American sailor Randall Reeves spent five years planning for the first ever, singlehanded circuit of Antarctica and the Americas (think of a figure 8) to be completed in one season. The route would leave North and South America to port and Antarctica to starboard: south from San Francisco to Cape Horn, around the Southern Ocean back to Cape Horn, north to Greenland, west through the Northwest Passage (when the ice started to open up) and back to San Francisco.
After years of looking for a suitable boat Randall got lucky. In 2016 he found Tony Gooch’s old boat Taonui for sale in Seward, Alaska. He had seen her in 2014 when he crewed on a boat making an east to west transit of the Northwest Passage. To get to know her, he sailed solo 7,000 miles from Seward, down the Alaskan Peninsula to Washington, out to Hawaii and home to San Fransisco. Randall renamed the boat Moli, the Hawaiian name for the Laysan Albatross. After eight months of intense preparation, maintenance and upgrading of communication systems and much more, Randall left San Fransisco in October 2017 heading for Cape Horn.
On December 18, 500nm from Cape Horn he was in 45 knots, gusting 70. A knockdown caused water ingress into the autopilot electronic control box knocking out the autopilot. The next day a retrieval line jammed in the Monitor windvane and the strain broke a weld on the vane’s vertical post. No autopilot. No windvane. Big problemos.
Randall had to hand steer 500 miles to reach shelter in Chile. Brutally hard work. He reached Ushuaia, Argentina on December 31. His wife, Jo, flew down with a duffel bag full of repair parts and by January 12, 2018 Randall had set off again across the South Atlantic. On February 18, now in the southern Indian Ocean, Moli endured a series of knockdowns near the Crozet Islands, the last of which stove in a window in the pilot house flooding most of the electronics. Randall bolted plywood over the window and continued on to Hobart to repair the damage. By now there was no prospect of making up for lost time to get to Greenland by mid-August. So, he sailed back to San Francisco.
As it turned out, 2018 was a heavy ice year in the Canadian Arctic and only two boats made it through. So, pressing on after Hobart would have been fruitless.
Undaunted, and with great tenacity of purpose and support from his wife and friends, Randall readied Moli for another attempt at the Figure Eight. At the end of October 2018, after only a three-month turnaround, Moli once again headed out under the Golden Gate and turned south. After 237 days and a fast 31,200 miles around the Southern Ocean, and up the Atlantic, Moli arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia to await the opening of the fabled Northwest Passage.
Randall departed Halifax in the early summer of 2019, crossing the Arctic Circle in Baffin Bay on July 26. He and Moli were halted for almost a month in Lancaster Sound due to heavy ice in the Canadian archipelago. Finally, in late August, he was able to punch through the main pack and arrived in Nome, Alaska on September 18, having made the roughly 5,000nm passage in 48 days.
Randall made the remaining 3,000nm across the Gulf of Alaska in short order. On October 19, 2019 and after 306 days at sea and nearly 40,000nm, Moli sailed back under the Golden Gate Bridge to complete the Figure Eight Voyage.
In recognition of this truly remarkable achievement for both skipper and boat, Randall was awarded the Ocean Cruising Club’s Barton Cup and the Cruising Club Of America’s Blue Water Medal.
And now, thanks to Tony Gooch (also a recipient of both awards in 2003 and a Bluewater Cruising Association honorary membership in 2006), BCA members will have the opportunity to hear Randall’s story firsthand on Wednesday March 10, 2021.
The presentation will be hosted by The Thermopylae Club which is pleased to invite all members of BCA and the Royal Victoria Yacht Club to come along on this epic solo voyage. Watch for additional information and registration details in mid-February.
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