Itâs called the âlongest-swim problemâ: If you had to drop someone at the place in the ocean farthest from any speck of landâthe remotest spot on Earthâwhere would that place be? The answer, proposed only a few decades ago, is a location in the South Pacific with the coordinates 48°52.5291ĘšS 123°23.5116ĘšW: the âoceanic point of inaccessibility,â to use the formal name. It doesnât get many visitors. But one morning last year, I met several people who had just come from there.
They had been sailing a 60-foot foiling boat, the MÄlama, in the Ocean Race, a round-the-world yachting competition, and had passed near that very spot, halfway between New Zealand and South America. Now, two months later, they had paused briefly in Newport, Rhode Island, before tackling the final stretch across the Atlantic. (And the MÄlama would win the race.) I spoke with some members of the five-person crew before going out with them for a sail on Narragansett Bay. When I asked about their experience at the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, they all brought up the weather.
With a test pilotâs understatement, the crew described the conditions as âsignificantâ or âstrongâ or ânoteworthyâ (or, once, âincredibly noteworthyâ). The Southern Ocean, which girds the planet in the latitudes above Antarctica and below the other continents, has the worst weather in the world because its waters circulate without any landmass to slow them down. The Antarctic Circumpolar Current is the most powerful on Earth, a conveyor belt that never stops and that in recent years has been moving faster. These are the waters that tossed Roald Amundsen and Ernest Shackleton. The winds are cold and brutal. Waves reach 60 or 70 feet. In a second, a racing boatâs speed can drop from 30 knots to five, then jump back to 30. You may have to ride out these conditions, slammed and jammed, for five days, 10 days, trimming sails from inside a tiny sealed cockpit, unable to stand up fully all that time. To sleep, you strap yourself into a harness. You may wake up bruised.