Kim.
Jesse, this trip up the coast was only the start of your adventuring. I'm sure you'll tell us a little of what you have done since then. But first, this big project, what's the goal?

Jesse
The goal is to sail around the world solo, non-stop and unassisted.

Kim
I feel like I should take a dramatic pause here. Goals don't come any bigger than that. When did this idea start? With the North Queensland trip with your Dad and Beau?

Jesse
That's when it first seemed possible. We lived on a basic diet, had encounters with crocodiles and sharks, survived two months by ourselves, and managed it all on a little 14 foot boat. That trip convinced me to try the world trip, being the youngest to do it means leaving this year while I am seventeen, and I will get home when I am eighteen.

Kim
The record for being youngest to do that is currently held by another Australian, David Dicks of West Australia, how old was he?

Jesse
David was seventeen when he left and eighteen when he got home. He had trouble with a mast spreader and had to have a bolt lifted in to him, so unfortunately he did not complete the unassisted aspect. The bolt broke just before he rounded Cape Horn, South America. He managed a temporary fix for the cape rounding until the English Navy on the Falkland Islands could get a bolt to him.

There are other Australian sailing record holders as well. Kay Cottee is the first woman to sail a solo non-stop circumnavigation. Jon Sanders sailed a double circumnavigation non-stop in the early 80s, then in the late 80s he did a triple, two years in the boat by himself. That's pretty amazing. Jon Sanders is the guy who taught David Dicks a lot of his stuff.

Australians seem to have a habit of doing this kind of thing. Paul Caffyn canoed right around Australia in the early 80s. It took him a year, but he paddled a sea kayak even across the Great Australian Bight. And he paddled that thing for the whole distance that Dad and Beau and I sailed up in Queensland. Ron Bath is an Australian, but he canoed the full length of the Mississippi River in the US. He even beat the record time of a team of English Commandos, and he's a paraplegic. There are some amazing stories of Australians on the water.

Kim
Where will you be sailing to on this voyage?

Jesse
I sail out of Melbourne, around the west of Tasmania, below New Zealand, across to South America and round Cape Horn, up into the northern hemisphere to the Azores off Portugal, then turn south past Africa rounding the Cape of Good Hope, then across the Indian Ocean, past Cape Leeuwin,  and back into Melbourne. It should take me nine months to do it.

To properly circumnavigate the world I have to sail past the antipodal point, which is the place straight through the centre of the earth and out the other side. From Melbourne that point is about where the Azores Islands are. My antipodal point is 38 degrees 18' north, and 35 degrees 22' west.

Kim
What experience do you have that makes this trip possible for you?

Jesse
I've sailed a lot. We all learnt to sail a few years before that Queensland trip so we could do it confidently. Then we did the trip. Since then I have had experience on another trip up in Papua New Guinea, I have sailed Bass Strait with my Dad in some pretty hairy weather, I've assisted on boat deliveries between Australian cities, and I've crewed on a yacht from Belize near Mexico, through the Panama Canal, then island hopping across the Pacific to Tahiti. That was a trip of over 5,500 nautical miles.

I'm also doing emergency drills in all sorts of weather and having solo experience in rough weather. Before I leave for the circumnavigation I will have taken the boat solo on two trips around Tasmania.

Kim
Tell us about your boat.

Jesse
The boat is a Sparkman & Stevens 34. It's the same class of boat that David Dicks and Jon Sanders sailed for their round the world trips. This boat has proven off-shore handling and is capable of so much more than fair weather sailing. The English Prime Minister, Edward Heath, won the Sydney to Hobart Yacht Race in one of these in 1969. It's got a good record, and timeless design for this kind of sailing.

The boat will have extra work done on its rigging, like triple forestay and backstay, double-spreaded mast, strengthened chain plates, a strengthened boom. There is also a lot of other equipment to be added, like solar charging panels, radar, GPS, satellite phone, extra water tanks, safety harness lines. There's a whole heap of extra stuff to make the trip as safe as possible.

Kim
That sounds like a lot of money. What kind of budget do you need for a project like this?

Jesse
The whole budget is about $175,000.

Kim
And where is the money coming from?

Jesse
I am working on getting sponsorship and have started raising funds myself. But mostly the money comes from my mother taking out a second mortgage on the house.

