I’m one-hundred-fifty miles off Cape Horn, both autopilots are broken, and my boat is drifting toward one of the nastiest chunks of ocean on the face of the earth.
ABBY SUNDERLANDThere are a number of places on marine charts where even the most weathered sailors point and say, “Right there, nothing can go wrong. Everything has to go right.”
More Abby Sunderland Quotes
-
-
I will definitely attempt to sail around the world again. In fact, I can’t wait for the chance to try again.
ABBY SUNDERLAND -
If Wild Eyes reached those islands, she wouldn’t run aground, keel in the sand. She would be smashed into pieces.
ABBY SUNDERLAND -
All the ingenuity, all the high-tech gear, all the jury-rigging sometimes the sea would rip it all away until there was only you, the Creator, and His mercy.
ABBY SUNDERLAND -
One day that same year, I told my dad that someday, I would sail around the world alone.
ABBY SUNDERLAND -
The things that happen on the sea take you beyond yourself, beyond human capability.
ABBY SUNDERLAND -
Wild Eyes was built for speed and I was flying down walls of water twenty and thirty feet high.
ABBY SUNDERLAND -
On October 19, 2009, my sixteenth birthday, Wild Eyes officially became mine! Now it was really happening.
ABBY SUNDERLAND -
One place is the turbulent passage south of Cape Horn. Another is the dead center of the Indian Ocean.
ABBY SUNDERLAND -
Terror ripped through me as I was falling, falling, falling toward the sea.
ABBY SUNDERLAND -
When I saw the plane, I was absolutely astonished! Two emotions crashed over me: surging joy and crazy fear.
ABBY SUNDERLAND -
If a big wave came at the wrong moment, it would sweep me off into forty-eight-degree water, where I might last twenty minutes. Drowning quickly might be better.
ABBY SUNDERLAND -
The open ocean often takes you past your physical limits and when it does, sailing becomes a mental game.
ABBY SUNDERLAND -
But none of that kept me from picturing what a tsunami might look like if it did rise up and roar toward my little boat like some watery blue version of the Great Wall of China.
ABBY SUNDERLAND -
In that moment it dawned on me that everything has to line up perfectly for something to turn out this awful.
ABBY SUNDERLAND -
I had begun to think that dreams are meant to be no more than dreams and that in reality dreams don’t come true. Then my brother (Zac) left on his trip.
ABBY SUNDERLAND