CLOSING HIS CIRCLES

American circumnavigator Joe Harris can't get enough of that offshore thing. Round and round he goes

- HERB MCCORMICK

ON a dark St. Patrick's Day morning-some 15 miles from the Lorient, France, finish line for the Globe40 doublehanded round-the-world. raceJoe Harris sat down at the bumpy navigation station of his extremely well-traveled Class 40 yacht, Gryphon Solo 2, and commenced to type his final blog post from a cold and rainy Biscay Bay.

"We are loping along at 7 knots of boatspeed without our foot on the accelerator for the first time in forever, as we are going to be in third place for this leg no matter what. So we are timing our arrival for daylight, and I thought this last night at sea might be a good time to digest and try to make sense of these past 10 months," he wrote in the last of dozens of posts that chronicled the eight-leg, 35,000-nautical-mile voyage he shared with mate Roger Junet.

"Trying is a word that comes to mind. Tumultuous is another, as is turbulence, but maybe I just like words that start with a T?"

As he closed the circle on his second circumnavigation on the boat-the first had been a solo record attempt for a Class 40 in 2015-16-tenacious is another appropriate adjective. That's because, for Harris, these last few miles were but the latest chapter in an epic nautical journey that started some five decades earlier, commencing with junior sailing, then learning the ropes on a collection of race boats from his rock-star bowman dad, to amassing his own series of racers, including an old, leaky wooden boat, a C&C 40 and an Aerodyne 38. Finally, he moved into the elite realm of shorthanded offshore sailing, first on a canting-keel Open 50 before moving into the Class 40 battles and knocking off a pair of circles around the planet.