2019. How I crossed the Atlantic alone, with nothing

Welcome to the special section “GdV 5th Years.” We are introducing you, day by day, An article from the archives of the Journal of Sailing, starting in 1975. A word of advice, get in the habit of starting your day with the most exciting sailing stories-it will be like being on a boat even if you are ashore.

How I crossed the Atlantic alone, with nothing

Taken from the 2019 Journal of Sailing, Year 45, No. 03, April, pp. 72/79.

Dan Lenard, superyacht designer, sailed 5,000 miles solo, from France to Florida, on a “recycled” 10-meter: without engine, electronics, instruments, compass, autopilot. Chronicle of sailing by “nose.”

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Dan Lenard, superyacht designer, sailed 5,000 miles solo, from Spain to Florida, on a “recycled” 10-meter: without engine, electronics, instruments, compass, autopilot. Chronicle of sailing “by nose.”

“The beauty of sailing is that it is never the same: every day of sailing has been different. Sailing is improvisation.” Not a bad ‘improvised adventure,’ that of sailing designer Dan Lenard, 51. He decided to take off the shoes of megayacht designer (the Venetian firm he co-founded, Nuvolari Lenard, is one of the highest-rated in the world) and embark on a 5,000-mile solo Atlantic crossing (from Cadiz, Spain, to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA) aboard a ten-meter “Frankenstein” made by assembling parts of different boats: but that’s not all, Lenard He made it without having an engine, electronic instruments, autopilot on board, and even without a compass and sextant (he had only a transponder with which those following him from the ground could visualize his position, but he could not use it to figure out where he was): as we will explain in detail in the following pages, he relied only on his own eyesight, the sun, the stars, and a faithful watch. He set sail from the Spanish coast on January 20, after jumping through hoops to transfer by land
Scia
(that’s the boat’s name) from the Prelog shipyard in Venice to Cadiz. The idea was to arrive in Miami to coincide with the U.S. Boat Show by following the route of Christopher Columbus ‘ second voyage to the Indies: an outline program, liable to change because, as Lenard told us, in the middle of the sea, with no outside help, no weather forecast, you have to improvise. Lenard arrived in Florida after 42 days of sailing at a – more than respectable – average of 4.95 knots and a small ‘beer break’ in Antigua before juggling the Caribbean Sea. Why did he do it? The official motivation is to raise awareness of the importance of zero-impact sailing: “Sailboats are made to sail: it sounds like the discovery of hot water but it’s not.” But hearing his excited tale over the phone, as soon as he arrived in Fort Lauderdale, we caught another: simply, Dan Lenard is a ‘”sick” sailor. A strange sickness that makes you happy when you manage to gain half a knot in a becalmed state because you set the Code Zero just right, or that pumps your adrenaline to the max while you’re surfing a giant ocean wave. Let’s find out who he is and how he made it across the ocean “with nothing.”

Who is Dan Lenard

Designer by job, sailor by vocation, Dan Lenard, 51, is the co-founder with Carlo Nuvolari of one of the most successful design studios. Since 1992, Nuvolari-Lenard has put his signature on some of the most iconic and acclaimed superyachts. In 25 years, Nuvolari-Lenard has designed more than 350 boats, including the 64-meter ketch built by Perini
Spirit of the C’s
and the impressive 106-meter Black Pearl built by Oceanco. Behind his “Hollywood star” look is an experienced sailor: he has been boating since he was a young boy, taking his first steps on Lasers and Flying Juniors, and designing his first 50-foot sailboat at age 19. As soon as he has a spare minute, he escapes among theAdriatic islands by boat with his family.

Scia, the enterprise boat

The boat used by Dan Lenard for the crossing,
Scia
, is a 33-foot (10-meter) “Frankenstein,” assembled at Prelog shipyards by Dan with the help of artisan friends. “The boat is unique and not replicable,” he explained, “simply because it is not a project. But a patchwork of pieces from previous boats, the ‘newest’ one is eight years old. The carbon hull is derived from a ten-year-old one-design designed by Slovenian Andrej Justin (the designer of the RC44s), the deck is largely the result of my own modifications, and I redesigned the deckhouse by lowering its profile: I didn’t care about the space below deck because, without an autopilot, I would never experience it except for sleeping. We also had to adapt the stern. The side ‘wings’ I added to avoid taking on water in case of waves at the backyard (and they worked great, I need to patent them!) the mast is from a Bavaria Match 35, the rudder is from another boat. Since this is a longer mast of the original, I had to move the inner bulkhead more aft where the shrouds attachment is attached.” To create the boat, 100 kilograms of resin were used for the various couplings. “Then with our design work we thought about giving it an aesthetically acceptable shape.” He concludes and jokes, “It cost us less than a Figaro!”

How did the crossing go

Not using routiers (weather experts) at his disposal, Dan repeatedly had to face the true enemy of sailors, the becalmed. That is why he was unable to arrive in time for the Miami Boat Show (Feb. 14-18: Lenard arrived at Fort Lauderdale March 3, 42 days after departure from Cadiz): “The only ‘bad luck’ I had was the low wind in the first half of the sailing. I was left dangling eight days in the flat calm. It was a miracle that I managed to grind out about fifty miles westward in that long time, thanks to Code 0, Code 2 and Gennaker. Even on days when there was a breeze blowing, it never did it for more than eight to 10 hours. At sunset, it would drop.”. Then, fortunately, the trade wind arrived. How did the boat perform? “In light sea conditions, she is a blast. In light wind conditions, having to deal with the ocean waves, which are wide and long, she suffered a bit in the upwind phase.” An additional day Lenard lost when she experienced a failure of the furling reel off the Canary Islands: “I had to disassemble the furler drum and fix the forestay in the bow before making repairs.” Also challenging were the last few miles in the Caribbean: between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic “I found myself with short waves and wind in my face: worse than passing the Strait of Messina with a sirocco in the bow.” .

What did you learn

Sense of sailing, the pure kind. “I will leave the boat in the Caribbean until I can find a freighter to bring it back to the Mediterranean at a humane price, vice versa I might even decide to sell it,” Dan told us from Florida. But what has he learned from this adventure? That “doing an Atlantic crossing without instruments, if you have a lot of experience behind you, is easier than you expect: a lot of people have been surprised and asked me how I managed it, maybe because they know me more as a designer than as a sailor. The fact is that I’ve always felt I could do it, technically I’m prepared. Trust me, there are many more pitfalls hidden in our Mediterranean Sea!” Dan downplays, but his feat goes much further. He has given us back a sense of sailing, the pure kind. A sense that Antonio Vettese captured well:“He explained to us that the luxury of passions is not the passion for luxury.”

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