Sailors rely on wind patterns and currents to make decisions about the expeditions they take, tracking weather patterns along the way and adjusting their route as necessary. But climate change has made winds less consistent and weather patterns less predictable. How does that impact sailing?
John Kretschmer is the President of John Kretschmer Sailing and the author of several books about his voyages at sea, including his latest release, Sailing to the Edge of Time: The Promise, the Challenges and the Freedom of Ocean Voyaging. On this episode of Reversing Climate Change, John joins Ross to explain how he came to love boats and books, describing how sailing facilitates deep and powerful intellectual discussion.
John weighs in on how climate change has impacted the way he plans and conducts passages, offering insight on how the trade winds and the Gulf Stream have changed in the last 30 years. Listen in to understand how sailors cope with volatile weather and find out how climate change has influenced the expeditions John is planning for 2021 and 2022.
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Resources:
John’s Celestial Navigation Workshop
Sailing Alone Around the World by Joshua Slocum
Voyage of the Liberdade: A Journey from Brazil to America in a Hand-Built Boat by Joshua Slocum
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: Hey everyone, welcome to season two of Reversing Climate Change. We are doing that podcast thing now and launching a Patreon. You can find it at patreon. com slash noripodcasts. There are various tiers with different types of goodies available. Do you want to receive a special newsletter digest of what norinauts are reading that week? Be a part of a nori book club? Get special access to nori events? Go take a look at patreon. com slash noripodcasts for what we’re offering. And in that spirit of being lean in that startup kind of way that, you know, we like to do, this list of goodies is subject to change and we’d very much like your feedback.
Is there something that you’d really like to see but it isn’t listed here? Honest feedback does a lot to help us shape what we offer to you. You can send an email to podcast. nori. com or fill out our podcast survey anonymously in our newsletter which you can find at nori. com slash subscribe. And thank you so much for listening to another season of Reversing Climate Change. Hello and welcome to the Reversing Climate Change podcast. I’m Ross Kenyon. Today we’re talking sailing and climate change. We have John Kretschmer on the show, author and sailor, I think it goes without saying, author of many books about sailing, many travelogues, At the Mercy of the Sea, Flirting with Mermaids, Cape Horn to Starboard, Sailing a Serious Ocean, and most recently, Sailing to the Edge of Time, The Promise, The Challenges, and the Freedom of Ocean Voyaging.
Hi, John.
John Kretschmer: Hey Ross, nice to be here.
Ross Kenyon: It is very nice to have you here because we tried to schedule and then was a tropical storm or is it a hurricane or is it both depending on when you’re asking that got in the way of us doing this? It was both. It was tropical storm Laura, then hurricane Laura, and then tropical storm Laura again.
John Kretschmer: And she conspired to screw up our trip. So we had to reschedule.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. And then you went AWOL on me for a while. I’m like, I hope I’m not... I ended up checking the news too to not make sure that it wasn’t an article for John Kretschmer died at sea.
John Kretschmer: Well, the slogan for my sailing business is never lost. It’s hard to find. Sometimes I go dark.
Ross Kenyon: That makes sense. It’s okay. It worked out. We have you here now. I hope it was okay. Was it a scary process or was it just part and parcel of your trade?
John Kretschmer: Yeah, more or less that, but it was a trip, it was just kind of an unsatisfying sail in that we had periods of calm winds and then periods of really wicked thunderstorms and a lumpy sea. So you just couldn’t get your momentum. You couldn’t kind of find your stride. It was just kind of scratching it out and it turned out to be fine. It’s interesting and sometimes I poo-poo technology, but The combination of AIS and radar allowed us to steer around shipping and thunderstorms pretty easily. It was fine. It wasn’t one of the great sales.
It probably won’t make it into a book.
Ross Kenyon: You didn’t let your sextant hear what you just said, did you?
John Kretschmer: No, I did not. It’s funny you mention that because we’re sitting in Maryland now and We do these workshops, and obviously in these times it’s very challenging, but we have two celestial navigation workshops coming up, and we have had a really good response. We’ve capped them at a small size because of COVID, but there’s an incredible interest in celestial navigation these days. In fact, I just got a new sextant for the workshop. I was pretty excited.
Ross Kenyon: That’s great. I have a theory for why that might be. And it’s come up on the show so, so often. But I think it goes along with this general trend towards people living in cities, primarily working on their computers, living in small spaces, and they’re just dying to do They will sign up for whole hog animal butchery classes, whole animal butchery, which if you told your parents or grandparents that you were paying someone hundreds of dollars to get covered in blood and deal with viscera, they would think this was absurd.
But we just want these sort of tactile, direct experiences that are not otherwise available to us.
John Kretschmer: I totally, 100% agree with you. Because the reality is GPS is the technology of our lives, but there’s not much reward to using it. And celestial navigation is not all that accurate. It’s a bit of a pain, but it’s fundamentally rewarding. And it forces you to look outside and look overhead and it’s more than even the star aspect of it is that you connect to the ocean in a really, really succinct way where your position depends on you reckoning with celestial bodies. That sounds so wooshy, but it is such a, it’s just a great feeling and there’s a huge interest in it right now.
