Sea Bird Lands Back In Oriental
Bernie “I’m Not a Sailor” Harberts Completes Circumnavigation
June 1, 2003

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Knights in White Shirts
Fashion Tips from Cervantes

One sentence in particular stands out. “I was so thrilled when I read Don Quixote, where somebody said, ‘Don Quixote, you need to go out with a white shirt. Every Knight Errant needs a white shirt.’ I just loved that sentence,” Bernie says. “It’s just lovely to read that.”

“And when I got to port I went to a Salvation Army and got three white shirts and I’ve been trying to wear light ones since!”

Aside from the sartorial habit, appreciating the power of words, the way ‘others have wrestled them to paper’ has stuck with him too “That’s what reading’s opened up for me. Maybe if I keep reading I’ll write better.”

(Bernie notes that he hasn’t liked everything he’s read. There was one book about a polo player and an Eastern European rider. “God, it was horrible,” he says, “but I read it all the way through.” You won’t find it on his shelf. “I threw it overboard.”)

He’s read a number of the 100 classic books recommended years earlier in college, and yes, Bernie has now even read “War and Peace”. Bernie says he tackled Tolstoy’s classic while stuck in the doldrums in the Atlantic a few months ago. To give an idea of how windless the conditions were, Bernie notes that he finished the book, “And I’m a slow reader.”

65 Days At Sea
Three Full Moons and the Moon As Timekeeper

He left South Africa in February and 65 days later arrived in St. Johns in the Caribbean. It was the longest single passage Bernie has made.
He had no outside contact. No radio, no satellite connections. He doesn’t think he would have been in the right frame of mind for such a long time at sea if he had tried it when he first took off 4-1/2 years ago.

“I didn’t take off my tie and go sail 65 days alone. It would have been tough because (back when he started out) I was so used to stimulus.” Here Bernie speaks rapidly as he runs down the list: “TV-newspaper-drive-a-car-shave-go-to-work-check-the-email-check-the-voicex-mail-go-to-lunch-run-run-run-run-run.”

But after four years at sea, he says, -- and 120 days making other passages in the past year -- his own clock had slowed to the point where he was “taking in one stimulus at a time.. and there were so few stimuli left. There were stars and waves and the moon. The moon was like my timekeeper. So it wasn’t a shock. I eased in to it.” He also says the boat was at a point where, systems simplified, it didn’t need a lot of attention.


Bernie shows us his "monocular"

“I slowed my life down enough to make it absolutely magnificent.”

“I was out for three full moons. That’s the magnificent part of it. Three full moons,” he repeats, “and not seeing land. “ He’s said he doesn’t think of himself as a sailor and thinks of boats as a way to get from one place to another. Yet that time out in the Atlantic was “the most content,” he almost whispers, “I think I ever was.”

Rebirth and Thin Skin

In his 65 days at sea, he says he lost all the calluses on his hands and feet and legs. And that’s not all. “I almost lost my voice. My hearing got really sensitive; I could hear dolphins a long way off in the water. You get sensitive to air pressure. If a low is coming you feel it.” Tuned that way, he says, “you can absorb the massive expanse and pulse of the universe.”

A little boat out at sea for that long, Bernie says, is like a womb.

You’re surrounded by salt water and the “boat protects you”. And then, when you reach land, he says, “you have to learn to walk again. It’s like this whole rebirth.”

He says his senses had become unclogged. The uncallused skin on the palms and on the bottoms of the feet became more sensitive than before. Still speaking in an awed tone, Bernie says that after going ashore he would, “step on a piece of wood and think ‘wow.. this is great wood.’ Or you walk down a gravel road and feel it under your feet.. your skin is so thin.”

“And that is kind of what appeals to me about the boat. In every country, I’m reborn. New ears, new smell, new sights, new skin. I can see things I hadn’t seen before. That’s the kick of sailing in a boat like this… you get to start over. You get a second, and a third and a fourth go at life.”

And so, what about that question of being alone with yourself for so long?

Bernie describes himself as “very self-contained… very comfortable being in solitude without being lonely. I’ve felt a lot more alone at the office Christmas party,” he says, “than I have after three moons in the ocean.”

The Gulf Stream By Cooking Timer

More practically speaking, he says, ‘sleep is the biggest challenge for single-handers” like himself. Bernie says that crossing the ocean he did not keep watches at night (even though he says his parents may think he got up every 15 minutes to look for ships.) “A week or ten days would go by without seeing a ship.”

But on crossing the busier traffic lanes in the Gulf Stream, he says he set a cooking timer to go off every fifteen to thirty minutes. “And I conditioned myself to not ever sleep through it. Whenever I heard the egg timer ding, my feet would have to hit the floor. “

>>> the circumnavigation continues on Page 5

 
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