LOS ANGELES — Zac Sunderland, who left the Los Angeles coast 13 months ago with a bold ambition to become the youngest person to sail around the world alone, returned to complete that quest this morning.
Sunderland, 17, who was greeted offshore and escorted in by an armada of well-wishers aboard dozens of sailboats and fancy yachts, cleared the breakwater beneath a clearing sky and stepped ashore in bright sunshine.
There, hundreds had gathered to meet a teenager from Thousand Oaks, Calif. Not long beforehand, Sunderland’s younger brother Toby, 11, proclaimed it “Zac Day” and hoped it would be celebrated with cake.
Sunderland, who departed when he was 16 on June 14, 2008, becomes the youngest person to have sailed alone around the world. He beat a record held by Australia’s Jesse Martin, who was 18 when he finished his voyage in 1999.
After departing on a westerly course, Sunderland crossed three oceans and five seas and crossed the equator twice, covering more than 25,000 miles. He endured a pirate scare, a broken boom, broken tiller, broken forestay rigging and a broken bulkhead, and he was swamped and almost washed overboard by a rogue wave off Grenada.
He returns to a house about 40 miles northwest of Los Angeles that he will resume sharing with six younger brothers and sisters. His parents did not give his room to any of his siblings. Instead, they used it to store T-shirts and other memorabilia for sale on his Web site.
Laurence Sunderland, Zac’s father, watched his son mature during his odyssey.
“He left thinking that he knew a lot about life, and the difference now is, he does,” he said. “You look into his eyes; he’s very much a deep thinker now. He tries to anticipate things more so now, before they happen.”
Some questioned the wisdom of letting a teenager embark on what could be a risky adventure.
“This is our whole life, boating, and Laurence has felt a huge amount of responsibility,” Zac’s mother, Marianne Sunderland, said early in the trip. “Zac has had all the best safety equipment — from satellite phones to his own meteorologists, and everyone to help him. With modern technology there’s no reason why he shouldn’t be successful.”
For Zac, there were certainly some difficulties of being alone at sea for such long stretches.
“The hardest thing to get used to is that there’s no normalcy,” he said at one point. “Every day is different. Never being anywhere at a certain time is hard to get used to.”
Karen Thorndike of Seattle, who 11 years ago became the first American woman to solo-circumnavigate the planet, said Sunderland would harbor this remarkable “secret” for the rest of his life.
“He’s done something amazing. … There are no words to describe it, and it’s his secret,” she said. “… If he didn’t really know it before, he learned it along the way. And that’s the biggest thing you realize — is that you don’t have to know it all before you do something, as long as you know that you can figure out how to learn how to do it.”
Unfortunately for Sunderland, a Brit named Mike Perham, who is a few months younger, embarked on a similar quest in November and is expected to complete his solo-circumnavigation, aboard a 50-foot racing yacht, in about three weeks.
Perham’s campaign is different than Sunderland’s in that it’s fully sponsored and involves a larger, faster and much more expensive craft. These facts have not been lost on those supporting Sunderland, who is aboard an older 36-foot Islander sailboat.
“The sails on the other guy’s boat are probably as expensive or more expensive as Zac’s whole boat,” said Charlie Nobles, executive director of the American Sailing Association, which has certified Sunderland’s circumnavigation. “It’s like one guy’s got a Ferrari and the other guy’s got a VW. There’s really no comparison.”
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