Four Seattle Yacht Club Members Join West Coast Circumnavigators’ List
Seattle Yacht Club member Dan Barr wrote last week that we were missing a few names from Latitude 38’s West Coast Circumnavigators’ List. As Dan wrote, “With great pleasure, I am forwarding you names of four members of the Seattle Yacht Club I believe are missing from your Circumnavigators’ List, and which I think should be included, from our list of nine Seattle Yacht Club circumnavigators we have identified so far.”
We’ve added the following names to the list:
Lawrence Killam, Graybeard, 1971, Cruising Club of America Circumnavigation.
Richard McCurdy, Active Light, 1977–82.
Behan, Jamie, Niall, Mairen, and Siobhán Gifford, Totem, 2008–18, Cruising Club of America and Ocean Cruising Club circumnavigation awards.
James Utzschneider, Jenna, Leo and Hazel Miller, Sophie, 2012–2021. 100,000 miles.
We’ve been compiling this list for about 30 years, and we are confident that we’ve failed at including all the West Coast circumnavigators. Adding these four names brings the total to 396, meaning it’s a pretty exclusive club. Some are completely obvious and we still miss them.
We did a Good Jibes podcast with Jamie and Behan Gifford about their circumnavigation aboard Totem and somehow didn’t manage to get them on the list. We’re glad Dan corrected our gaffe. Behan also pointed out, “More people climb Mount Everest — by several orders of magnitude! — than circumnavigate [every year]. Between 600 and 800 people successfully summit Everest … EVERY YEAR.”
So more people will have summited Mount Everest this year than have circumnavigated from the West Coast, as far back as our sailing records go!
We also recently did a Good Jibes podcast with Harry Anderson, whom we just added to the list after he completed his solo circumnavigation this year. He’s from Bainbridge Island, WA, so is another Pacific Northwest circumnavigator. Harry added a special twist by making sure he touched all seven continents on his circumnavigation. Next summer, he’s hoping to do the Northwest Passage solo from east to west on his Allures 40.9, Phywave. Our podcast with him will be out in a couple of weeks.
Interestingly, technology has made it much safer to do a circumnavigation, though according to Jimmy Cornell, fewer people are doing it. In addition, COVID forced a number of cruisers to abort their planned voyage around the world, so fewer people have been completing the trip in the past few years.
If you are a circumnavigator whom we have left off our West Coast Circumnavigators’ list or know someone we haven’t recognized for their achievement, please send the information (and photos) to [email protected]. Everyone on the list is in the elite company of some adventurous voyagers.