomaniac named Jamie Pierre, who launches off a 160-foot cliff near Brighton in Utah, and pulls off a cartwheel on the way down. Pierre sticks the landing but suffers a concussion-induced seizure 15 minutes later. “I’ve averaged at least one concussion per year since the early ’90s,” Pierre tells [Skiing’s reporter]. He seldom wears a helmet: “If it’s a matter of my body going instantly from terminal velocity to zero, a helmet isn’t gonna help much.” Uhhh, okay, Jamie. At least Pierre has managed to avoid the fate of a Tahoe bartender named Paul Ruff…so far. Ruff famously splattered himself in 1993 attempting a world record, also with a 160-footer. As he skied toward the edge his subconscious started screaming, not unreasonably: “My God, man, are you stark, raving insane??!!” The result was a little hesitation turn that slowed Ruff down just before he went airborne, and that in turn was just enough to keep him from clearing a pile of volcanic rock close to the base of the cliff. Oops. Pierre plans to try for a world record, too. Unfortunately, the world record has been upped a little since Ruff’s tragic last leap–by a New Zealander named Paul Ahern, who in 1995 managed to survive an unbelievable…225 foot jump (he landed on wind-packed snow with a backpack full of styrofoam to cushion the blow). Pierre has got his eye on a 235-foot spot on the backside of Grand Targhee. Skiing asks him how he survives each ever-increasing jump. “I stomp my skis into the snow, double click my poles together, and say a Hail Mary,” he says. Oh, now I see. Umm, good luck with that, then.



“Our Father, who art in heaven…..”

(Photo: Skiing magazine)