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The Circumnavigators’ List

By Tim Henry | May 11, 2018 | Planet Latitude |

We’d like to welcome two new sailors to our West Coast Circumnavigators’ List: Jack van Ommen and Julie Spencer.

"I just thought of it," Jack wrote us a few days ago. "I completed my solo circumnavigation on March 31, 2017, in Fort Lauderdale, FL, a month after my 80th birthday." Van Ommen started his voyage from Alameda on March 16, 2005, sailed westward around the Cape of Good Hope, and arrived in June 2007 in Chesapeake Bay. He crossed the Atlantic again, sailing to Europe in 2009 on his Naja 30 Fleetwood, which he’d built from a kit to do the Singlehanded TransPac.

Jack van Ommen onboard the original Fleetwood in the French canals in 2013, just a few months before his boat was lost to a storm in the Med.

© 2018 Jack van Ommen

"I shipwrecked in 2013 on the return to the Americas in the Mediterranean," van Ommen said. He was planning on heading back across the Atlantic when he was trapped in a storm. Van Ommen was forced to backtrack a bit. "I completed the circumnavigation from the Puget Sound, departing September 12, 2016, on a copy of the shipwrecked Naja 30 via the Panama Canal. I left Alameda on this last leg on October 8, 2016."  

In early April Julie Spencer wrote asking us to include her as a West Coast circumnavigator. "Leave it to Latitude 38 to have such a list." Spencer made her round-the-world trip between 1987 and 1993 aboard Mas Alegre, a Standfast 40. "I just came across the list for the first time — it’s a fabulous list from historic to current. Each name represents an amazing chapter in our lives, filled with hundreds of remarkable stories."

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