And ironically, when I started as a sailor, I had a little navigation school back in Fort Lauderdale. And in those days, you had to learn celestial navigation because there was no GPS and it was hated. It was this miserable topic. You had to work your way through with all this math. And today, people are dying to get into classes because it’s seen in a more spiritual way, if you will.
Ross Kenyon: I can see that link and why people are yearning for experiences like that. Also, I’m happy to hear that my instinct is somewhat correct. I always like hearing that. We are definitely going to get into topics like that, but maybe while we still have the chance, we should start with your origins and how you came to make landfalls for a living. How did you end up in such an amazing overlap? I’m How’d you get here, John?
John Kretschmer: You know, that’s a simple question, and I seem to find different answers for it all the time. But it certainly wasn’t a career path I checked off in school. I was a pretty dismal student. I was a college athlete, and I had sort of screwed up my latest college scholarship. And my mom and I had a meeting of the minds, or had a meeting, literally. And she said, you know, I know you’re not as stupid as you seem. But you need to change course. So she made me a deal. If I worked really hard for six months, whatever I made, she would match provided I bought a little sailboat and sailed away because that’s all I wanted to do.
I was so interested in that. And it’s not as though I grew up sailing. I was one of these kids in yacht clubs or anything near that. I was far from that. But I had sort of fallen and Under the Romance of Sailing, there’s a body of literature about great single-handed sailors, and I had read all that, and I was just dying to have a genuine ocean experience, and she sort of called my bluff. And I bought this little 27 foot sailboat and started sailing in Florida and stumbling around. And gradually I learned to navigate.
Celestial navigation was really my ticket into becoming a quote unquote professional sailor. And I launched this very, very, I don’t know, maybe hubristic expedition to sail from New York to San Francisco around Cape Horn. And I was woefully unprepared, but we managed to pull it off in a 32-foot boat, and I wrote a book about it. And that kind of was how this whole program of mine came together. And I’ve been sailing and writing ever since.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, and that’s Cape Horn to Starboard.
John Kretschmer: Yeah, kind of a coming-of-age story, really. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s become a classic. And then also, yeah, I also love that literature, sailing literature in general and travelogues broadly. But I imagine you’re referencing books like Joshua Slocum’s famous one and many others.
John Kretschmer: Exactly. Yeah. And there’s no question, Sailing Alone Around the World was an influential book in my life and many other sailors. Yeah. And the whole body of literature on, it’s interesting you say that about sailing books, Ross, because I sometimes wonder why they endure. Because sometimes the writing is not always spectacular. But to me, there’s two levels. There is the honesty that the sea forces on you. It’s really a difficult place to bullshit. You get revealed for who you are very quickly. And I think secondly, at least it seems outwardly, and this is interesting on a climate change podcast, Because when you go sailing, you do have a connection to sailors of every era.
I do think that Odysseus could get dropped down into the cockpit of our boat and probably figure out how to sail it. I don’t think he’d be able to drive a plane. But I think the connection between sailing and sailors of now and sailors of yore really connects. To me, that’s one of the reasons these books endure. We feel this kinship with mariners of each age. At least I feel that way.
Ross Kenyon: I definitely think that’s a part of it. I used this opportunity of you coming on the show to read all of those amazing books that I hadn’t yet read and call that work. I have my own form of dream job here, really. But yeah, Slocum’s book is fascinating, both because of how quaint it is. He’ll be like, oh, I pulled into the harbor in some Latin American country and the Navy was there and they really helped me and did all this stuff. I can’t imagine the Navy doing anything like that these days for liability reasons.
And then also fighting pirates around Cape Horn as well.
John Kretschmer: Black Pedro, yeah.
Ross Kenyon: How do you beat that? Your trip parallels that one too, at least for part of it.
John Kretschmer: I think the thing about Slocum, if I hope your readers will be interested, your listeners are interested in this, but Slocum really had an ability to be tongue in cheek and write in this quaint, simple Yankee style. I mean, his book was a bestseller. You can imagine that at the turn of the century. But what you don’t learn is that before he shoved off, he was one of the most Most experienced sailors in the world. If, I mean, you could probably have made a case he was the most experienced sailor.
He’d been captain and part owner of one of America’s last viable fully rigged commercial sailing ships. He had sailed around the world numerous times as a working sailor. The beauty of his book is that it’s so tongue in cheek and it’s so, so gentle and yet he handles things that are remarkable. And there’s just humility eking out from those pages. But at the same time, this guy, he really knew what he was doing.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, wow. I didn’t even pick up on that. And it’s at least partially understated Yankee persona, perhaps. Yeah. Because at the beginning, he’s like, oh, yeah, I fixed a boat up. I found one. And then I just rebuilt the boat. Is that just a thing that happened 100 years ago? Is someone would just know how to do that?
John Kretschmer: I think that, again, that slocum was particularly skilled. I mean, there’s another story in his life. And it’s an incredible little book, if you ever find it, called The Voyage of the Libre Dad. So he had this beautiful commercial catch that he shipwrecked in Brazil. And he was completely broke with his wife and family there. And he literally on the beach, decked over, kind of refinished a dugout canoe and turned it into a sailboat and sailed it back to Massachusetts. I mean, he really had a remarkable life. And just, yeah, I think that mariners of his age could turn their hand to anything.
