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Zac Sunderland Completes Solo Sail Around the World
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by Amy Judd | July 16, 2009 at 03:26 pm
555 views | 4 Recommendations | 2 comments
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Zac Sunderland, only 17-years-old, has completed a solo sail around the world, becoming the youngest person ever to do so.
It took him 13 months, but he left Thousand Oaks when he was 16 and came back today at 17.
He was greeted by a group of fans upon his return and dozens of sailboats guided him in to shore. According to some onlookers, he 'left as a boy and came back as a man'.
Not long beforehand, Sunderland's younger brother Toby, 11, proclaimed it "Zac Day" and hoped it would be celebrated with cake.
He left Marina Del Ray on June 14, 2008 and is now the first person to sail around the world before he reaches 18.
He crossed three oceans and five seas and the equator twice, travelling over 25,000 miles.
He endured a pirate scare, a broken boom, broken tiller, broken forestay rigging, a broken bulkhead, and he was swamped and almost washed overboard by a rogue wave off Grenada.
He returns to his home with his parents and six younger brothers and sisters and his room is still waiting for him.
Zac's parents were criticized for allowing a teenager to embark on an around the world tour but they were fine with it.
"This is our whole life -- boating, and Laurence has felt a huge amount of responsibility," Zac's mother, Marianne Sunderland, said early in the trip. "Zac has had all the best safety equipment -- from satellite phones to his own meteorologists, and everyone to help him. With modern technology there's no reason why he shouldn't be successful."
Zac said the hardest thing was having no normalcy, and having every day be different.
However, a British teenager, named Mike Perham, who is a few months younger than Sunderland, embarked on his own solo around the world tour, and he is expected to complete his own quest on a 50-foot racing yacht in the next three weeks.
If Perham succeeds, he will be the youngest person, and Sunderland will be the youngers American. Perham however is fully sponsored and has a larger and faster craft. Sunderland is on a 36-foot sailboat.
"The sails on the other guy's boat are probably as expensive or more expensive as Zac's whole boat," said Charlie Nobles, executive director of the American Sailing Assn., which has certified Sunderland's circumnavigation. "It's like one guy's got a Ferrari and the other guy's got a VW. There's really no comparison."
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Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (2)
at 18:33 on July 16th, 2009
It is remarkable but if I was 17 I would not spend a year alone on a boat.
at 15:15 on July 25th, 2009
I think this boy is lucky to be alive.
Why the hell is it so hard to post on this stupid site. I try to cut something from word or wordpad into this thing and it doesn't show up. This sucks because there is no spell check or any other useful tool to edit your blog in the comment box. That sucks.