PUERTO VALLARTA, MEXICO — Zac Sunderland is wedged in his small bunk, reading, as his 36-foot sailboat ascends and careens down mountainous, shifting peaks.
Just ahead on this late June morning is Mexico's first seasonal tropical depression, whose winds have roiled the Pacific. To the south, churning up the coast: a larger storm building into a hurricane.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Thursday, July 09, 2009 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 4 National Desk 1 inches; 61 words Type of Material: Correction
Sailor: A front-page article Monday about teenager Zac Sunderland's bid to solo-circumnavigate the globe in a sailboat referred to one of his stops as the Cokos Keeling Islands. The correct spelling of the Indian Ocean islands is Cocos Keeling. The article also said Sunderland is a student at Grace Brethren High School in Thousand Oaks. The school is in Simi Valley.
Sunderland, 17, is more than 100 miles offshore on the final leg of a 13-month, around-the-world odyssey. He holds course but is interrupted by a jarring thud and what sounds like a gunshot.
His boat, Intrepid, has launched from a 10-foot wave and its port-side bulkhead has buckled on impact. The deck flexes and chain plates with lines supporting the mast have ripped loose. Wind hisses loudly, menacingly.
He must change course and try to reach the nearest refuge, Puerto Vallarta.
Sunderland has grown accustomed to adversity since he embarked from Marina del Rey on June 14, 2008, on a mission to become the youngest sailor ever to circumnavigate the globe alone. He was 16 and didn't even have a driver's license.
The idea had been in his mind since he read "The Dove" as a child. The book chronicles a five-year circumnavigation by Robin Lee Graham, whose voyage ended in 1970, when he was 20.
Sunderland, a shipwright's son and an experienced sailor, planned the journey himself. He would cross the Pacific and Indian oceans before rounding Africa's Cape of Good Hope, then cross the Atlantic, pass through the Panama Canal and sail north along the Central American and Mexican coasts before returning home.
He would subsist on freeze-dried and canned food when fresh provisions ran out, and he would desalinate his drinking water with an on-board kit.
What Sunderland, due to return to Marina del Rey about July 14, could not foresee were the dangers and difficulties.
Notable was the pirate scare. In October, he was 150 miles beyond Indonesia, on a course from Australia to the Cokos Keeling Islands, when he encountered a mysterious boat. The 60-foot wooden vessel did not appear on his radar screen. He tried unsuccessfully to raise its crew on the radio. He changed direction; it changed direction.
Winds were light and he could not escape, so he clutched his satellite phone -- his lifeline -- and dialed his home in Thousand Oaks.
