captains courageous he's a seafaring man he's got an incredibly interesting story to tell up until now and one that perhaps is even going to be surpassing all of that is are we going to look ahead and do is it venturous plans for the future and read welcome very much to look at but could you start with your own background please where you were born raised look at your family that sort of thing education and then we'll get into a discussion of this interesting project your products that preceded you and our van eggs and you out into the future exciting product would you share your own background please share my parents are from north carolina both of my parents and my dad was in the air force so i grew up traveling all over the world every year moving to a different place but our family went back every summer to north carolina to visit the grandparents and my mother's father organized the building of a big vacation cottage on the inland waterway near the south carolina border in the pine trees behind the marsh the sand dunes and then the ocean i so our family built that house together when i was a young child my granddad was there with his  off the ground so that when the tide rises during a hurricane yeah doesn't sweep the house away yeah right so we built that house as i was a child growing up i saw my dad and uncles building the house and we lived in the middle of the work during the summers and my dad and uncles like boats built little boats and took them out on the waterway and out into the marsh and so since i was a child i've been around construction and tools and military men and your primary residence was in north carolina also or was it some well like i know because my father was in the air force yeah you know we lived in germany for three years and in the philippines for two years and all over the u s and different places but every summer we went back to granddad the families beach cottage and we spent the summer there you know i wonder you know that's what they call a military brat you know the loving care of the do for that when you move around but that's a that's a that's a pretty good background in order to get you some knowledge of the world pretty well living with military around the world like that you get a pretty good feel for the work rather than being just one place the whole why what right you've lived through that it was a good experience it opened our minds traveling is good because you see a lot of different cultures around the world and a lot of different people and i'm i guess you don't remember maine attached to one place you see a lot of different things so i grew up traveling and  we were on an adventure growing growing up and so that's why i continued to travel as a as in my adult life yeah you've been traveling a good deal of the time aboard the ship now you built do you and your family your brother i'm thinking maybe you could share with as you build this a schooner seventy feet long sixty ton sixteen feet across schooner lovingly put together a real sea worthy vehicle a vessel and you did this yourselves you built this at a shipyard in north carolina  well really my brothers and i built surfboards through high school you were a server i grew up surfing that was my favorite thing and we built surfboards and that was our after school job or our after school work was making surfboards we learned how to make surfboards and we had our surface shop in our garage family garage north carolina well when we traveled part of the time it was in illinois and part of the time in arizona right and you'd like to do the surfing you still do that well i haven't done much in recent years but yes i still consider myself a surfer was born i still am a saver you see those guys pick those waves it's really high adventure and oh i love that i think  surfing is a wonderful sport though i never considered it like a sport it was like a lifestyle and you're very close to nature you have to tune into nature to be able to do it well and it's to be in the salt of the way this breaking and especially to be teenager you push the envelope and oh yeah when to ride the biggest waves i could in the most faraway places and tried to ride in the tube of the way to where i felt like i was somewhat in the center of the universe when the wave breaks over you and you and you're in the tube it seems like things speed up yeah and you're able to see things in slow motion really and define your movements real well and think even though things are happening real fast yeah you're looking at it do you have a respect for the way or you ever worked for nature in a certain sense and you know and then you're overcoming that you're doing better than that or what you fear or certainly there's an element of the water in one of those great big waves and you got dashed to the ground you could be seriously hurt could you well the big waves break over you and you can get hit by a surfboard yeah you can get your air knocked out of you in and it's holding you underwater for a long time series that you have to be able to hold your breath for a long time  stay down and sometimes you get disoriented about which way is up and sometimes the big wave breaks there's so much foam and froth yeah that you can't hardly swim in it and you really have to be call men wait for that to pass in order to look for the best place to swim up swim up and then when you get to the top you can't just grab air immediately you have to make sure there isn't a way that's about ready to break in your face yeah and you have to get some air real quick because there's more waves coming in and you have to dive under them right it's like a