Top: Dilip Donde and Abhilash Tomy, guru and chela, pose together on the eve of Tomy's epic voyage
By Ajai Shukla
On board the Mhadei, at INS Mandovi, Goa
Even the most hard-boiled sailors believe
that it takes an unusual, and somewhat eccentric, person to circle the globe in
a sailboat, dealing single-handedly for months on end with the capriciousness
of the wind, the waves and the weather. Three years ago, Commander Dilip Donde,
a naval officer, became the first Indian to sail solo around the world, making
his epic journey in a 56-foot, Indian sailboat, the Mhadei. On Nov 1st,
Donde’s former crewmember, Lieutenant Commander Abhilash Tomy, will set sail
from Mumbai on an even more hazardous voyage: a solo, non-stop circumnavigation
of the world.
Less than 80 humans have completed such a
passage. Compared to this, more than 525 humans have travelled to space; and
some 500 mountaineers summit Mount Everest during an average climbing season.
Like no other sport, solo sailing pits a
lone human against the elements, with the dice loaded heavily in favour of
nature. The inflexible conditions that govern a solo, non-stop circumnavigation
require Tomy to traverse at least 21,600 nautical miles (or 40,000 kilometres)
under sail, without any form of engine power, with no halts, starting and
ending at the same port, and crossing the three great southern capes: Cape
Leeuwin (Australia); Cape Horn (South America); and Cape Agulhas (Africa).
The Mhadei, sailing into Cape Town on Dilip Donde's circumnavigation in 2010
I sail out on the Mhadei in Goa, as Donde
and Tomy carry out a pre-voyage check. They are clearly a comfortable team,
chattering constantly yet giving each other respect and space. Donde the
veteran is a grizzled greybeard, tanned and fit, with an easy laugh that lights
up his face. Tomy is 33, at that magical cusp of life where youth has married
experience and confidence. Lithe, powerful, alert and yet strangely calm, he
glides barefoot around the Mhadei like a gazelle on steroids.
It is hot and still outside Goa, and Tomy
scours the sea with a weather eye. “There’s some breeze,” he calls to Donde,
pointing to a patch of sea that appears darker than where we are. We head there
and the Mhadei’s sail billows as it catches the wind.
The calm Goa sea will be a distant memory
as Tomy heads south across the Indian Ocean, crossing the Tropic of Capricorn
to the longitudes south of Australia and New Zealand. This is the dreaded
Southern Ocean where there is no land to stop the freezing trade winds, only
Antarctica a couple of thousand miles away. The trade winds push forward a
sailboat, but also pile up the ocean into forbidding mountains and valleys of
water. Through this grey landscape Tomy will steer the Mhadei, a speck in the
bleakness that must somehow keep afloat.
Mhadei sails past the Royal Navy destroyer, HMS York, near the Falklands Islands
Donde inexplicably smiles as he describes
sailing the Mhadei through the Southern Ocean, rolling and pitching in an
unending succession of 20-foot waves that are almost as tall as the main mast.
One moment the boat wallows in a trough, with 20-foot walls of water on either
side; seconds later the boat crests the wave, providing a view of unbroken
ocean. And then it drops sickeningly into the next trough with the sailor
wondering whether it can ever climb out.
What about seasickness, I ask queasily.
“The only way to avoid being sea-sick is to remain sitting under a tree,” says
Tomy, pokerfaced.
*
* * *
The saga of the Mhadei has been the story
of four unusual men. It began in the imagination of one of the navy’s crustiest
old salts, Vice Admiral Manohar Prahlad Awati, who, from his retirement home
near Pune badgered successive naval chiefs about the need for the Indian Navy
to achieve the Holy Grail of sailing: solo circumnavigation. In 2006, Admiral
Arun Prakash gave the green signal, allocating a Rs 6 crore budget and asking
Awati to mastermind the project. The navy sent out a call for volunteers.
Enter Commander Dilip Donde, a diving expert
posted in the Andamans, who had sailed only recreationally. He claims he
volunteered to “be a part of the project” but, since he was the only volunteer,
ended up as the skipper.
“I broke the cardinal rule that I had been
taught since I was a cadet: never volunteer! Why, I don’t know. Maybe, at 38, I
faced an early midlife crisis. Or maybe it just sounded like a fun idea,” he
laughs.
For Awati, though, this was deadly serious
and he quickly enlisted the expertise of one of the world’s greatest sailors,
Sir Robin Knox-Johnston, a yachting hall-of-fame member who first completed a
solo, non-stop circumnavigation of the globe in 1968-69, when he sailed his
Mumbai-built teak-wood boat, Suhaili, around the world in 313 days.
Donde was sent to the UK, where he worked
with Knox-Johnston, learning from scratch about building and kitting out an
ocean-going sailboat and sailing it single-handedly through the worst storms on
the seas. In consultation with Knox-Johnston --- whose imagination had been
captured by the project --- Donde framed the specifications for what would
become the Mhadei.
