How one man went over the top

6:10am Thursday 27th November 2008

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He had wanted to sail around the world in the wake of the great lone sailors Sir Francis Chichester and Sir Robin Knox-Johnston. In fact, Adrian Flanagan’s bold intention was to follow these heroic yachtsmen into the history books, rather than simply repeat their remarkable solo feats. And somehow you sense that with Mr Flanagan there lurks a desire to achieve things the hard way — the title of his new book Over the Top is well chosen.

Taking on Cape Horn and the Roaring Forties was never going to be a sufficient way for Mr Flanagan to test himself against the heroic pioneers of solo circumnavigation, while laying to rest his own personal demons.

No, he had to do it the hard way. In fact, not so much hard, but downright impossible, some might argue.

He was to spend more than two years of his life chasing a dream that involved a quest to voyage vertically around the earth, via Cape Horn and the icebound waters of the Russian Arctic.

It involved mortgaging his house to help raise the £200,000 he needed.

There would be derision and humiliating references to ‘Captain Calamity’, not least when he almost died after being thrown out of his stainless steel boat, with the unlikely name of Barrabas, only days into the trip.

Nor did news he had been forced to seek the shelter of the River Helford in Cornwall in the face of an English Channel storm augur well.

The cynicism was compounded as it emerged that the voyage was not to be exactly non-stop, as the rules of single-handed circumnavigation demand. He was to stop off in Honolulu for repairs and twice left Barrabas for lengthy winter hibernations, in Alaska and later Norway, allowing him to fly back for stays in England.

Most damning of all, in the eyes of the purist, when he was unable to pass impenetrable ice in a frozen section of the Russian Arctic, he suffered the indignity of having to be lifted on to a Russian cargo boat to be carried hundreds of miles between Tiksi and Murmansk.

But in a way, his eventual arrival back home last May — after an expedition lasting 937 days, including 349 days of sailing that saw him cover 30,825 nautical miles — can be viewed as a remarkable achievement.

A classic, noble failure in the best English tradition for sure, shot through with all manner of misfortunes and miscalculations, with bureaucratic foreigners messing things up at crucial moments. And at the same time a stirring modern day story of an obsessive restless spirit, who just did not know when to quit.

Mr Flanagan, now happily settled back home in the village of Ludgershall, near Bicester, has set out the full story in a 380-page book, Over The Top: The First Lone Yachtsman to Sail Vertically Around the World. The defiant title says it all.

And when we met he wasted no time in making clear that, in his view, it really was mission accomplished.

True adventure, he maintains, must be pioneering; something that has never done before.

“I am the first solo yachtsman to enter the Russian Arctic. That is irrefutable,” he says. “We’ve seen pioneering sailors like Chichester, Knox-Johnson and Chay Blyth. But it’s about continually raising the bar. Whenever someone writes a history of single-handed yachtsmen, I don’t think the history would be complete without the Barrabas.”

His fascination with Chichester began in his father’s study in Hong Kong, where he was living at the age of 15. Bored with studying for his O-levels, his eyes fell upon a book promising adventure and escape entitled Gipsy Moth Circles the World.

His father’s work meant his boyhood was spent between Africa and the Far East.

There were opportunities to sail on company cruisers and to explore beaches in a dinghy, but there was no great family tradition of sailing.

“The sailing itself never captured me. But the sea did. I loved the whole mystery of being on the water’s edge sitting on rocks, inches away from this alien, unexplained place, stretching thousands of miles.”

He went on to read medicine at King’s College, London, later joining the army. But after going through the rigorous selection procedure for the Parachute Regiment, he left the officer training academy after dislocating his shoulder.

He qualified in osteopathic medicine, but this time a damaged wrist forced him to stop practice. There followed work as a freelance sports journalist, the launch of his own food business and a well received novel, entitled Cobra.

His restlessness was still evident when he married Louise, with whom he had two sons.

But only in November 2003 did he finally face up to what was really behind it: not so much a mid-life crisis, as one that crept upon him as a teenager.

“I had long felt uncomfortable within myself, like a man with a conscience who had committed a crime. My dfficulty was not commitment, but contentment. And the well spring of that discontent was my desire to sail alone around the world.”

His relationship with Louise, now his ex-wife and who lives in France, is one of the book’s most fascinating aspects.

As they moved towards divorce, he took her for a meal at a pub in the Chilterns.

As the food arrived he revealed his circumnavigation plan. “You’re absolutely out of your bloody mind,” she told him.

She would not be the last person to come to that conclusion over the next three years, given that he had never even sailed single-handed before.

Yet for all her misgivings, she ended up agreeing to act as manager of the Alpha Global Expedition. Her efforts to find sponsors and to penetrate the Russian labyrinthine bureaucracy to secure the necessary permission to sail over the top of Russia knew no bounds.

She even wrote to Roman Abramovich, the billionaire owner of Chelsea, who was to provide invaluable assistance in their dealings with the Russian authorities.

She had, however, given him her blessing on two conditions: “Whenever you’re on deck you wear a bloody lifejacket and make sure you’re strapped in.”

Sadly, Mr Flanagan only came to fully appreciate the wisdom of her words when he found himself in the English Channel having been swept off the deck by a powerful wave.

“I was as certain that I was going to die as you are of the sun coming up,” he told me.

Completely separated from the boat, he recalls seeing the faces of his two sons, his ex-wife and some close French friends who had been killed in the Boxing Day tsunami the previous year. He even decided to strip off his outer clothing, judging hypothermia to be preferable to drowning, which he had always viewed as “a hideous and unbearable” way to shake off the mortal coil.

“When I knew I was going to die I actually felt a sense of relief. I’ve spent a lot of time analysing that, given that I have young children. But it came down to the fact that I accepted what was going to happen. There was nothing I could do.”

No sense of guilt, then, that he had chosen such a dangerous path?

“What I most want to teach my children is that they must be true to themselves, whatever anyone else advises,” he replied. “If you want something badly enough you must pursue it. How could I teach them that, if I didn’t do it myself? It would be hypocrisy. I was also conscious of the fact that if I died, the children would have been too young to remember me.”

He survived because a shock cord had slipped beneath the middle finger of his right hand. His second great piece of fortune was to be swept up by a wave, which left him sitting on the sugar scoop of the Barrabas.

There were to be no more plunges into the sea, although the Barrabas was to capsize twice while rounding Cape Horn.

“Yes, I got the full experience,” he says with evident pride. “I rounded Cape Horn against wind and currents from the Atlantic to the Pacific and I’ve joined a very elite group of people who have done that. I felt it was something to silence the people who earlier had been a little bit cynical. They couldn’t say anything after that.”

The damage suffered to the mast led to the decision to stop off at Honolulu. His original intention had been to sail non stop, he said. But from the beginning he knew he would stop in port in the interest of safety, rather than risk calling out rescue services.And he concedes, too, he really would have needed perfect timing and massive amounts of luck to have been able to pass through the frozen waters of the north without serious assistance.

As it turned out, delays in securing the necessary visa from Russia ensured that this circumnavigation would be broken by winters spent in England, while the ice ensured that as well as paperwork, the Russians would have to come up with a cargo boat to secure the mission’s success.

Success? Well that’s how Mr Flanagan saw it as he sailed into the narrow confines of Chichester Harbour, before enjoying a Royal Naval escort.

And six months on he still believes that he really did achieve something unique. He is already working on a new novel and planning an expedition, this time to fly a microlight around the coast of Australia. Rather than being laid to rest, it looks as if that ghost is only being rested after all.