challenge  together now you'd be one of the great adventures in the history of mankind which is no small matter because there's been a lot of people who push that envelope there's something that motivates people to do the ends various are ways hillary went up the mountain and that sort of thing  that they recognize me for doing what i'm doing for words you're doing and have been doing so on back to the ship i mean the am right it was made lovingly where because you sit in north carolina and my family speech got to be tried so i was saying that we grew up making surfboards through high school and i went to hawaii and i was surfing there and while i was surfing in hawaii as a teenager i met another teenager who had taken his college money and bought a beautiful wooden sailboat and he was getting ready to sail into the south pacific and we made friends and he said do you want to come and i said yes of course i'm ready to go i had to call my parents on the phone and say how old you are no i was  and i had i had to call my parents and say i want to go sailing in the south pacific will you mail me my birth certificate so i can get a passport now my my dad my parents could have said no we won't don't want to let you do that andrus you know they could have said no we won't mail you your birth certificate we don't want you to go you have to go back to college and do what we say do this right and learn all the french verbs instead lee sent me my birth a great fun adventure which i had never been ocean voyaging before that time only sailing in small sailboats that my father had built so as a child i saw my dad build apply wood and fiberglass sailboat as a hobby this little one little one that he took us out in so that when we saw that we learned from him so that when we look that's how we learned how to build surfboards no regrets at all because i need to know that my life has been totally connected in the past now as i go into the future this is what i've always thought and what i've always done and what i've always prepared for so somehow i always knew this in my youngest age and all of the things that i have been doing have prepared me and led me up to this great moment and i have the a very grateful and lucky for life has for me it's where i have to bring up the most in me and who i am be the smartest and be with the most love in order to survive that next me with the most luck love love yes not luck love well no no i said i said with the most knowledge and strength and the most love yeah ok right because when you are open in love you see clearly and you act wow that's a good philosophy general philosophy for everyone and everyone who don't live that way with no regrets right no sense doesn't do any good  rhythm and in all that sort of thing about regrets you have to realize that what you've done in the past has made you what you are there may be some things that i could have done better work for an extra half hour on the ropes in the sales in rough weather and it's cold and maybe they look at me and say well why did why did why do we have to do this now or you made a mistake we're having to do this or they get mad at me for making mistakes they look i might make mistakes not perfect yeah yeah but i'm going to keep doing what i have to do and keep trying and do things right until i know things are under control i'm going to stick with it and stay focused and it is a different proposition if you're taking a risk you're doing whatever you please me so they might say well give me a ten minute warning on on on dinner and when dinner will be served just right and then i might forget to give that ten minute warning and be in a hurry because i have to go somewhere else and then i realize i made a mistake i didn't give the ten minute warning on of thought in it which was that i sailed into the south pacific with another teenager yeah while we were sailing in the south pacific we met the st man to sail around the world without stopping french a frenchman bernard went to see a yeah and he had a group of friends who were with him who were young small boat ocean voyagers who were all people sailing boats with no motor no radio no electronics but they were the best seamen of our time navigating with  yes in a sense it's very similar to that we'll get to that if you can later control right and well ending up on a long distance sailors in the furthest places in the world and often as it was in the early seventy's when i began my long distance know i would say so not at all we're pushing when you have the leading long distance ocean voyages who led the way for the thousands of sailors who are island hopping around the world now yeah we're sailors who were real seamen who who knew how to navigate and knew how to boat builder knew how to take care of themselves and did real good long distance ocean voyage is and so they were the people who i learned from as a teenager all that great everything about sailing and also everything about the right state of mind to live on the sea in these faraway places and to survive in nature without the attitude that you're thinking you got your satellite telephone or your radio and you can call for help if anything goes wrong or punch the button on your emergency satellite beacon so in those days we didn't have those things so we developed a sense of independence those you know not really they didn't exist and radios were very very expensive so it may have been because of financial reasons that they and we sailed that way but i'm glad we did because that was how i learned with an old sexton and without a radio did to call for scooter as you were saying this is what i