Poor Jarle Andhøy

Those of us with an interest in boating will probably have noticed that Jarle Andhøy's Berserk has been missing for a week, in the waters off Ross Island, Antarctica. The news went out on Wednesday last week that the EPIRB on board the Berserk had been triggered, only to stop transmitting a little over a half hour later. This happened in exceptionally bad weather, with temperatures around minus forty and the wind kicking up a violent storm. My initial thought was that there wasn't much hope for the guys on board, and with the EPIRB gone, searchers probably weren't even going to recover the bodies.

It is just too easy to imagine what might have gone wrong under such circumstances. Freezing spray can sink a boat in a frighteningly short time, impacting an ice berg in ten meter seas would lead to massive damage, and otherwise trivial technical difficulties can quickly escalate to an emergency under those conditions. Once the boat is gone, the survival time of the crew would be measured in hours, not days, if they even made it into the life raft. Thus, while the rest of the world (or at least the newspapers) seemed to live on in the hope of a miracle, I quitely resigned myself to the infinite sadness of what has happened.

As luck would have it, Jarle Andhøy was off the boat at the time of the incident, taking one crew member with him on an overland expedition by ATV to the South Pole. While I was definitely happy at this news when it emerged a few days after the sinking (I think we can call it that now), I couldn't help but feel a big pang of "Ouch!". Can you imagine what Jarle has been going through the past week? Travelling for days through the desolate ice deserts of the Antarctic with all that solitude and time to ponder the loss of his friends and crew, knowing he could do nothing to help once he made it to the coast... Man, I feel your pain, and it's damn near enough to make me cry. For the first time, I don't envy your life.

Now that searches have drawn to a close, people are waking up to the fact that the three men on board must be dead, and they are levelling an unusual weight of criticism against Jarle. Some of the stuff being said seems relevant, and if it's true that they only had two survival suits on board... well, I wouldn't have done that. 'Nuff said. Then there's the bureaucrats complaining about the proper forms not being filled out. I guess that's their job, being bureaucrats and all, but if they possess even a shred of integrety, they should be able to point out that it wouldn't have made a difference this time.

However, the shit storm doesn't stop there. Now there's a sea captain who proclaims to the world that he observed the Berserk being dangerously overloaded. Excuse me? What the fuck do you purport to know about the stability requirements for that boat? A seasoned naval architect would know enough not to make a statement about it without measuring everything thoroughly and making his calculations. For all your experience, you don't know shit, so please sit back down and stop picking on a man who is in too much pain already.

At first, I was puzzled why people have reacted so strongly this time. I mean, it's not the first time a sailing yacht has been tragically lost at sea, but we don't usually see their captains being subjected to a public humiliation like this. However, when I stop to think about what Jarle Andhøy represents, it is not so puzzling any more. He has been following his dreams, which have also been the dreams of many others. In a short few years he has seen more of this world than most people do in a lifetime, and he has done so with a certain attitude. He has made the happy-go-lucky approach his trademark, and he has rubbed our faces in it by making it all seem easy. The introduction to his blog makes this point more clearly than I ever could.

That is after all the reason why the public loves him, and I for one cannot fully express my admiration for what he has done. Not the going places part - a lot of people could have done that - but putting the ragged people on the map. In some ways, he is a modern working class hero. Sadly, we know all too well what The Nice People think about working class heroes in general, and with him having invaded one of their exclusive clubs, namely bluewater cruising, it is no wonder that they have long carried a thorn in their side for him. As long as he was winning, he was damn near impossible to target, but now that he is down, TNP are flocking around for the kill. May the shame rest with them.

EDIT: The motherfuckers definitely aint done yet