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July 6, 2009 – Nome, Alaska
by Herb McCormick
The crew of Ocean Watch shares breakfast with French adventurer Jean Gabriel Chelala. From left to right: Dave Logan, Tyler Osberg, Captain Mark Schrader, Bryan Reeves, Herb McCormick, Dr. Michael Reynolds and Jean Gabriel Chelala.
Photo Credit: David Thoreson
(July 6): Spend a week in Nome, and you begin to hear the tales of the legendary tough guys who’ve cast long shadows down Front Street, men like the gunfighter Wyatt Earp, the explorer Roald Amundsen, and the dog musher Leonhard Seppala. Just the other day, another intrepid soul washed into Nome (and we’re speaking here in the literal sense): a young Frenchman named Jean Gabriel Chelala, rescued from his kayak by helicopter from the stormy Bering Sea in the final act, at least for now, of an ambitious round-the-world expedition, the likes of which we on Ocean Watch could certainly relate.
Shortly after his rescue, Chelala stopped by our dock in Nome yesterday and hailed Ocean Watch with one of the more memorable greetings we’ve heard: “Hello boat!” He’s the latest rugged hombre to find his fateful way to Nome, but we’re getting a bit ahead of our story.
As we sit in Nome for another day waiting for near-shore ice to disassemble outside our next scheduled port-of-call in Barrow-it’s like Waiting for Godot, but colder, and with Eskimos-some of the crew have wiled away many an interesting hour wandering through the exhibits in the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum in the heart of the city. Museum director Laura Samuelson is an energetic fount of information when it comes to native lore and artifacts, the manic days of the gold rush, and other historic chapters in Nome’s memorable, voluminous past. But I have to admit, my favorite stories are the ones involving the rough-and-tumble characters who’ve blustered down this road, whose hearty deeds and manly exploits inject hue and texture to those distant days.
Wyatt Earp was cooling his heels in Yuma, Arizona, in 1897 when he first heard word that there were golden fortunes for the digging in the wild territory to the far north. Between the weather and the wife-one pregnant with obstacles, the other actually pregnant-it took Earp a good two years to get to Nome, and when he did, he found a way to bolster his bank account while keeping his twitchy trigger-finger clean. Earp’s saloon, the Dexter, was a veritable cash cow, and it attracted a roster of larger-than-life dudes every bit as formidable as the proprietor: the writers Jack London and Rex Beach, prizefighter Jack Dempsey, and a brilliant mining engineer named Herbert Hoover, who was destined for renown in another arena
Earp was long gone by the time Norwegian adventurer Roald Amundsen sailed into Nome in 1906 after a three-year odyssey aboard his ship, the Gjoa, to become the first skipper to successfully negotiate the Northwest Passage. We’ll revisit Amundsen in greater detail in future crew logs as Ocean Watch begins its own attempt at the Passage.
Amundsen’s legacy wasn’t limited to his ocean-going exploits. He also played an important role in the life of Leonhard Seppala, the Musher King, one of the most famous dog racers of all time.
Today, dog racing is an important Alaskan winter sport; the thousand-mile Iditarod Race, which begins in Anchorage and ends in Nome, is easily the city’s most important annual event. It wasn’t so when Seppala arrived from Norway in 1900, a friend of the so-called Three Lucky Swedes, who struck gold in Nome and became fabulously wealthy.
Seppala wasn’t as lucky, but he was a prospector, and he was good with dogs and used dog teams to haul freight. In 1913, Amundsen asked Seppala to train the Siberian huskies he’d purchased in Russia. By that time, the All-Alaska Sweepstakes Race was the world’s most famous dog race and Seppala was urged to enter, which he did in 1914, though he finished out of the money. But he won the next three runnings of the Sweepstakes and his own fame was assured.
However, Seppala’s greatest exploit was ahead of him. In the winter of 1925, a diptheria epidemic threatened the children of Nome; their survival hinged on the 300,000 units of antitoxin serum in Anchorage. The Serum Run, in which twenty mushers delivered the medicine to Nome, is now a part of Alaskan lore. With a pair of dogs, Togo and Fritz, sharing the lead, Seppala and his team traversed a brutal section of the trail, covering over 250-miles in the process. And another Seppala dog, Balto, led the team that raced into Nome. Balto became as famous as Seppala, and was memorialized with a statue in Central Park. Fritz was also mounted and preserved, and is now on display at the museum in Nome. All things considered, he’s still looking rather frisky.
All that brings us to the latest Nome adventurer. The story of the French kayaker, 28-year-old Chelala, appeared in Sunday’s Anchorage Daily News under the following headline: “Coast Guard plucks adventurer from kayak.” I can state with assurance that no seaman ever wants to appear in a story in which the key words are “Coast Guard” and “plucks.”
Over breakfast this morning, the affable and engaging young man told the Ocean Watch crew his tale. He’d left France in January 2008, in an attempt to circle the globe under human power alone, which meant bicycles, kayaks and peddle boats. After biking to Portugal, he literally peddled across the Atlantic to Miami, with stops in Morocco, the Canary Islands and St. Maarten. Once in Florida, the expedition (www.expedition48north.com) continued as Chelala hopped on a recumbent bike and made his way to Alaska.
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| French kayaker and tough hombre Jean Gabriel Chelala |
According to Chelala, no one has ever completed the journey alone, though a pair of Canadians circumnavigated via their own power. But he wasn’t after a world record. “I wanted the trip to make sense, to have values,” he said. “I’ve done other mountain expeditions and I always had programs for children. That was what this was about, to show you can make something if you try.”
From Alaska, he went to France for the winter to raise more funds and then returned again this spring, setting forth in a custom 20-foot kayak with a canopy that covered the cockpit so he could stop and rest each night. It took him 26 days to get out to the Aleutians, and after a brief layover, he pointed the bow into the Bering Sea toward Russia.
He was haunted from the outset. “It was just a hostile place,” he said. “Even the birds show it. They look at you and you can tell they’re saying, ‘You’re not in a good place.’”
Chelala was aiming for remote St. Lawrence Island. He never got there. “I left with a good forecast, but on the ocean, it wasn’t okay,” he said. For six days he battled currents and contrary winds, and was finally within thirty miles of the mainland. But he began to get cold-not from the ocean outside, but from the condensation within-and realized he was becoming hypothermic. He had a satellite phone and he used it. When the helicopter lifted him aloft, he had his laptop and cameras. The rest he left to the Bering Sea.
At breakfast, he said he wanted to continue his journey, though he wasn’t quite sure how he’d proceed. Of course, now that he’s received outside help, his record attempt is over. But that was never the point of the exercise.
“I’m proud that I made the right decision,” he said. “And I still have an important message. Sometimes people have things happen to them that they don’t expect. I think it’s important to realize you have to overcome it.”
Aboard Ocean Watch, where we’ll remember those words as our own voyage resumes, we tip our hats to the spirit of Jean Gabriel Chelala, and wish him well as his quest continues. He’s a lucky chap, and a gutsy one, too. In Nome, as proven time and again, those traits can take a fellow a long, long way.
- Herb McCormick with photographs by David Thoreson
This crew log submitted by Iridium OpenPort and Stratos
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