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< May, June 2000
	Hotline
South Pacific Sojourn--Solo Mike Shahin

It's easy to assume, and most people do, that the toughest part of Joseph Le Guen's attempt to row solo across the South Pacific will be the journey itself.

It might be the 15-foot swells and the 40-mph winds conspiring to batter the Frenchman and his coffin-shaped boat into submission. It might be the 5,600 miles of grey, hostile sea from scenic Wellington to the boat graveyard of Cape Horn, Chile. Or the 1.2 million blister-inducing pulls of the oars. Or the four months of freeze-dried dinners and prunes. All of it, every salt-tinged moment, alone.

But Mr. Le Guen's wife, Marie-Claire Le Gac, has watched her husband do this before, and she knows when her man will really hit bottom. "When he comes back," Ms. Le Gac says, "he'll be wasted. That will be the tough time: He's emotionally wasted, he's all alone, he's on another planet."

That, of course, is assuming Mr. Le Guen does come back. He and his wife acknowledge the danger, although they say they have no doubt he is capable of completing the never-before-attempted journey alive. Five years ago, Mr. Le Guen rowed alone across the Atlantic Ocean, from Europe to the United States, in 103 days. Two years later, he again crossed the Atlantic, rowing with a French double-murderer in a race meant to raise awareness about the issue of prison conditions (they lost to a pair of New Zealanders).

This time, the official purpose of the trip, which began Thursday, Feb. 3, is to highlight the problem of ocean pollution. The rower has affiliated himself with an environmentalist group of French academics and has dubbed the project Keep It Blue. But the motivation appears to go much deeper for Mr. Le Guen. How many people, after all, would leave a newborn son (Tangi arrived Jan. 1), four other children (from another marriage) and a loving partner, to row across some of the most angry ocean in the world?

"People say Jo is crazy," said Jikiti Buinaima, a Colombian Indian who is a sort of spiritual mentor to Mr. Le Guen. "But he is a reasonable man. This Pacific crossing is special. It's a symbol of change. People love to use beautiful words, but nobody does anything to change things."

Mr. Le Guen, his giant hands flashing and his broad shoulders shrugging as he speaks in French, struggles to explain exactly why he is doing this.

Perhaps he hasn't fully figured it out himself. But the third-generation fisherman from France's Brittany region has a clear bond to the natural world and an equally strong aversion to urban culture. In short, he needs to get away from a society that he feels is spinning into a frenzy of consumption and waste.

"The crossing is the non-acceptance of the accepted (way of modern life). A square house, fence, yard—it's death for me!" Mr. Le Guen says with a glint in his ice-blue eyes. "We should never have left hunting and fishing (as a way of life)."

The rower will eat more than 750 pounds of food over the course of the 5,600-mile journey, and although he will consume 6,000 calories a day, he expects to lose about 50 pounds. His nine-meter-long, 2,500-pound (fully laden) boat will have 10 sea anchors to help stabilize the craft in rough seas, and is built to right itself when rolled by waves.

Mr. Le Guen will be completely alone, except for communications through a satellite phone and computer. He will receive special weather reports and will send back trip updates and photos (which will be posted to the project's Web site at www.keepitblue.net). Mr. Le Guen has packed a few books for the trip, including one on astronomy and some French poetry. The only novel he has chosen, fittingly, is One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

"I have no doubt that he has the ability to make it back," Ms. Le Gac says. "The only question is whether the sea allows him to pass through."

—Mike Shahin