If you had to fix the boat, you didn’t pull into a boatyard per se. You fixed it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. What would you even do now? So many boats are fiberglass or steel or ferrocement or whatever. You land in Brazil. I guess your boat might not even be wood. How would you even do it?
John Kretschmer: Yeah, it’s true. You have to figure out a way to be resourceful for sure. And it’s an interesting thing about the sailing life in general is that you start out being really involved in sailing typically. And as you proceed, you become... Really a jack of all trades and you learn how to do fiberglass and you rewire the boat and then you have to fix the diesel and all of these things are just part of the equation. And I think that even though it’s not maybe the same woodworking skills that Slocum and his crew had, but you still have to be resourceful.
I think that’s one of the surprises of people who get into the sailing life. How much of it still falls to you?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I originally wrote this question as a contrasting point, but maybe it’s similar for that reason. So, so much of what we’ve been reading and talking about on the show has been in the agrarian Wendell Berry school of thinking. I’m not sure if you’ve come across his writing before. Yeah. You have, yeah.
John Kretschmer: Yeah, for sure.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. So small scale farming, being rooted in place, community, how important that is for a life well lived. And you are in some ways the opposite. And I associate your style of living with someone like Heraclitus and no man steps in So are you more alike than I originally thought? Am I onto something there?
John Kretschmer: It’s a really interesting contrast because I think we are more alike in that sailing and the way I’ve done it, especially the last 20 years with this boat and with kind of the group of people. We’ve formed a really tight community. It’s been a business for me, but it’s gone way beyond that where people come on trips with me year after year and all over the world. There is the basic element of the boat. The boat becomes really important when you’re out to sea for all the obvious reasons, but there’s an element of it, too, that is something that bonds us together, and working on the boat is a part of it.
I have customers, people who have paid me money to come on trips, will come to the boatyard at their own expense, on their own time, when I’m doing a project to help me out, because they know I usually need it. But I think it’s deeper than that. They feel this connection to the boat. And then unlike a small farm, the boat goes out into the wider world and has adventures and has drama for sure. But we’re all connected to it in a really important way. And so there is a similarity.
I like that. You know, I was an early fan back in school of transcendentalism and the connection to nature itself. And I’ve taken a, I’ve pushed out in my other writings where I sometimes think land people, as we call them, don’t always see the ocean as the wilderness that it is. But it’s an extreme nature, it’s ultimate nature. But that connection to it is very, you know, it’s a waterborne agrarian connection in a way. Crazy as that sounds.
Ross Kenyon: It is a bit odd, but I sort of like it. You can contrast that with someone like Odysseus who ostensibly is trying to get back to Ithaca, but also seems quite content to be meandering around too. It doesn’t seem like he took the most direct route either. He gets distracted pretty easily. Yeah. So maybe it’s somewhere between the two. Well, you know what’s really interesting about Odysseus?
John Kretschmer: Because he’s really a thematic character to me in most nautical writing. And it’s this contrast between having an adventure and getting home. And you can read about Odysseus pretty much in any way you want. And I think that sailing, even to this day, when you shove off on a passage, I’m really of the mind that you should enjoy it and really enjoy it. There’s so much minutia that you can observe in the ocean that is just incredible. And at the same time, you stay the course to get where you’re going.
And I think it’s sort of the struggle of Odysseus. We live every day when we make a passage.
Ross Kenyon: That’s true. You definitely see it that way. And it seems like there is such a strong connection in your writing to... Well, I don’t know. Are you... What is the most polite way to say this, John? You weren’t a good student, yet you’re reading all of these difficult books, works of literature, all the way back from the classics to now. Your writing is filled with references to things that you’re reading. What is the connection between the two, or is it just coincidence that you are a guy who likes sailing and also good books?
John Kretschmer: No, definitely not. It was something that they developed together. I mean, I was not a great student, but I would typically skip class and go to the library and check out a bunch of books and go find a place to read them. For me, Ross, boats and books have always been closely linked. I wrote in my last book that I discovered the ocean in books, and it really is true. And as much as I talk about those great sailing books, it was... Other books that really kind of led me down the path to wanting to write about sailing.
I didn’t want to write a travel log about this or that much as in reality I’ve done a lot of that. But the larger connection to... To the freedom that being at sea offers, to the incredible responsibility. And to what is really the central theme of almost all my books is that how you spend your days is essentially how you spend your life. And to me, days at sea, really, they seem to last longer. You experience them deeply. And so you live a really intense life. And some days you’d love for them to roll by quickly.
But so when I encounter the classics, oftentimes deal with that theme. We were joking about Zorba before we started talking here. Zorba essentially becomes someone who has decided he lives each day as it comes his way. And as romantic and lovely as that sounds, it’s a really hard way to live. But being an ocean sailor, you respect that so profoundly. I loved Zorba before I went sailing. And after I went sailing, it became even more important to me as a book.
Ross Kenyon: You don’t call Taji your Bubulina, do you? No, I don’t. That might be a little bit inside baseball. I think you’ve had to have seen the movie or read the book. I can see that because he very much is interested in experience. He’s not interested in abstract ideas. But sailing allows you the space to think those. But it seems like a nice pairing of the intellect with work with your that your experience too?
