‘Convergence’ Comes Home: A Circumnavigation 21 Years in the Making
In 2004, Randy Repass, wife Sally-Christine Rodgers and their 9-year-old son Kent-Harris Repass bid goodbye to friends, hoisted the sails on their Wylie 65 cat ketch Convergence, and sailed from Santa Cruz into the horizon. Their goal: a circumnavigation. At the end of October, 21 years and about 40,000 miles later, mission accomplished.
Here’s a quick debrief of a very long journey from Sally-Christine:
Tying the knot of a circumnavigation is a milestone that gives one pause. A deep sense of gratitude prevails, not to mention a splash of accomplishment. We left Santa Cruz in June 2004 with our 9-year-old son, Kent-Harris — and friends and circumnavigators Linda Moore and Jim Foley with their 4-year-old twins, Dana and Trevor — for a straight-shot, 3,000-mile downwind run to the Marquesas. Then on to the Tuamotus and Tahiti, where the Moore-Foleys departed.
Convergence meandered across the Pacific to the usual stops: Cook Islands, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, New Caledonia, Vanuatu and the Banks. We also ventured to New Zealand and explored Tasmania, then up the coast through the Great Barrier Reef of Australia to Darwin. We crossed to rarely visited Banda and on through many of Indonesia’s islands, then to Malaysia and Thailand. Throughout, we spent as much time underwater as we could. These places are etched into our memories, and the people we encountered are etched into our hearts.
The Indian Ocean was the most spectacular sailing. The Red Sea, with its challenges of pirates and politics, provided a glimpse of the Sudan and Egypt during the Arab Spring. The Mediterranean opened our eyes to Western culture with a new lens. Turkey, Greece, Italy, Sicily, Malta, Albania, Montenegro, Croatia, Corsica, Sardinia, Spain, Morocco and the Canaries each left their historic, cultural, religious and culinary impressions.
In 2017, we crossed the Atlantic to Bermuda before heading north to anchor off Randy’s family home in Marion, Massachusetts. We took in Nova Scotia and the Bras d’Or Lakes of Cape Breton before turning south through the familiar Caribbean. (The following seas off Venezuela will be remembered!) We bartered through the San Blas, crossed through Panama, and sailed up to Costa Rica.
By that time, we had developed our own routine. Everyone who takes on the challenge of a circumnavigation puts their own spin on it. One of the reasons our roundabout took so long is that Randy and I were still working, so we sailed only two to five months a year, leaving Convergence to return home. Then COVID hit, and for a while, everything changed. We left the boat in Mexico and returned home for two years. When the coast was finally clear again, we returned to luxuriate in Mexico’s rich embrace, exploring her coastal Rivera and the Sea of Cortez before starting our way north toward home. The docklines were barely tied off when the questions started.…