Battling wind, weather and solitude, Abhilash Tomy races to finish line in ocean endurance race

Panaji: Racing just off the Azores Islands in the Atlantic Ocean covering 156 miles at a blistering pace, former Indian Navy aviator Abhilash Tomy can’t stop his mind wandering back to his family here in Goa.
With less than 1,400 nautical miles from the finish line at Les Sables-d’Olonne in France, Tomy is on the cusp of history as he takes the lead in the gruelling 30,000-mile round-the-world race that almost killed him in September 2018.
“Distance to finish, Abhilash is closer, though he is ranked second. It looks like Abhilash is technically in the lead,” said founder and race chairman of the 2022 Golden Globe Race, Don McIntyre, during Monday’s race update.
The Kirti Chakra recipient has been locked in a nail-biting duel with the gutsy South African, Kirsten Neuschafer, for pole position for more than half the race. “Abhilash is flying. It’s game on. Kirsten and Abhilash are right in the game,” McIntyre said.
Back home, wife Urmimala and two sons, Abhraneil and Vedant, have been fretting for him every day since he announced that he was going to participate in the daunting race. In 2018, while sailing in the third position, Tomy had severely injured himself that left him unable to walk and required his spine to be fused and strengthened with titanium rods.
“The last seven months have been a blur. I think we’ve followed the wind and weather patterns with our emotions. The mood is still quite tense. The children have no patience left. So, it is more of a countdown for them,” Urmimala told TOI.
But Tomy, via a satellite call to TOI, has promised that he would take them for a holiday once he is done with the race. But for the next two weeks, it is just him and his 36-foot boat Bayanat.
Tested by storms, barnacles, sargassum weeds, and equipment that is beginning to give up due to the battering, Tomy and the Bayanat have been cruising non-stop for 225 days.
Cape Horn holds a respectable, if not fearsome reputation for solo sailors, and for good reason. Tomy’s weather-beaten face and the Bayanat’s battle scars tell the story of the battle with Cape Horn in February.
Tossed, slammed and knocked down, every inch of the Bayanat and Tomy’s resilience was tested. The Bayanat limped out with torn sails, broken Halyards, repaired spreaders, dismantled wind generators, electrical blackouts, and diesel tank leaks.
“The boat’s moving, so I am ok. The boat has sorted itself out,” Tomy told the organisers via a satellite call. “I was just thinking that if I spend another month, I will have a baby because it would be nine months.”
For many, the solitude can be maddening but Tomy revels in it, turning the mundane silence into a spiritual quest of witty quips.
“In solitude, consuming little, expressing little,” Tomy told the race organisers.
For, solitude and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s masterpiece One Hundred Years Of Solitude have been Tomy’s constant companions every time he ventured into the sea.
“Because races condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth,” Tomy had tweeted in December, quoting Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. Tomy first read One Hundred Years Of Solitude when he was 16, and the book has been a beacon for him since then.
Back in the waters, the sailor who once failed the Indian Navy’s navigation and communication test, has charted a route that has baffled and amazed everyone. Using nothing but a barometer and a sextant, the intrepid solo adventurer accurately found stronger winds to his north, which looked set to slingshot him to the finish line.
Even McIntyre appeared puzzled on Saturday, quipping that “he had absolutely no idea what Abhilash is up to”. But the gamble seems to have paid off.
“It is going to be a nail-biter, but certainly in the next 48 hours, you are going to see Abhilash jump quite substantially… Abhilash is looking pretty good at the moment,” McIntyre said on Monday.