John Kretschmer: 100%. I think that is the real attraction for many people who come sailing with me. We have all the technology on the boat. You can communicate every day if you want. You can send text emails. You can make satellite phone calls. And many people come. And they get all the data on how to do it, and then they never communicate at all because they’re experiencing something that is hard to find today, space, where we’re not interrupted. I mean, you and I are talking here. Someone calls me on my phone. I pick up my phone and see who it is.
I mean, to me, that’s insanity, but it seems to be land life and our busy land lives. At sea, we might have a four-hour discussion. Without it being something we schedule and it grows organically and we might disagree. But because we’re in this environment where we need to rely on each other and we like each other and trust each other, we’re able to have really deep, powerful discussions. And another thing happens that seems missing a little bit in our dialogue today is that we generally find common ground. Sailing is so difficult to schedule.
You get a fair wind. You start calculating when you’re going to make landfall. And then two hours later, the wind shifts and you go, oh, that calculation. I shouldn’t have even wasted the brain cells on that. And because you’re going to get there when you get there. And that’s a really hard concept in our world where people turn on Google Maps to drive to the grocery store and it tells you it’s 11 minutes this way or 13 minutes that way. Whereas ocean passage making is really still so far from that.
And so the space that it provides you is to me a just magical thing.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I connect with that pretty strongly. I moved to Los Angeles years ago from Phoenix and I rode my bike there and it took me, what, 10 days, 11 days or so. Wow, what a great expedition that was. Yeah. I think back on it often, I think it was one of the happiest times of my life, primarily because there was no... I didn’t feel any of the weight though because you’re a writer so you know every moment that you’re not writing you’re thinking about like oh I should probably be writing or oh I need to go and jot down this idea.
John Kretschmer: So just to be clear, for me, sailing means shoving off on a long ocean passage. That’s kind of my definition of sailing. But I’m really focused on the job at hand, and I’m never more observant or efficient, but I’m not interested in writing at all. I just can’t carve out that space, that work ethic that writing requires. Writing, I think, for me at least, maybe for you too, I have to force everything else out of my mind. And focus on what I’m writing. And sailing is just the opposite. I have room for things to flow through my brain.
And yet at the same time, I’m in the moment. If there’s a dark line of clouds forming on the horizon, you can’t just say, oh, well, I’m going to go inside. No, you’re going to deal with it in a very physical, intellectual and emotional way. And I love that. I just flat out love it. I’ve gotten old enough now to where those encounters, it’s an interesting thing that’s happened to me. They’re less stressful than they used to be. And I just view them more and more as the pact we make with the ocean and with nature.
And yeah, it’s part of the job. I got to ride my bike. I’ve got to put the miles in. I got to find a place to sleep. I mean, that’s been sort of the way I’ve lived a lot of my life. And consequently, when I write, it seems like a lot of work.
Ross Kenyon: Okay, cool. Yeah, it sounds like we’ve lived a little bit of a parallel experience there, even though you’re full-time. I’m just a part-time Voyager, you could say. No, it doesn’t really matter. Each one counts equally. Yeah, I suppose so. Okay, John, we have to get to climate change because it’s the name of the show. I can’t just invite authors whose writing I really like on the show. I have to find some way to make it about climate change. We found that the reason why, which is climate change, and that clearly has a big impact on you crossing oceans, taking people out, and also being able to write about it.
Climate change seemingly is a very large concern for your line of work.
John Kretschmer: It is. And I’ll just take a second here, if you don’t mind, Ross, to thank you, though, for the way you started this, because you somehow understood that the philosophy and the living in the moment and all of these things, which can just sound cliched, are essential parts of what I’ve done. And you’ve read the books and things. That’s super cool, because it’s not always the case. But to get to your direct question today, One of the aspects of climate change that we see in the sailing world when it comes to planning passages, there are different criteria and different assumptions than there used to be.
This is empirical information. I am certainly not a scientist. I’d much rather write a poem than work out any equation. But that being said, there’s no denying that 40 years of this has just changed the way I do business for sure. An interesting point is my mom sailed around the world with her friend Tim in the 1980s, in the early 80s. And they did the classic trade wind circumnavigation, which not to diminish it at all, but it’s pretty straightforward. And in those days, they had no interest or ability to get weather reports.
They basically had one criteria for choosing their route. They sailed at the right time of year in the right ocean. And the trade winds were well established. The cyclone seasons and hurricane seasons had really defined edges. And the winds were generally moderate. And they put together a four-year, essentially gale-free trip around the world in a 38-foot boat. And that wasn’t extraordinary. And today, people are sailing around the world all the time still, I mean a handful, but it’s a lot different. The prevailing winds are less prevailing in a way, or at least they’re more interesting to interpret The trade winds can be less consistent.
And probably the biggest change for us is the extension of tropical seasons all over the world. And so now there are old sayings like by October 1 in the 1980s, you were ready to sail anywhere in the Atlantic because if you did encounter a hurricane, it was a really rare thing. And today that hurricane season seems to extend well into November and even into December. That’s just the fact of our life. So we deal with what’s a different climate than what it was even 30, 40 years ago.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. And making those late fall winter passages across the Atlantic, which you documented in your writing, that didn’t seem to be that easy of a passage to begin with, but now you have extra risk that’s just built into it.