learned as a teenager meeting these people in the south pacific where we talked about what makes a sea worthy boat there's certain issues that make a sea worthy boat and that was when i had got in my idea well i want my own boat and yes i can build my own boat and yes i can learn how to use a sextant and be my own captain and be able to navigate and choose to go where i want to go so what are the metaphors it could be written in i mean there's all that is better for sure  and this is about five minutes long five minute didn't you can get a look at because we should maybe say set it up you don't mind we set it up where this will show the ship that he built called the hand named after his mother and which he is saying i believe if i'm not mistaken he was sailing right into antarctic all waters for six months far down in the ice as you can right into the ice of the antarctic bezoar than say all over the world lived on the thing for most of your adult life and so work and have proposed to go on a one dollars day trip without being inside of land which he is proposing in this time in which we talk so let's set up that let you have a look at the wonder of the sea and the wonder of the ship that was with together by our guest that's a  most people are afraid of going to see i think because they're afraid of what will happen if they get hurt or they can die do you have a positive attitude to keep your body under repair and keep yourself healthy for month after month year after year knowing that you're not going to see a doctor or get help from the outside rel where you develop the attitude that you can't take care of yourself you have to keep your physical environment under repair and also you have to have the tools to keep your body and spiritual work is progress in real good on the expedition at the rate we're going we're going to have this boat in incredibly great shape in a kind of a shape that no one else can understand because no one else has prepared to take a boat to century so often i liken it to a stradivarius violin which is the finest culmination of craftsmanship along with the magic of music and of the thousands of years  in working on boats what's going to work with the sails the polies the ropes where should the mast be when angle should the mast be and what tension should the rigging cables have what tension should the rope sad exactly where they should go and that is designed by so many hundreds of people for so many hundreds of years and it came to one thing this gas rig schooner and as i have her to just ride as i have proven her in the waters around the world she's like a giant stradivarius violin and she hums with a certain kind of music just like that instrument i launched this boat on twenty four years ago so basically i've lived on the boat for twenty four years that was just a natural thing for me and not really too concerned with the idea of home and being attached to things there was nothing i was attached to i just let everything go the object of the voyage is to leave the land and all support sail for a one thousand nonstop at sea without receiving help to live at sea to be healthy to send back good messages and have the whole world follow the voyage and understand the importance of it and then we'll be back sailing back into new york city after a one thousand days the longest time that i spent on the water was the odyssey of the sea turtle where we spent two hundred dollars days out of sight of land we did the whole trip without the motor and when we came back we still had everything on the boat that we needed to go on for months and months there would have been no column to go on for many months more as people watch me go to see their question is again and again what do you eat dried natural organic health food last years and years but the main thing about the diet that makes it work and makes it so good is that i grow my sprouts i grow all kinds of sprouts i eat a huge sprout salads twice a day and i catch fish fresh fish i'm eating dried fish and salted fish and i catch the rain from the clouds and that's the water that i drink i will be setting off on a course south from new york across the equalizer and then down into the south atlantic where i would travel from the west to the east follow south africa the indian ocean below australia and new zealand across the pacific ocean around and under cape horn and then back up into the south atlantic to the equalizer where i'd cross my outgoing track and that would be one voyage around the world and then i'd say well ok here i go again and i turn south and i get back into the head for another trip around the world so i'm going to choose to sail where i please far from the plane and away from all the hazards of ships in the shor all you've done and what you propose now thanks for setting that up i really appreciate that now we're talking about your back your history that you've gone down into antarctica you've made the sea voyage a good deal of your adult life has been spent on that ship has it not and maybe  right but you lived a great deal of your life that your home yes really my home and i i have been captain of my own ocean go ings boat since i was twenty years old in that great because i built my made the trip across the board i had my passport and i had most of the knowledge that i needed and i had the knowledge that i needed to build a boat and since i didn't have much money i decided to build a very small of plywood and viber glass and built that under the family beach cottage right and i worked on that boat eight months straight never took a break  in the middle of building the boat one of my friends