Last year I arranged a sponsored sea kayak trip off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Beau and I did that trip by ourselves and made a documentary video for TV. That film will bring in some finances to help this solo sailing expedition.

Kim
Can you tell us some more about that sea kayak journey?

Jesse
Well, I wanted to do something, and I needed to raise money. So we thought up this trip. We could be self-sufficient in the sea kayaks and it was relatively cheap. We got to Rabaul, that's on the island of New Britain, to the east of the Papua New Guinea mainland. From there we paddled across to the Duke of York Islands, and from there to the island of New Ireland. Then we paddled up the coast to the tropical town of Kavieng. We made a documentary of the whole thing.

The eight months of planning cost me some school work, and the trip meant five weeks off school as well. But it was a fantastic thing to be doing, just the two of us, Beau and me. We had nine sponsors; Australian Geographic, Uncle Toby's, Snowgum (the Scout Shop), Solarex, QBE Insurance, Sea Optics, Quiksilver, Air Niugini, and Sony.

Kim
You must have had some close encounters up there, those islands are a long way apart.

Jesse
Yeah, we did. The St.Georges Channel separating the islands got very rough with a typhoon up near Japan effecting the weather, and larger boats than us sometimes disappeared. But we paddled very early in the morning before the swells built up.

We came across a tribal initiation ceremony that we were welcomed at. And the people everywhere were very generous to us. We saw lots of relics of the war, and found tunnels into the cliffs that were used during the war.

Sometimes flying fish would take flight when we paddled past, they would flash past us or thump into the kayaks. We even saw manta rays doing double back flips out of the water as we paddled past.

We would paddle for seven or eight hours a day and would be very tired with maybe 35 km travelled, but then we would have to get through the surf breaking onto the reef before we could set up camp for the night. Then suddenly we would find ourselves surrounded by people pulling the kayaks up to the beach and another village would welcome us for the night.

One day we saw a shark which was as round as a forty four gallon drum. We stopped paddling, rafted up, and when we couldn't see it any more we paddled the mile or so into the shore in record time. That was pretty scary.

Kim
I'm beginning to feel like you have more than sixteen years of experience up your sleeve. But you are still at school. How does the school take all this?

Jesse
I am in year 11 at Wesley College in Melbourne. Beau and I took time off from school for the Papua New Guinea kayaking trip and I had more time off this year for the Belize - Tahiti trip. I did first semester of my VCE this year by Distance Education on that trip, which the school was pretty good about. The Distance Education people helped me a lot to get my work done. I am still doing school work, although only two days per week while I arrange this trip. I am keeping up to speed with maths and English especially. I wrote up the Tahiti trip for a school assignment on communication. Not many high school students get to do an assignment like that.

Kim
I can imagine that people will say it is irresponsible for someone your age to go off sailing around the world by yourself. Any comments?

Jesse
All I can say is that I am well prepared. I have sailing experience in lots of conditions, good support, and the boat will be as safe as we can make it. Two years ago a fourteen year old Japanese boy sailed solo from Tokyo to California. He made it, but only with lots of equipment breaking down that he didn't know how to fix. His repair manuals were in English and he couldn't read them. His trip should never have started and he only made it because he didn't run into any bad weather. I am well prepared and have good support as well as the sailing ability. That's all I can say.

Kim
What are some of the publicity avenues that you are pursuing?

Jesse
I've got a lot of things on my list already. There's TV current affairs shows. I'm getting in contact with newspapers and radio. I'm writing to Jeff Kennet, the State Premier, and am arranging speaking times with the state education department. There's other things like publishing rights to the biography and getting that website set up that we've been talking about.

The reason for the publicity is because I want to say something to the world about air pollution and global warming. I am in contact with the Australian Conservation Foundation and David Suzuki about how to go about this, getting information and learning how to speak about it. I'm doing public speaking lessons most weeks to learn how to communicate more effectively in that regard.

David Suzuki says that we have probably twenty years left before the whole world's air supply is dangerously polluted. It is imperative that air pollution becomes a widespread concern for the people of all nations. The air is for breathing, not for dumping chemical rubbish into. And we all breathe.

Kim
Jesse, you've already done the impossible here. This is a Hobie Cat magazine and we only know about catamaran sailing. And you have managed to get a monohull into our pages. That's an acheivement in itself. Is there anything that readers of On The Wire can do for you?

Jesse
Wish me well, I suppose.