John Kretschmer: Exactly. It was always a bit of a threading of the needle when to leave, say, Nova Scotia or New England on the Atlantic side here when hurricane season was essentially finished, but before the onset of the nor’easter gales that are a feature of the fall and winter here. But now that needle has gotten, that point is even smaller because hurricanes often last into late October, early November, and they seem active now that time of year. And there is no doubt, every person in the Northeast will tell you the Nor’easters come sooner and more So from a sailing perspective, you really are on top of it.
An interesting observation, though, is that the opposite side of that equation is that the weather modeling that we’re able to get today, specifically their GRIB files, these digital weather models that you are able to download even at sea, are crazy accurate. So in the old days, you kind of had predictable weather patterns that you just counted on. And today you have less predictable weather patterns, but more knowledge of the weather than ever before. And so you’re able to cope with it as a sailor for sure, but it’s a lot more dynamic and you’re making a lot more decisions.
You don’t just push off and set up and assume you’ll be there X. You’re dealing with weather changes more frequently than we used to.
Ross Kenyon: And that’s true even in the case of trade winds, which maybe is worth explaining to someone who doesn’t have a nautical background. How exactly do they work classically and what’s happening with them now?
John Kretschmer: Yeah. So, you know, the winds of the world are, they connect to the Coriolis effect and the earth was really made for sailors the way I can see it. We’re tilted on our axis and we rotate nicely and it creates winds and day and night and seasons. And It’s a nice world for traveling by sailboat, for sure. Specifically, the latitudes between, say, 5 degrees north of the equator and 25 degrees north, and the same in the southern hemisphere, these areas have really consistent easterly winds. They’re rarely achieved gale force. They’re often fresh for good sailing, and those are known as the trade winds.
And they got their name because in the days of commercial sail, that’s where you wanted to be if you were in trade, if you were doing commercial sailing, moving goods around the world. They’re the stuff of sailing dreams. I mean, I’ve made lots and lots of ocean crossings in the heart of the trade winds, and it’s just nice going. Consistent winds, good wind speed. And they are definitely still there. There is no question. The trade winds are a dominant factor in all of our voyage planning, whether we’re going across them north to south or with them east to west.
But they are not as consistent as they were. And this is just not me saying it. There’s a lot of evidence of it. There’s a guy, Jimmy Cornell, who’s kind of a famous person in the sailing world who’s written books on route planning. And he’s compiled with his son new pilot charts, which are climate prediction charts. And there’s just the satellite data of the last 25 years that they’ve used has just shown that the trade winds are... Less direct than they used to be. And so consequently, it’s just another factor that you deal with.
Wow, wow.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that sounds tricky. At least the trade winds, it doesn’t sound like a huge risk. At least it just seems a bit more forecasting goes into it or a bit more thought. Or maybe part of this might be good old days effect or nostalgia seeming easier in the past.
John Kretschmer: Totally, yeah. Maybe the fact that we have this information now, we can say, wait a minute, it didn’t seem like that. There is without question some good old days effect in the way we sailors think.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I think as a group of people, I think that’s probably fair to say. I’ve seen things too about the Gulf Stream weakening too as the oceans warm. Have you had much experience or noticed much change in crossing the Gulf Stream or trying to sail with it? Also, we should probably explain what that is too.
John Kretschmer: Yeah, no, the Gulf Stream has been a major... I mean, so I’ve done the bulk of my sailing in the Atlantic. I mean, I’ve sailed across the Pacific four different times, but... My office has been the Atlantic Ocean, so the Gulf Stream is the dominant feature there. It’s a warm current that originates actually in the Yucatan Channel, and it flows between the Straits of Florida, between Florida and Cuba, up the East Coast. It kisses Cape Hatterist, and then it arcs. East, northeast across the Atlantic where it parts halfway and becomes the North Atlantic Drift Current which goes up to Ireland and then the Gulf Stream itself turns into the Canary Current which forms the Great Atlantic Gyre.
It wraps around the Atlantic. The Canary Current flows south, and then the trade winds push it west with steady east winds, and it’s a circular current, and it’s a huge part of the Earth’s climate, and it’s something sailors have been contending with for all time. In fact, Columbus is great discovery, really. He didn’t discover any of the lands he thought he did. And he was kind of a jerk as a person. But he did figure out how to sail across the Atlantic both ways. And it was primarily current driven. He stumbled into the current going back from as he went north from the Caribbean.
And that was a huge discovery because it was easy to get from Europe to the Caribbean. The trade winds and the current blow you there. But to get back, he realized he had to go north where he picked up prevailing westerly winds and essentially the Gulf Stream. So have I noticed a difference? Absolutely. So we’ve made a lot of crossings to Ireland and England over the years, and it just does not flow with a lot of oomph up that way these days. I mean, you can just open any GRIB file, you can open it today and look at the current I guarantee if you guys go to windy.
com and open it up and you will see that the Gulf Stream, instead of having the classic fork halfway across the Atlantic or just before the Azores, it just kind of peters out as it goes north. You don’t have to be a meteorologist or a climate scientist or anyone. You can be a sailor looking at wanting a prevailing current to make that trip. And it just doesn’t have any steam. And it seems to be not even seasonal. So there’s lots and lots of theories about that. And, you know, one of them is the ice melt has changed the salinity levels of the ocean.