from the south pacific who was sailing by himself for three years in the south pacific i was twenty he arrived he was twenty four he's from holland he said well let's take your cat to holla and on the cross he blocks the north atlantic i didn't really intend to do it because the boat was so small and i had no reason but once he said let's take it across the north atlantic i realized i had a partner who was  and so we launched the boat and and with with with no motor radio or electronics we launched her and sailed her out and just went right across the no need to tell anybody you were leaving our family was that every accuse you of being foolhardy young man well not in a way maybe that i should be going to college and i should be a better example for my younger relatives who are and so forth stay right there stay right on the other hand they saw that i was serious about what i was doing right and that i knew what i was doing and that i had good people around me and and that we had a good plan and and they believed in me and they helped support and let me live my life as i wanted wanted to do so they were supportive of me as i sailed off you've seen the movie i take it the perfect storm i've seen the movie atlantic ocean right that would you would have been davy jones locker right but but in the beginning of the summer you don't really have those kinds of storms always you can study the the pilot charts world and you can see how the winds and wave goes  as they've been recorded for two hundred years and then you can get to where the wind and current sco the temperatures water temperatures and the ratio of gales and how bad they are and so forth so that time of year is the time when there is very light when there isn't much wind and there's no real gales happening so we knew that was the one time we could go across so we weren't sailing the big you'll run into the month of june the month of june the perfect storm was a bit more to the north actually and later in the season but you wouldn't want waves break over her let them break over her again and again she's going to just come right back up like a duck and head the water really and she'll be floating in as long as things don't breaking as long as i get don't get a hole in the boat as long as i don't h home at sea in this boat and i i didn't even know it was a hurricane you don't i have a v h f radio line of sight which means as far as you can see you can talk yeah and so we were in this big certain way yes but i didn't want to have to do that i called the ship to say well do you see assume and you're going to miss you're on a course that's not converging with us and they answered back yes they said yes we're we're on a course to miss you we can't change course either we're in hurricane katrina and the wind is blowing eight thousand five hundred and ninety knots and then he said ok sign over and out and he hung up on us and i said wow we're in a hurricane look how good we're doing this is so bad isn't the boats riding just like she should she was riding out that hurricane and that time the wind was coming up from the south we had one so in the middle of the boat it was really small that kept the boat steady against the wind and the wind was blowing on the boat we were he to we was turned over and lashed the wind was blowing on the sail in a certain way the kept us steady facing the storm facing facing just on facing into the storm and the waves were breaking with us yeah that's the way to do it when the storm is against you when the storm then the next morning yeah we were in the eye of the hurricane right in the eye and say oh i'm right in the well it's not so calm not so called stop but the waves break from every direction so now the boat like a mousetrap now the boat is getting rocked and waves are breaking over her from every direction but the sun is out in the sky is blue moon we are then we saw the next one of the hurricane coming from the north so we knew it was coming from the north we were headed to the south and so we got a small  ready in the very front of the boat and when the wind it was a jew it would be in the very front staysail is behind the just the staysail is is closer and it's smaller and it's on a boom and we set that sail so when the wind hit us from the north we had that sail set i was up front i told my crew member when the wind hits guide the boat any direction between southeast southwest whatever the wind tells you to do just drive the boat with the wind i didn't care what course we were doing no this time we're going with the wind you know we had the sail up front so by the time i crawled back among the deck because it was the when you got to make sure your heart you got to make sure call back the wheel he on the wheel and driving the boat downwind yeah and i took the wheel from him and then i felt the wheel and the boat was balanced running down downwind you know we were on course that i wanted to go  southeast too and take a where we were going down to agents week to put the boat up for the charter season in the caribbean so i thought the wheel the butt was balancing i just put ropes over the wheel and we went inside and the boat held her coming right after the next and there's one big wave coming it's coming so fast the next thing you know you're up woah on top of it and then the expense issue is like sir pushes you along for a while at the top but the boat's heavier and he's not traveling and catching it light like a job and i was really pleased with the boat and it built up my confidence a lot in myself and in the boat nuff so that i could plan into the future and say i'm going to go as far on the