Go Alex Carozzo! The great navigator is battling the coronavirus

Among the patients at Desenzano Hospital engaged in the fight against coronavirus is 88-year-old sailor Alex Carozzo. A living monument of Italian sailing. It seems that Alex’s health condition is improving: we wish him a speedy recovery and take the opportunity to tell you his beautiful story.

Alex Carozzo, class of 1932. Alex is a shy guy, difficult to contact and even more difficult to interview. Still, he has plenty to talk about, the only Italian who has been able to challenge Tabarly and Moitessier in the ocean. We crossed paths with him and interviewed him on the fly, and the result was this article published in the Journal of Sailing in 2014. Here is the story of Alex Carozzo, the pioneer of the oceans!

ALEX CAROZZO, THE PIONEER OF THE OCEANS

I arrive transfixed in Lerici, fearing that I will be late. I‘ve been chasing it for months, and now I don’t want to let it get away. Alex Carozzo, whom I have tried to contact by phone, email, through one of his assistants but to no avail, is in the Ligurian town to talk about his new venture: at 81 years of age is intent on setting off, in a 9.60-meter sailboat made of marine plywood that he entirely self-built in two and a half years in San Felice del Benaco, Brescia, Italy, for the Galapagos. Sailing from Venice and passing through the Panama Strait, 6,000 miles in total.

Reading an old English pilot book some 30 years ago, Carozzo had been struck by some place names on the cartography of San Cristobal, the main island of the Galapagos archipelago: Punta Lido, Frangente degli Schiavoni, Punta Malamocco. Typical Venetian names. And he, characteristically Venetian (though born in Genoa) and curious, did some research and discovered that the “baptisms” of such places were the result of a scientific expedition carried out back in 1884 by the 80-meter steam corvette Pier Vettor Pisani, the last wooden oceanographic ship made in Venice. Hence the dream of retracing the route to bear witness and make a mark again.

But why did he wait 30 years? “I’m doing it now,” he tells me at a coffee shop table in the piazzetta in Lerici, his glasses mirrored, white beard and the physique of a young boy, “because I did other things before. And it is precisely the “other things” Alex completed that make me realize the person in front of me. As soon as he finds the funds, he will leave immediately for the Galapagos, and he will even get there. These are not the ramblings of a senile old man, but the last crossing of a very great seaman.

ALEX AND THE PACIFIC

Alex Carozzo was born in Genoa in 1932, but moved to the Serenissima when he was three years old, where he attended the Nautical Institute and the Naval Academy before joining the Merchant Navy as a navigational officer. In the 1940s, meanwhile, he had first taken up sailing by attending the Venice Sailing Company, getting on Snipe, Star and 5.50s. “I didn’t go to navigation school,” he says, “what I know, I learned self-taught. Things, to really learn them, you have to do them; otherwise you end up making serious mistakes.” It is so Alex. Concrete in the soul. In 1965 he became the first Italian solo sailor: he crossed the Pacific, from Tokyo to San Francisco, aboard the Golden Lion, a boat he had built himself during rest shifts and with makeshift tools in the hold of an American ship he was on, the Liberty. The following year he was the only Italian to participate, on the trimaran Tristar, in the first Transpacifica for multihulls (from Los Angeles to Honolulu).

RETREATS AT OSTAR AND GOLDEN GLOBE
In June ’68 he took part in the third Singlehanded Transatlantic Race (the OSTAR) on the 16-meter catamaran San Giorgio, which he designed and built, starting two hours behind his 34 rivals. The boat, due to financial difficulties resolved at the last moment through the intervention of “L’Espresso,” had arrived in Plymouth not yet perfectly tuned. Despite being listed as one of the favorites, Alex was forced to retire (due to a collision with a whaleboat off Cornwall), a fate he shared with a great “contemporary” of his, Éric Tabarly. He does not lose heart, for in October of that year he is in Cowes, lined up on the starting line of the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, the historic non-stop solo round-the-world race won by Robin Knox-Johnston after Bernard Moitessier had abandoned the race by heading for Polynesia to find, according to him, himself: “In ’68 I gave the St. George, along with some money, to Uffa Fox’s yard in Cowes and in return I was given the Gancia Americano (the 20-meter Alex-designed with which he took part in the Golden Globe, ed.) All the deck equipment, including the mast, belonged to the St. George: I rigged a 20-meter monohull with what I had salvaged from a 16-meter catamaran. On the first outing, miraculously, everything was on the bubble, the boat was a rocket.” If the boat is fine, the same cannot be said of Alex: “In England I was alone, frantically working on the boat: I was exhausted with fatigue, and to make matters worse I had previously had duodenal ulcer surgery. The maximum limit for the start of the regatta was around October 20, so I had to cross the starting line and stay 10 days out at anchor sorting out the last things on board, in the deep freeze.” When he finally set off on October 31, along with the ill-fated Donal Crowhurst, who would later commit suicide during the race, Carozzo was sick: “I didn’t consider myself crazy. I was simply doing what I wanted to do. My friends didn’t agree with my choice, but they knew I was going to bring my skin home no matter what, even straddling a dunnage.” Alex’s adventure ends on November 14, when he decides to retire by setting course for Porto. The Venetian sailor may not boast a palmares laden with victories and international records: but he was the first Italian to take part in the century’s greatest regattas (which at the time seemed to be within the exclusive reach of the British and French), with boats he designed and, often, built.