And I’m not an expert on it, but the water, the reason the water flowed up toward Ireland was that it would then sink and it would kind of go in reverse course underwater. And with all the fresh water in it, it’s disturbed that cycle. When you sail to Ireland, they’re funny that the Irish have a way of saying things. They’ll say, Because it’s been colder there year after year, especially on the Atlantic coast. And they’ll say, we lost the Gulf Stream. By God, we’ve lost the Gulf Stream. Yeah, I mean, the water’s cooler than usual.
And the currents are, you know, just not doing their thing. Or so it seems from my little perspective.
Ross Kenyon: To date, have you had to change the way that you conduct passages? And I imagine that’s one of the principal ways your company makes money is by taking people out. Have you had to cancel, postpone, change routes? Have you already had to start making accommodations for climate change?
John Kretschmer: We have to some degree, Ross, but we’re pretty flexible on our feet and we’re a little tiny operation. I know this sounds crazy from a sailor’s perspective, but we’re taking it more seriously than ever. Just a quick example, we sailed from Bermuda to the Azores a few years ago. And the way that, and I’ve made that trip a lot of times, and the prevailing wisdom is you sail north from Bermuda until you pick up the westerly somewhere above latitude 40. And then you continue east in the westerly winds and then you drop down to the Azores.
And it’s a 1800, 1900 mile passage. But lately, the route has changed. The route is now, and it’s not just me. It’s many, many sailors write about it. And Jimmy Cornell even talks about it in his pilot charts. It’s better to stay south of 40 and find these little ribbons of wind from the wind files and follow them as opposed to just laying into what was a classic westerly passage, a westerly wind, west wind passage. And So yeah, we’ve changed our routing that way, but we’re able to cope with it.
The people that come sailing with me are looking for adventure and kind of wanting to feel their way on the ocean. So it’s not as though we’re pinned down to a schedule, but we’re certainly paying really close attention.
Ross Kenyon: Back previous to all the technological advances, were these routes just very consistent? Or was it just because we didn’t have the technology to notice these ribbons? A bit of both? What would you say?
John Kretschmer: I would say a bit of both and definitely a bit of both. And there’s that old time, good old days thinking again. However, just empirically in my case, I would have argued with you vigorously to say that you’d ever want to make that crossing below latitude 40. I would have really taken you to task on that. But it turns out that the last two times we’ve done it, that’s exactly how we’ve done it. Armed with much better information than we had before. But it’s a complex equation where the weather in the Atlantic is driven by the Bermuda High and the Azores High.
And for whatever reason, they’re not shifting as far as they used to, forcing you to kind of thread your way between weather patterns. So I think it’s a little of both. You know, you tended to have confirmation bias when you went up there and then eventually made it through the Azores. You convinced yourself that was the right move. But when I really try to look at it as analytically as I ever look at anything, I do think there’s been some change in wind direction and at least wind consistency.
Ross Kenyon: Are you preparing to make any future changes to how you conduct business?
John Kretschmer: Well, you know, actually we are because the voyaging that we have planned for next summer, let’s hope that the world kind of writes its ship on that and we can pull all this together. And certainly the following year, 2021 and 2022, are taking us much further north and south than we’ve gone before. So we’re going to go up to the Arctic. I’ve sailed up as far as Labrador previously and been around Newfoundland and have been high in the Baltic. But this time we’re going to go way up the Greenland shore and then come down the west coast of Greenland through Prince Christiansund and over to Ireland and then up to northern Norway.
And so this route is far more doable than it used to be because of the fact that there’s just a lot more open water. Interestingly, there are also more icebergs because... There’s so much more ice melt that bergs are formed, but the actual access to these areas is better than ever. I mean, the yachts are sailing through the Northwest Passage now at kind of a record rate, and that’s the same reason. And then the following year, we’re going to work our way all the way down to Patagonia, Cape Horn, and Antarctica.
And again, these destinations, while the winds are kind of potentially violent and stormy, access to the regions themselves because of global warming, they’re more accessible. So we’re making changes to our route. I’d like to say it was just because of the weather, but it’s something I just want to do before I get too old to do it again.
Ross Kenyon: Okay. Yeah, those trips, I’m sure if you’re listening, I’m sure your ears perked up and you’re wondering, how much is it to try and get on that boat for that? Because I am also running those calculations in my head. I’d love to have you come sailing with us. I think you’d really dig it. Oh, for sure. I definitely would. Are you going in Quetzal, though? Or do you need some sort of special boat that’s set up for ice?
John Kretschmer: No, it’s interesting. We’ve been mulling that over, but we are, Taji and I are just so, we really like our floating home here. It’s our home. It’s our business. It’s our world. And we’ve upgraded her in so many ways. And it was, so yeah, we’re planning to take the old girl. That’s all it is. Wow.
Ross Kenyon: Also, I imagine people listening probably were not aware that you could even sail a Northwest Passage, especially because this is one of those great, like a golden age of exploration. This is the thing that so many people were looking for. And you have things like, I don’t know if you read or saw the show, The Terror that came out.
John Kretschmer: No, but I know that I read the book. Yeah.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, yeah. So people are thinking about it. So I don’t think they know that you could actually just sail a sailboat through the Northwest Passage now.
