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Glenn Wakefield was sleeping when the first big wave hit.
He'd gone to bed in a squall. Winds topped 90 kilometres an hour. Waves towered 10 metres high. Six hundred kilometres north of the Falkland Islands, the storm lashing at the 57-year-old carpenter and his 40-year-old sailboat was so loud that he couldn't sleep without industrial-strength earplugs.
He didn't worry. The boat, Kim Chow, had weathered storms like this before as Mr. Wakefield piloted her from Victoria.
Yesterday, safe at home, he recounted the harrowing events that cut short his journey around the world. He was trying to become the first person to complete a solo circumnavigation of the globe against prevailing winds and currents. But when that first wave jostled him from bed at 4:30 in the morning on April 24, 215 days into his journey, that goal must have seemed a fleeting dream. He thought Kim Chow must have rolled over, but couldn't tell for sure. The cabin was a mess. Blood flowed from a gash on his head. He remembers everything being black. Then he passed out.
'It was heartbreaking,' Glenn Wakefield says of leaving the Kim Chow adrift. 'I'd brought that boat from complete disrepair to better-than-new condition.'
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Glenn Wakefield reassures friends and family that he's okay in an audio message broadcast after his boat has flipped.
When he woke an hour or two later, daylight was shining over books, food and personal items that were strewn all over the cabin.
He could only guess that she'd flipped again. Somewhere along the ride, he'd sustained a concussion.
The boat he and his family had spent five years outfitting for the trip was in even rougher shape.
The waves had ripped away the life raft, a hatch cover, the steering vane and the solar panels. She was taking on water. Everything was soaked. Without solar panels to recharge his batteries, he'd soon lose any ability to communicate with the outside world.
Weather reports said the storm would last three more days.
Tripping around the mess, he made a cup of tea and some porridge. Then he broadcast a message to ham radio operators that would eventually make it back to his family in Victoria.
“I think it's Thursday today,” he started. “I'm not sure …”
As he listed off all the injuries he and Kim Chow had sustained, the full gravity of the situation hit him. Toward the end of the message, he choked up. “We're going to make it through this, honey. … I cannot phone, I'm sorry honey. … I love you. Bye for now, over.”
In fact, he would later say, “My situation was much more desperate than I made it out to be.”
Back in Victoria, Marylou Wakefield put on her headphones and played the two-minute message five times over, trying to interpret the tone of her husband's voice.
“That was a toughie,” she said. “I could tell he was shaken up. I could tell he'd really been through something.”
Thousands of people in 85 countries had been following Mr. Wakefield's progress on her blog, kimchowaroundtheworld.com. It told an inspiring tale. A self-described “regular Joe” who had put five years and a good portion of his life savings into the trip, Mr. Wakefield had suffered a massive heart attack just three years before setting out from Victoria in September.
Curious ham radio operators spoke with him for hours every day. Two elementary schools in Regina barraged him with questions that he would answer online.
No one following his progress had ever heard him sound as dazed as he had on that final dispatch. Luckily, a member of the Argentine Coast Guard was listening in on the ham network.
Even though Mr. Wakefield hadn't issued a mayday or asked for rescue, the coast guard officer dispatched a 350-foot naval vessel, the Puerto Deseado, and readied an Orion airplane to fly an extra life raft out to Kim Chow.
The Puerto Deseado was two days away. Despite his precarious situation, Mr. Wakefield was determined to carry on.
He covered the open hatch to stem the flow of water coming aboard and cleaned the mess. But as he attended to the broken or missing equipment on Kim Chow, his mood turned.
He thought about his wife and two daughters, about all the ham operators who had kept him company and fed him weather reports as he crossed 20,000 kilometres of pounding seas, and about all those kids in Regina who wanted to meet him.
“I could have gone on,” he said, assuming the Argentines could outfit him with the supplies he'd need to finish the trip. “But the anguish that would have created was not something I wanted [my family] to go through. I thought the most humane thing for me to do, the most logical, was to abandon Kim Chow.”
When the Puerto Deseado finally reached him, its crew had to wait 36 hours before the seas finally settled enough to pluck Mr. Wakefield from Kim Chow, his one constant companion over the past half decade.
“It was heartbreaking,” he says, of leaving the boat adrift in the Atlantic Ocean. “I'd brought that boat from complete disrepair to better-than-new condition. I was pretty proud of that. There was a fair bit of everybody I know in that boat.”
As soon as he reached land, Ms. Wakefield flew down and met him in Buenos Aires.
They returned to Victoria last week. Today they are flying to Regina, where Mr. Wakefield will finally meet the kids whose warmth and curiosity stirred him to self-preservation.
“I thought this whole thing was about sailing around the world and setting the record,” he says from his Victoria home, where he's still recovering his strength and the 20 pounds he shed at sea. “But it turns out it was about the people I met.”