AN ITALIAN IN THE COURT OF THE “GREATS”

In those years, Carozzo was surrounded by true sailing legends such as the aforementioned Chichester, Moitessier, Tabarly, Knox-Johnston and Crowhurst. “I translated Chichester’s book, while in person I met him in San Remo on an evening when no one spoke English (except me, who read English magazines as a child and with vocabulary I taught myself) and they wanted to drag him to the Casino: he came to me and asked me to save him.” Also sympathetic is the little joke he tells me about Donald Crowhurst: “The only times I have ever met him, he has fallen into the water: at Cowes I went to see him who was moored at anchor, and in getting off the boat to the support craft he fell overboard. Another time the scene repeated itself. Either he was already out of control at that time or I was jinxing him. I remember that he gave me one of the very first radiogoniometers that his company produced.” Here, on the other hand, is what Alex thinks of the alleged rivalry between Bernard Moitessier and Robin Knox-Johnston (Moitessier claimed that he had retreated to Polynesia to find himself, while Knox-Johnston, some say, declared that he had actually done so because he had realized that he would come in behind him): “This is bullshit from small-minded journalists. One has to take one’s hat off to both of them, so different from each other: Moitessier was the essence of romanticism and possessed the gift of writing, Knox-Johnston came, like me, from the Merchant Marine: he was therefore the embodiment of a certain British-style pragmatism.” Less enthusiastic is of his contemporary Ambrogio Fogar, who prefers not to comment: “I got rotten blood then, I don’t want to do it again now.”

A LEOPARD (OF THE SEA) CAN’T CHANGE ITS SPOTS.

In 1989 Alex also took away the satisfaction of entering the world of cinema: not as an actor, but as a “shipowner.” In fact, one of his boats is used in the sea scenes of Franco Piavoli’s film “Nostos – Il Ritorno,” a retelling of the Ulysses myth that positively surprised critics. The scenes were actually shot on Lake Garda, where Carozzo, a Padenghe resident, has lived for more than 40 years. Alex never gets tired: in 1990 retraced Christopher Columbus’ route from Gran Canaria to San Salvador: 3,800 miles in forty days, seven more than the Genoese navigator, aboard Zentime, a 20-foot-long fiberglass lifeboat he salvaged from a demolition site in Las Palmas and put to work in three months. The rigging is more than basic: the rigging is abandoned cable from cranes, the bowsprit a salvaged plank, the deckhouse a one-cubic-meter wooden box. Mainsail and bows are cotton, hand-sewn with the help of a mattress maker. There is no engine, no radio on board; even food is rationed. A primitive form of sailing, a return to his roots for Alex, who in the meantime (the boat’s name, Zentime, literally “the time of simplicity,” also indicates this) has become a Buddhist. He always carries a statue on board, which he calls “The Master,” with whom he has several conversations while sailing. This adventure is recounted in his book, Zentime Atlantico, published by Nutrimenti.

THE GIANT WAVE AND THE MOTHER’S DREAM
I can’t help but ask Alex, who has been through a lot at sea, if he has ever been in a situation where he risked leaving his skin behind: “It was October ’65 and I was in the middle of the Pacific when I was hit by an abnormal depression., with the barometer that had suddenly gone down. An unprecedented gale was brewing. I prepared the boat for the worst, lowering the sails, placing the stern anchor, and so on. ‘This is it,’ I muttered to myself. I was scared, but then I calmed down: I thought that in the end, everything I could do to save myself I had done. It’s not that if there had been a Tabarly or a Moitessier in my place he could have done more. What made me angry, though, was thinking about how my friends would react to the news of my death: ‘Look at the Alex, he was a jerk and went down like a pear.’ It is the sailor’s cabbage pride: feeling victimized by unfair judgment. Fortunately, the storm passed, the boat weathered the breakers, and I got away with it. When I returned home, my mother and sister told me that on October 16 they both had had a bad dream. My mother had dreamed of me dressed in a black palandrana and in need of help, my sister saw me at the base of a large sand mountain trying to reach the top. October 16 was exactly the evening when I was hit by the gale.“. And now Alex, we just have to wait for your next “carriage”. Eugene Ruocco

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