John Kretschmer: Yeah, I mean, it’s something that’s been on my mind for probably longer than I should admit. Because when I sailed around Cape Horn, we went from New York to San Francisco. And kind of like groping for what does a 24-year-old person do next, I came up with this idea that we’d sail from New York to San Francisco again through the Northwest Passage. But in those days, in the 80s, it was totally hit and miss and much more missed. There were very few years when it opened up. But now... I mean, essentially, it’s almost become something of a bucket list item as opposed to a great expedition.
I mean, boats, there’s controversy over whether everyone should even be allowed to do it. But there isn’t as much controversy about the fact that it... I think I was reading recently that eight years in 10, it’s open right now to just kind of make your way through. And when you think about Sir John Franklin and the horror of what those early explorers went through, it seems crazy that you could slide through in a fiberglass sailboat, but boats are definitely doing it.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it’s really unbelievable. What’s the debate around? Is it, I imagine there’s like Inuit communities up there that are pretty isolated, that are not used to a bunch of sailors coming through, environmental concerns, all of the above?
John Kretschmer: It is that, although I think that sailors in general, and maybe I’m giving us a little more credit, we’re pretty environmentally aware. We are kind of on the forefront of using alternative energy. And it’s not like we’re leaving A dirty wake these days. But the thing that people question is that, so it’s a really interesting philosophical question. Sailors are very independent. And as people who might not be, this is the way the questions pose, prepared or in boats that are ready for it, if they get into trouble, is this great frontier going to be closed off or restricted as countries have to respond to emergencies?
So there have been a few boats that have gotten in trouble there and weren’t prepared to ice over for the winter and had to be rescued. And it’s triggered a discussion among adventure sailors, high latitude sailors, whether or not these people should have been trying it in the first place. And it’s an interesting controversy because on one hand, I see their point. And on the other hand, I’ve always been someone who encouraged people to follow their dreams and dreams. And, you know, be prepared, but go for it sort of thing.
And so the Northwest Passage is viewed as kind of a special place for high latitude expedition sailing. And we don’t want it screwed up by having it become a place where trouble happens. Does that make sense?
Ross Kenyon: It does make sense. I’m sure people are trying to figure out, specifically countries, trying to figure out what kind of Coast Guard coverage exists up there, what they’re responsible for.
John Kretschmer: No, for sure. There are all sorts of political reversions as well and questions in terms of who owns what. And Canada is very, very in control up there. And you have to get permission from Canada. You have to make the passage. And so, yeah, it’s a little more complicated politically than even maybe...
Ross Kenyon: And I, of course, can’t let you get away with saying that you intend to sail down to Antarctica. Surely that’s dangerous sailing. You’re going the roaring 40s to that. That’s the latitudes there around Cape Horn, right?
John Kretschmer: Yeah. It’s actually even south of that. They call it the Furious 50s.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I knew they had some sort of alliterative, terrible name for them. So you’re going to cross both of those. Is that not a concerning dangerous sale or is it moderated somehow these days?
John Kretschmer: No, it’s definitely a serious sale, but when you look at it navigationally, it’s doable. So the voyage we made all those years ago, we essentially went nonstop. We had a stop in Brazil and a stop in Chile, but we made long, long passages. This is different. This is to go... We’re going to go down the coast of South America, make our way past the Straits of Magellan where Slocum went, but down to the Beagle Channel where Darwin was and Ushuaia. And Cape Horn itself is actually an island off the tip of South America.
So, again, with the weather technology that we have, by no means do I presume... That it’s going to be easy or that you should think you could do it in a boat that wasn’t made for that or you weren’t prepared for it. But in Quetzal, that’s a two and a half to three day passage or less with the right winds. So you can find that window to blast across and have some fun and then find a window to come back. So unlike our voyage of long ago where we just stood out there in our little tiny boat and got blasted day after day, we’re going to do it in bits this time, in increments, and kind of explore the Beagle Channel, which is staggeringly beautiful, enjoy Antarctica, and then make our way north up in the fjords and the canals, as they say, of Chile, and then come out in the Pacific that way.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. Is it easier to round the horn east to west that way if you’re that far down? I imagine you’re at least not getting pushed to the shore or anything like that.
John Kretschmer: Yeah, exactly. So in that respect, rounding the horn almost, that’s a really good question because I used to take this really personally. Rounding the horn, this is like old sailor speak for sure, but in the classic sailing ship era meant that you sailed without stopping from the 50th parallel down around the horn, which lies at 56, and then back up to the 50th parallel in the Pacific. So if you drew a line on the 50th parallel and bisected the southern part of South America to go from 50 to 50, Was considered doubling the horn and that was what a Cape Horn rounding was.
So nowadays when we go down there this time and we’re hanging out in Ushuaia and then sail 80 miles down to the horn and nip around and anchor and get ready for a passage further south. In kind of a classic sailing terminology, that’s anything but a Cape Horn rounding. That’s kind of a visit to the horn. Which is still pretty challenging and should be lovely and interesting and cold and breezy. But it’s not that classic Cape Horn story.
Ross Kenyon: Understood. Yeah, I don’t want to end up on the wrong side of some sailors. I’ll get angry emails. I’m not trying to do that today.
