“Wild Eyes was built for speed and I was flying down walls of water twenty and thirty feet high.”

On October 19, 2009, my sixteenth birthday, Wild Eyes officially became mine! Now it was really happening.

I am twelve thousand miles wiser, twelve thousand miles more resilient, and I have twelve thousand miles more faith in God.

The swells were amazing! As big as three-story apartment buildings!

I knew that even if I was able to call for help, I was in a place so remote that it wasn’t likely there would be anyone who could help me. And even if there were, it could take weeks.

I will definitely attempt to sail around the world again. In fact, I can’t wait for the chance to try again.

One day that same year, I told my dad that someday, I would sail around the world alone.

In that moment it dawned on me that everything has to line up perfectly for something to turn out this awful.

If Wild Eyes reached those islands, she wouldn’t run aground, keel in the sand. She would be smashed into pieces.

Terror ripped through me as I was falling, falling, falling toward the sea.

Going up the mast is one of the most dangerous things you can do as a solo sailor.

I wanted to break the record, of course, and become the youngest person to sail around the world solo and unassisted.

It was amazing to see all the support that he got from around the world and to see how everyone worked together to help make his dream reality. Watching him do this really made me believe that I could too.

Slowly, my brain let me in on the fact that I had just come this close to dying.

Fewer people have successfully solo-circumnavigated the globe than have journeyed into space.

The terrifying physics of going up-mast in heavy seas are inescapable.

One place is the turbulent passage south of Cape Horn. Another is the dead center of the Indian Ocean.

We as producers need to keep an eye on things and make sure we’re doing great stuff, which is sometimes easy to do because of the talent we have, and sometimes not so easy.

Hear me, four quarters of the world-a relative I am! Give me the strength to walk the soft earth, a relative to all that is! Give me the eyes to see and the strength to understand, that I may be like you. With your power only can I face the winds.

Little by little deep inside us, the diamond shines, the eyes open, the dawn rises, we become what we already are.

It seems that most the world is driven by the eye, right? They design cities to look great but they always sound horrible …

These days I smile benignly at the fights that I see in NBA games. There aren’t any broken noses or black eyes, which happened quite often when I played.

The idea that I [should] trust my eyes more than the stats, I don’t buy that because I’ve seen magicians pull rabbits out of hats and I know that the rabbit’s not in there.

The greatest art belongs to the world. Do not be intimidated by the experts.

I think it’s offensive to equate evangelical Christians, Catholics, others that view marriage as between a man and a woman, as being racist.