world as i want to go and i know the boat can do it voyage and just going back a little bit the st boat that i built was was was very small because my budget was smaller and i was learning how to build boats and so forth but it was the smallest boat across the atlantic ocean twice we went to europe the cat them at the language door close it and open the love window at the moon's wisdom yeah have you learned anything do you think in all of their personal learning all the time you're in a forced situation to learn not not a situation where you might learn a bit ok i'm in a situation where i'm in a little boat i'm in the middle of the atlantic ocean perhaps by myself and i did see obama self and yeah that means that i'm thirst to learn learn learn and do the best i can all the time or i'm in a situation where i could couple people there is something and you're going to go and you are going to live off the sea in terms of sustenance and so with fish you can catch the water catch them stored in the in the tanks and so forth and you're going to have sprouts and other sprouts is over they're going to eat that sort of thing if you think but you're going to be able to live on the sea what the sea has to offer well to a certain extent yeah i know how far does that go that you don't have to have a line to the land in order to be able to sustain human society that and what it what happens if you get into where you've got a real crueler columbus and so forth and that kind of thing they were sailing men who were sailing people or the people from polynesia sailed across the great pacific ocean  i mean can they live off the sea can you do it or is it because it seems awfully big right civic ocean the ocean you know what i mean can you live off the sea you know a certain extent but that's not really what i'm trying to do or i will catch the rain and i will catch fish but i have like i said in the in the film natural organic health food and i have really good healthy food that i'll be eating and i have more than enough on board so it's not really that i have to survive off the sea i supplement my diet with fish which i catch regularly and i eat a lot of fish when i catch a big fish i slice it and dry it and i can eat fish for for months later you can drive fish on  catch and so forth and and that will keep in the same way they could have done in columbus day in that they did what i was getting at is it is it inherently impossible for people to just live off the sea on a ship or if they were really ship shape and so forth are we tied really important and i'll be bringing vitamins and minerals also to stock the boat up for a one thousand days one thousand it is not so hard it's just a bit of thinking and planning and it's really exciting inspiration to people who are thinking about where they want to become a sailing man who sails around the world would take sort of five public accounting i don't know which way they want to go but anyway it's very exciting but just this was civic projects you're working on let's see if i got it right one thousand days nonstop mars sea odyssey nonstop and as you were saying this is the longest nonstop voyage in history where you had those well that's what i'm preparing to do you know i guess you know the history of man on the sea very very precisely we know that in columbus is they nothing much happened before their time where people could have gone longer at sea we know that the smartest and brightest sailors of their age by the time they were a month at sea they were dying of scurvy they didn't know about these things we know that perhaps   viking well know what they did and the and columbus this time you have a columbia columbus they had the guts to do that and ship columbus sailed thirty three days of the canary islands and that through its crew was freaking out including the pins own brothers who captained the other two sure later when they tried to sail south of the equal or mean were dying at the quatre from bad food in from scurvy the point being is that they were really nervous about sailing out into the great ocean you know the great ocean sea because i mean they didn't know that you know they didn't routinely take those trips how and how magellan could have gone across the pacific is really staggering to me in that new interim yeah but we've learned a lot now and it we got a record what's the record set is a record set by let's say you're  the one you're going to try and set in a certain sense in your bones and it's going to be away from sight of land yes for the longest time that a human being is ever done that and you're tied into mars because that's about the same amount of time it takes  from my years of experience on the high seas and the sea is the sky and the ocean moving there's no land around you it's really a lot like being in in space yes i was and your ability to adapt to that extreme isolated environment for an extended period of sustains you you know in that austere environment where there is nothing else at all but elements of nature too harsh to exist out there so you have yourself and your rich inner world and your environment that's around you your little space ship or your little boat which is like a little space that's right it is like a spree ship and things have to be shipshape to and you have to know what you're doing in order to be able to function in it and it can propose  people this fellow this french fellow that you met out in the pacific what was his name was sent the world's renard want to see it right now he had set a world record in terms of time at sea and so forth right around the world and a half in about a year's time  