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There’s often a scene in the Road Runner cartoons when Wile E. Coyote is clinging onto a clifftop by his claws. It usually doesn’t end well for the luckless hunter.
Conrad Colman found himself figuratively clinging onto the clifftop by his fingernails in the Southern Ocean. And there was a time when he thought he might fall off the cliff just like the coyote.
The 34-year-old, who was endeavouring to be the first Kiwi to finish the Vendee Globe non-stop round the world yacht race, had just been swept overboard in the middle of the Southern Ocean. A storm was blowing, it was night time, the waves were as big as a house and Colman had been dispatched into the cold, vast emptiness.
It is not an overstatement to suggest it was a life-and-death moment.
Fortunately, he was tethered to a safety harness but, with the boat dragging him in the water at about 10 knots in heavy seas, there was little chance he would be able to pull himself back onto his IMOCA 60.
That’s when fate, which had so cruelly swept him overboard when a crucial rope snapped, sending the boom and Colman flying into the water, played a big hand. A wave picked him up and deposited him near the side of the boat.
“The lifeline was stopping me getting back on the boat,” he explains on a rare visit back to Auckland. “It was under tension and wouldn’t allow me to get on the boat. I was doing my best koala impersonation, completely wrapped around the stanchion clinging on, but I realised very quickly the only way I could get back on the boat was if I literally took my life in my hands and hung on with one hand to the boat and then undid my harness with the other and let the harness fall away to allow me to get on the boat. I definitely had a pretty quick conversation with myself. This was a one-shot deal that I couldn’t afford to muck up.”
The fact he’s still alive to tell the tale shows he didn’t, but this kind of challenge was not an isolated one.
He also had a fire on board when a solar panel fried, his auto-pilot got a mind of its own, causing the boat to capsize about 15 times, his forestay broke nearly bringing his mast down in 60 knots of wind and he was down to his last set of sails for the last third of the race.
If that wasn’t enough, there was more drama to come.
Only three days from the finish in France, his mast snapped. Colman’s spirit nearly broke with it.
“I had already given this race my all and thought, ‘this is one step too far’. And it’s a pretty big step to deal with, a 30m mast coming down. I had been at sea for 100 days and was low on food already so I was low on energy. It was tough.
“I had been in the process of co-ordinating the festivities for the arrival. I was right there, on the threshold of finishing this thing. Emotionally, I had almost finished the race, so to have that yanked away from me, that was really rough. I thought I had done everything right and this was the last straw.
“When it happened and it was raw, physically I didn’t think I could do it. I felt it was beyond my capacity to deal with the situation. After a good sleep and with a new day, I realised there was no way I was going to let my adventure finish here without at least giving it a good crack to make it home. This represented so much of my life and I was not going to let it finish there.”
He managed to fashion a mast from his broken boom and made some sails to fit – he described them as like handkerchiefs compared to normal sails – and got moving again, albeit at a painstakingly slow four knots.
He celebrated with his last freeze-dried meal and then lived off about half a biscuit a day for the next 10 days. But he finished the race 110 days after leaving port, becoming the first person to finish with zero emissions, and received a hero’s welcome from people who marvelled at his perseverance, bravery and ingenuity.
“I did the whole race walking on eggshells. It was like someone had a vendetta against me. Everything had been an absolute fight all the way through so it was incredible achieving it. It was complete euphoria.”
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It might not come as a surprise to learn Colman is known as the Crazy Kiwi.
It’s a moniker given to him by his friends in France, where he lives with his wife, Clara. It takes a very special type of person to choose to go to sea alone to circumnavigate the world and it’s part of the reason why the Vendee Globe is considered by many to be the world’s hardest sporting event.
A total of 167 sailors have attempted the race since the first Vendee Globe in 1989. Only 89 have finished.
It’s why Colman targeted it. He left New Zealand at 15 to further his education in the United States, where he was a competitive mountain biker, but wanted “a big, scary challenge” that utilised all his skills as a sportsman, entrepreneur, marketer and mechanic.
He moved to France with the sole ambition of racing in the Vendee Globe and somehow scraped enough money together to get to the start line last year. He signed his major sponsor only two days before departure.
“From the beginning of this project in 2007, I have been chasing the hardest challenge I can possibly find,” he says. “I don’t think I’m insane, just obsessively motivated. I was really attracted to it, a lifestyle that is all or nothing.”
The Vendee Globe was his third circumnavigation of the world. The previous two were in double-handed races – he won one – but they were steps to a solo, non-stop sailing.
There was a period of six weeks when Colman saw no sign of humanity on his journey, not even a plane’s jet stream. “The isolation is a privilege,” he explains. “It’s a very zen-like existence. You have one job, which is to sail as fast as you possibly can.”
That means sleeping only five hours a day in 20-minute blocks. Every 20 minutes a siren similar to a car alarm connected to a strobe light rocked him out of what sleep he might have snatched to check everything was alright on deck.
Needless to say, it has taken some time to adjust to normality and he still hasn’t returned to his normal weight after losing 11kg.
Despite all the risks, flirtations with death and setbacks, Colman wants to do it all again in 2020. This time he wants to “build on the ultimate MacGyver race” and put a package together capable of winning. He wants to go from plucky Kiwi to victorious voyager.
“I’m a competitor, a driven guy. I won my first race around the world. Yes, this is a race that surpasses sport but it’s still a race and I want to become the first non-Frenchman to win the race. I think I can do that.”
It will take some serious cash to achieve that goal. His last campaign was put together on a paltry €600,000 ($955,000) and his team was made up of himself, his wife and one employee working out of a container. The big teams had budgets closer to €10-12 million ($16-$19 million) and about 20 staff.
He needs to find sponsors and believes the Vendee Globe is a race that resonates with the Kiwi pioneering spirit. His amazing story has opened some doors, and he’s going to work as a commentator for the upcoming Volvo Ocean Race, but not as many as he had hoped.
“My future lives and dies in the hands of corporate gate keepers,” he laments.
But the drive and never-say-die attitude he displayed at sea is also how he lives his daily life and he won’t stop. There were times during the race when he didn’t think he had any more to give but every time found a solution, day after day after day.
“I had said I was going to do the next one before I had even finished the first one. Clara knows I need this in my life and I’m driven to do it and won’t be satisfied without this level of challenge.”
It will also be a challenge for her. Colman famously told only his boat captain about being swept overboard at the time – “I needed to offload to him that I had almost died” – but told him it was something Clara and his family didn’t need to know about until he returned.
Colman’s father had been killed when he fell from a mast when Colman was a toddler, and his brother committed suicide a couple of years ago, so he felt he didn’t need to burden his family with more worry.
They will inevitably do it again next time but he hopes the 2020 adventure is less dramatic.
Instead of being the Coyote, Colman wants to be the Road Runner. And the speedy bird was untouchable.
