He spent 2-plus years alone at sea. Now, he wants to train Mars astronauts on his schooner
Scientists estimate that if humans ever reach Mars, the one-way trip to the red planet alone could take up to a year.
Then, the astronauts would likely have to spend another year there to wait for Mars and Earth to realign before making the long trek home.
“So, that’s almost three years together that you’re with the same group of people in a confined space,” said Soanya Ahmad, part of the crew of the 70-foot wooden schooner, Anne, which has been anchored off Virginia Key this week.
Ahmad is part of a crew of nine people onboard the Anne, which is getting ready to sail to Boca Chica, Texas, home to Elon Musk’s SpaceX’s launch site.
They hope to convince the billionaire that they can train astronauts to make the long, lonely journey to Mars aboard the more than 40-year-old craft, which they call a “starship.”
The leader of the expedition, North Carolina-based artist and sailor Reid Stowe, holds the record for the longest non-stop, at-sea voyage. He accomplished the feat aboard the Anne, which he built in 1978 and named after his mother.
That adventure started in April 2007 from New Jersey with only Reid, 69, and Ahmad, 36, aboard the Anne. Stowe’s goal, for which he prepared for two decades, was to spend 1,000 days on the ocean without coming to port and without having to be resupplied.
The major cargo on the boat was hundreds of pounds of food like nuts, pasta and sprouts, along with gallons of fresh water.
The first interruption of the trip came in February 2008 after 306 days while the Anne was between South Africa and Antarctica. Ahmad, the couple discovered, was pregnant with their now 12-year-old son Darshen.
“We had already discussed that if anything happened to her, I would have her rescued at sea and I would go on. Because, I worked on doing the thousand-day voyage for 20 years before I was able to set off,” Stowe said this week standing in the Anne’s pilot house. “So, I had a lot of people who had helped in a lot of ways, and my mind was set, do or die.”
Stowe radioed Australian Jon Sanders, himself a legendary sailor who’s circumnavigated the globe 11 times, to arrange for Soanya to be taken off the boat. Sanders, along with members of the Royal Perth Yacht Club, met up with the Anne and took Ahmad to Australia. She gave birth to Darshen in New York in July of that year.
Stowe spent the next nearly 850 days — or 2 1/3 years — on the Anne alone before arriving in New York City in July 2010. In total, he spent 1,152 days on the vessel.
“On his own. By himself on this boat,” Ahmad said. “He spent another 846 days without stopping and without seeing land or another person.”
Stowe, Ahmad and the rest of the Anne’s crew are now embarking on what they refer to as a “Mars Ocean Analog.” In short, they believe spending long periods of time in the isolated confines of the Anne is a similar scenario to what astronauts would find themselves in should they ever embark on a mission to Mars.
Stowe said he’s been in contact with NASA about tailoring the program to train its astronauts, but they weren’t too receptive to working with the eccentric artist, who once plied his trade in the early 1980s scene sharing the same orbit with painters like Keith Haring and Julian Schnabel, according to the New York Times.
Jean-Michel Basquiat painted a portrait of Stowe, which was sold by Christie’s at auction in 2000 for $94,000, the Times reported.
“They only work with people who do exactly what they tell you to do,” Stowe said of NASA. “And, I don’t seem to be that kind of person.”
He now has his sites set on Musk.
“He’s the one who is leading the way toward Mars, and I’m going, ‘We’ve got the experience that the people who are going need to have. And, we’ve got the program that we can train the astronauts,’” Stowe said. “Before they go on a spaceship to go to space, they should go on a starship at sea and see how they get along together. And, see how they can handle it.”
John Wolfe, the captain of the Anne, said the comparison of seafaring and space travel gets especially close at night.
“You’re dealing with isolation. You’re dealing with constant motion. You’re dealing with resources, a lot of the same stuff you’re dealing with on a spaceship,” Wolfe said. “And, you know, like we’re fond of saying, when you’re out sailing at night, you’ve got the whole firmament above. Also, you’ve got the phosphorescence, you know, sparkling in the water behind you. And, it feels like you’re in this big void, essentially.”
Stowe said that training at sea for a long journey in space beats land training or training in a simulated environment because once you’re underway, you can’t just call it quits.
“You have to have courage to be out at sea, and you know the sea has overwhelmed every type of boat through the ages, even the greatest boats,” Stowe said. “Therefore, you have to overcome fear to be out there. And when you’re in that situation, it’s very different from being in a [simulated] space capsule where you can walk out when you don’t like it.”
The current journey is funded through Stowe’s art, some of which is exhibited in the Manolis Project studio gallery in Little Haiti.
Most of the crew on the journey to Texas has been with Stowe and Wolfe since before the Anne left the Wilmington, North Carolina, area in January. All of them have years of experience working on boats, from ecotour boats on the Cape Fear River, like Eric Goss and Andrew West, to crewing yachts, like Gwen Whitney and Kate Wicks.
Whitney, 31, is a recent arrival, having joined the crew about three weeks ago in Palm Beach when the Anne moored in the harbor there after a 20-day trip from North Carolina.
“I was on a mega yacht, and the Anne got towed in right next to us, and I saw them all hugging as they arrived, and they were all very excited,” said Whitney, 31.
She and Wicks, 36, went over to the Anne on a dinghy and Reid and the crew cooked dinner for them.
“And I said I need to be part of this crew. About three years ago, I read an article about Reid, and I didn’t realize this was the boat. And he had this art show in Palm Beach. I’m also a painter. And there was this kind of connection, and I felt the need to join this journey.”
Along the way, the old schooner needed repairs, and the crew continues to paint the vessel and maintain it themselves.
“This boat is historic,” said Goss, 34. “It’s really wonderful to see it being restored and brought back to life.”
The Anne will likely be in port off Virginia Key until the end of next week, Wolfe said. They wanted to get moving sooner, but the weather is forecast to be more favorable for making way by Thursday or Friday, said the ship’s captain.
Once en route to Texas, they hope not to have to stop as the ship sails past Key West and then north across the Gulf of Mexico to Texas. The crew fully expects to encounter some rough seas along the way. But, they consider themselves seasoned, and they’ve already seen that the Anne is able to tackle the unfavorable conditions.
“We made it 20 days across the Atlantic in the middle of winter,” said West, 30. “It was a rough time, but we did it.”
This story was originally published March 27, 2021 at 6:30 AM.