when i decided i was going to antarctica which is the ultimate voyage for a small sailboat you did you'd have to go further away than that that's right yeah so i didn't really well i do after that whereby i will continue to evolve and i didn't see it as a day that i want to challenge myself or set record you don't see that no i don't i see what i what i'm doing is what is wet i could see that i could evolve myself and mankind when  watches yeah the press is there the stories are there people follow it and i gear a lot of what i'm doing towards inspiring kids and teaching kids that they would have to learn the subjects they're learning in school in junior high whether they know why or not if they want to be able to follow their own dream but what i do every subject that they're learning in school is what i had to learn in order to do what i do so you're not going to encourage all those kids to quit school and run away and do if they were lucky enough to have those opportunities then it would be a great use it would be for the great inspiration for the youth in order for them to think that way to do it to live the life of an adventurer the life of an adventure the list of physical skills that knowing about food and nutrition and knowing about yourself and how you can react in certain situations so forth or you won't make it very far yet you would make it very far and you're learning self sufficiency which is a that's a good thing to teach in this time write it yourself right it's about you think it is a good thing to have it's own self that's sort of visions learning how to use alternative energy learning had adapt to the environment without hurting the the environment you know for you have a real feel for the environment and for all of those things but i'm really one step beyond them and people take sailboats to sea and they do education and they do ecology and all of that you know they do this in normal things that what sailors do you know i'm more of an extreme sportsman and extreme naturally and a visionary so i'm doing what's never been done and i've been doing what's never been done before yeah so ecology is that is that is an issue that's part of me yes but the real important thing is to be able to combine everything you know and take a step where no one's ever things jocks or athletes who who think athletic things and do athletic talk they're not people who have had months and years separated from society so that they could develop an inner philosophy that takes them to a way of thinking that's different than sportive thinking which is tied into the media which is tied into the to the club all of this sort of i haven't had a chance to to break away and understand something that's different then the normal knowledge that they're all connected yes so they're part of the norm actually and i see them more as part of the how would you associate with downhill racers astronauts you know adventurous mountain climbers or ntellectual expiration or even let's say political group of people that are trying to lead a nation or a group or something into some sort of a new way leadership gandhi or something like that who had of course would you associate with that kind of thing or  about them i don't mean yeah right you know when i sailed the smallest boat across the atlantic ocean i had to leave all things behind in order to adapt to that moment the best that i could  changing weather more shallow more shallow water different kinds of way the shipping lanes and ships you know i'm out in the on the high seas it's actually easier for me out there sailing because i'm not dodging though you're thinking you're thinking help us we're still looking for a major sponsor to help support the voyage you know looking for a major media company that will get us the satellite equipment so that i can do a live show from the boat great ok great that's great you're going to have you're going to have it's going to be public access from the connection to the internet both feed in and out from your the site and the best possible that we can do it depends on the relationship that we're able to develop there with the sponsor right and a media company who wants to develop the content from the longest voyage in history yeah  interested there people can understand it no matter what their level of thinking oh yeah from every rock anybody could under here is someone who's out at sea longer than anyone's ever been you know didn't think it possibly you know how is it possible for him to do what is he  television people could check in with you and people with a nightly news could have their they're there check in with read every night because they read hours ago and while i'm out here with a dolphin or i'm in the mood you know like that sort of thing it would be something that would really be an inspiration to a whole lot of people around the six billion people in this world who's looking is an issue or maybe right will that thing off i wish all the best you know i you know i really think it's an exciting kind of proposition you've done and what an interesting life and i really enjoy that there's so many questions that come to my mind but it's high adventure and i really thank you really very much ok for coming in to this program and i wish you all the best and anyone who's out there in the environment we're going to put contact information here at the end so somebody who might be  interested can contact him and then you're also looking for some media people who might be interested in picking up and communicating that's a credible odyssey we go this is didn't have it in columbus didn't have a basket big gama didn't