“The Indian Navy was making a statement to
the world. So we decided not to make the boat in steel; we chose high-tech
fibreglass instead,” he says.
With a design bought from Dutch bureau Van
Der Stadt, the navy had then to identify a boat-builder who could construct a
vessel that would survive even a battering from the Southern Ocean. Big warship
builders like Goa Shipyard turned down the offer as too small and commercially
unviable. That was when an extraordinary shipbuilder, Ratnakar Dandekar, who
was running a tiny shipyard called Aquarius Fiberglas Private Ltd, walked onto
the project. The Mhadei had found its mother.
*
* * *
Left to Right: Lt Cdr Abhilash Tomy, Vice Admiral MP Awati, Ratnakar Dandekar, Cdr Dilip Donde
We take the ferry to Divar Island, the whitewashed
churches and convents around the Basilica of Bom Jesus peeping over a curtain
of lush green palms. Here, in the shadow of the Konkan Railway bridge over the
Mandovi River (called the Mhadei at its source in Karnataka), Dandekar welcomes
us to Aquarius Fiberglas.
“I can honestly say that I had no idea of
what I was taking on when I contracted to build the Mhadei. But I just knew
that this was a once-in-a-lifetime project. No boat of this quality and
endurance had ever been built in India. Today, while I am still a small
shipbuilder, nobody questions my technological credentials,” says Dandekar.
Donde describes Dandekar’s embrace of the
project, an enthusiasm that quickly swept away commercial considerations.
Dandekar listens with a quizzical half-smile, apparently wondering why any of
this should be surprising.
“The Mhadei is completely mine; I built it.
When some work is required on this boat, I don’t need a tender… I feel a real
attachment to this boat. Building the Mhadei has changed me as a shipbuilder,
as a person and as a businessman,” he says.
The ferry to Divar Island, across the Mandovi. This river is called the Mhadei at its source in Karnataka and gives the boat its name
As we tour Aquarius, which now employs 84
workers compared to just 16 when it built the Mhadei, a special train carrying
trucks to Mangalore on roll-on-roll-off wagons thunders over the bridge. I
wonder: is the Mhadei a superbly planned project, or was it just blessed with
worthy people?
*
* * *
Now the next chapter of the Mhadei story,
so far a saga of unalloyed success, will be written by Abhilash Tomy, who
formed the shore support team when Donde went around the globe in 2009-10.
Tomy, however, will have no shore support team; his will be a non-stop voyage.
This increases the difficulty manifold, since everything that malfunctions must
be repaired on board.
The Mhadei itself seems ready, a battle-tested
veteran. Success, therefore, will largely rest on the skipper’s mental
conditioning. “You can keep preparing for ten years. But you are only going to
learn some things when you actually do it,” agrees Tomy.
The Mhadei is as sleek, high-tech and well-kept
a sailboat as any I’ve seen. There are dual steering wheels, covered with
Chamois leather to provides a grip even in the wettest, coldest weather. In
front of the wheel is an array of instruments, including an automatic
identification system (AIS), which tracks through satellite every ship on the
seas, relaying its name, course, destination, vessel type, registration and
crew. While much of the Mhadei’s journeys are through isolated seas, it does
encounter other vessels at the chokepoints of the great capes.
Tomy recounts an incredulous radio call to Donde from a supertanker that was crossing the Cape of Good Hope in a driving storm
and discovered on their AIS that a small boat, the Mhadei, was close by.
Supertanker: Confirm port of origin?
Mhadei: Mumbai
Supertanker: Confirm destination?
Mhadei: Mumbai
Supertanker: Confirm type of vessel?
Mhadei: Sailboat
Supertanker: Confirm crew?
Mhadei: One man
Supertanker: Confirm crazy!!
Apparently, this brand of gallows humour
provides comfort to lone sailors! I ask Tomy whether a wife or a girlfriend
will be praying for him while he sails. “As a good sailor, the first thing you
learn is not to tie a knot that you cannot untie quickly,” he shoots back.
Waiting for him instead will be his mother
and his father, himself a former naval officer. Twice a day, Tomy will email a
“sitrep (situation report) over an INMARSAT satellite link to naval
headquarters in Delhi. If he needs to send video, or talk to someone, there is
a bigger FB-500 fleet broadband system. But that is expensive and Tomy is very
budget-conscious.
What’s to talk, he asks? Anything that goes
wrong must be fixed on board. Inside the cabin is a small workbench with a
vice, and spanners hanging below, stuck into a orange rexine organiser. In
another corner is the galley, the navy’s grandiose monicker for a small gas
stove. On the wall are plaques, presented by authorities in places like Cape
Town, Fremantle (Australia) and Littleton (New Zealand), the ports of calls for
vessels like the Mhadei.
After signing the Mhadei’s visitors’ book,
I leaf back through previous comments. On Feb 21st, 2009, Sir
Robin Knox-Johnston had endorsed the ultimate compliment: “A nice strong boat
to sail around the world!” All of us should pray that he is right.