John Kretschmer: Damn you, Ross.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, you incorrectly used sailing terminology as a non-sailor. Oh my God. Everything is a language all its own, that’s for sure. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I can talk a good game, but it’s all just books and a fair number of which are yours. Yeah. Well, I appreciate that. Yeah. That’s interesting. So then we have the Greenland and pretty far up that way and then potential Northwest Passages, Antarctica. Are any sailing voyages becoming less possible or less popular with climate change? Here’s an idea. I know going from the East Coast to Bermuda, it always seems like a good idea.
It seems like it’s close. It’s actually a lot of people get into trouble on that passage. And if hurricanes are coming later and later in the season, when do you even go to Bermuda now?
John Kretschmer: Yeah, so we’re working out all the protocols literally right now because we’re headed out at the end of October. But you nailed it because what is tricky these days are the kind of classic trans-latitudinal passages. That’s a fancy word for north to south passages during the change of season. So the classic cruising routes, for example, in the Pacific would be to go from The Pacific Northwest of California down to Mexico in the fall after hurricane season. In the Atlantic over here, it’s to go from somewhere on the East Coast to the Caribbean and often by way of Bermuda.
And so like we were talking about earlier with the vagaries of the Gulf Stream and how long hurricane season lasts, you really, you don’t have as clear a window. And so people are waiting longer and longer to make the trip, meaning they’re leaving later in the year. And it’s driven by a lot of weird factors. One of them is insurance. Most insurance companies say that you can’t be below a certain latitude, say the latitude of Bermuda, before November 1st. Because there’s a lot of nuances about insurance, but when it’s a name storm, you know, then the reinsurance kicks in.
And if it’s a name storm, you know, your classic insurance doesn’t work, all of these things. So sailors and yachts are staying in the north longer than they probably should if you just look straight at kind of the meteorological climate models because of insurance. And then they’re set up to get smacked by these northeast gales. So that window is tighter. That’s what’s a little more challenging than it used to be. Once you’re in the trade winds, you are kind of in the same dynamic we’ve always been in. And it’s good traveling as long as you’re headed westward right the way around the world.
But the north to south voyages that kind of stage us are the ones that are more challenging than ever. Okay.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah. I suppose that makes sense. Well, John, we should start thinking about wrapping this show up. Where do you normally tell people to start with your writing? Do you normally just tell them the latest book you’ve written or do you have some other approach?
John Kretschmer: I’m proud of the latest book. Edge of Time is definitely more philosophical than some of my others. The book that probably people know the most right now is Sailing a Serious Ocean. The term bestseller is a little obscure these days, but it’s been a really good-selling book. All over the world, all over the English-speaking world. The book I’m really proud of is At the Mercy of the Sea, but probably the most fun is Flirting with Mermaids. Something happened with that book recently, Ross, and I am proud of it. Lions Press put together a new imprint called Mariner’s Classics, and they chose three books.
They chose Bernard Mottessier’s The Long Way, which is truly a classic, and Sterling Hayden, the actor in his wonderful book, Wanderer, one of my favorite books of all time, and Flirting with Mermaids. Those are the three that they chose to start the imprint with, which blew me away, actually. It was kind of cool.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, that’s amazing.
John Kretschmer: But flirting is fun. You don’t have to be much of a sailor to really enjoy it.
Ross Kenyon: That’s true. Yeah. I mean, they’re all fun in their own ways and all have interesting things to say.
John Kretschmer: I really appreciate that.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, my pleasure. It’s fun to watch your writing transform to you from Cape Horn to Starbird and see. Your most recent book is seemingly the most you of all, at least from having spoken with you. But yeah, so much time talking about philosophy and literature and basically where we started the show. It’s nice that you just leaned into that so hard and that’s the space that you’re carving out for yourself.
John Kretschmer: Well, that’s much appreciated because some people wrote me saying, you know, where’s the salient? But, you know, you write enough books, you get to indulge yourself every now and then.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, well, fair enough. And then also, if people, I imagine somewhere out there in our listeners are people who their appetites are now wet by our discussion here. So there are passages that people can go on should they elect.
John Kretschmer: Yeah, by all means. You know, it’s hard to get a board. It’s a small, tiny little business and a good one, but absolutely. And more today than in recent years, just because of the dynamics of the world, if they should go to johncretsmersailing. com, And take a look at the schedule. We have partners now, Nathan and Vivian, that we just love them. And they’re doing trips with us as well. So there’s actually more opportunity than in recent years to get out there with us. And those high latitude trips are all going to be available in 2022.
So yeah, there’s good stuff out there.
Ross Kenyon: Wow. Plenty of time to plan and to make that happen.
John Kretschmer: Yeah, exactly. You have to scheme everything.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I will be, we’ll keep my eyes peeled on them.
John Kretschmer: Yeah, that’d be great. You can do a podcast from Cape Horn. That’d be pretty cool.
Ross Kenyon: Oh yeah, then Nori can pay for it. I’m sure they’ll love that bill coming their way. Cool. John Kretschmer, thanks so much for being on the show.
John Kretschmer: My pleasure, Ross. Thank you very much for having me.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, it was a lot of fun. I’m happy we got to talk sailing. I hope you listened to it and enjoyed it as well. If you like what we’re doing here, would you please write us a review on Apple Podcasts or iTunes? It helps a lot. It gets more people to listen to the show. We also have a Patreon for the show. The link is in the show notes if you’d like to support what we’re doing here. And thank you so much for listening. Well, thank you so much for listening.
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