Watching the waves crash against the sides of his crippled boat, Ronnie Simpson concluded that he was very likely to die.
For more than 100 days, he had been winning his battles against the world’s fiercest seas and most of the other 15 sailors he was racing around the globe. Never before, in all those wet, cold, sleepless nights, had he truly been afraid. Now, as a massive storm hurdled toward the spot where he bobbed some 700 miles off the coast of Argentina, it seemed that all was lost. The race. His dream of completing a solo lap of the planet. The partner waiting for him back in Maine.
It took something approaching a miracle — technological and otherwise — for Simpson to be rescued that day in February 2024. It’s something else that has compelled him to try it all over again.
In the fall of 2027, Simpson plans to compete in the second-ever Global Solo Challenge, an around-the-world race that pits amateur and professional sailors against each other, the elements and the limits of their own will to endure. As he did two years ago, he will base his campaign in Portland, quietly the American epicenter of the little-known sport.
“This is a very, very special place,” Simpson said in October on the dock of the Maine Yacht Center, which regularly prepares boats for the world’s toughest sailing competitions. “The moment I decided I was going to race around the world solo, the first thing I had to do was book a one-way flight from Hawaii to Portland.”
Two years before he sets out from the race’s starting line just off the coast of Spain, Simpson is already hustling to raise the $1 million he believes he needs in order to have a real chance of winning the event. That requires attracting potential donors and sponsors by sharing and resharing his life story — a tale of suffering, rebirth, obsession and, someday he hopes, redemption.
A lonely enterprise
It’s the sailing equivalent of summiting Everest.
Simpson struggles to put into words exactly what attracts him to the world of shorthanded sailing, except that the sport is the ultimate test of mental and physical endurance.
“It’s definitely sort of type 2 fun,” he said. “A lot of it is miserable.”
For the roughly four to nine months that it will take Global Solo Challenge competitors to circle the planet, they can expect to eat almost exclusively freeze-dried meals. When they get to sleep at all, they tend to do so in 20- to 60-minute increments so that they can constantly adjust to changes in the wind or approaching tanker ships. Though they are connected to the outside world through satellite internet, they will have no face-to-face human contact unless they choose to port and take the accompanying four-day penalty, a strategy most of the top racers try to avoid.
Electronic autopilot systems, powered mostly by on-board solar panels, steer the boats. Everything else is in the hands of the sailors, from trimming sails to tracking weather patterns to charting the fastest possible course that does not endanger the vessel.
After setting out from Spain in October 2023, it took Simpson about 30 days to reach the bottom of South Africa. From there, he spent most of the race in the “roaring 40s” and the “furious 50s,” named after the extreme weather that dominates the latitudes of the Southern Ocean. With few landmasses to break up pressure systems, storms in that part of the world are famous for spinning freely and gaining immense power. Sailors competing in the Global Solo Challenge can harness those storms to reach average speeds of 13 knots, or about 15 miles per hour — at least until the winds change direction and buffet their boats with ferocious headwinds that can approach or exceed hurricane-level speeds.
From days 30 through about 100, Simpson lived in the Southern Ocean, riding one storm at a time as he sailed under Africa, Australia and South America. Though the experience was brutal, he felt the race was going well. He sat in third place as he approached Cape Horn, famously the site of the most dangerous sailing in the world. Unlike most others in the field, he could fairly say that he had already been through something worse.
Lost and found
Simpson has only scattered memories of the June day when a rocket propelled grenade took the air out of his life.
The Atlanta native had joined the Marines straight out of high school in 2003, just a couple months after the U.S. initiated its shock and awe campaign in Iraq. A year later, his unit was escorting a group of Army equipment trucks when it came under fire near Fallujah. A grenade hit the road near the base of Simpson’s Humvee, bounced up and exploded about a meter from the roof-mounted .50 caliber machine gun he was operating.
He woke up 18 days later from a medically-induced coma in a San Antonio hospital. The bottom of his left lung was shredded. His eyes, ears and ribs were all damaged, and his skin was burned. At age 20, Simpson’s military career was over.
Then his father died, and Simpson found himself “lost in life.” He started college, but quit before graduation. Like many soldiers who have seen combat, he struggled to adjust to the slow pace of civilian life.
He has said for years that it was sailing that saved him. In 2008, after he had moved to California, he discovered the Vendée Globe, the most prestigious competition in solo around-the-world racing. Though the sport is niche in the United States, it has a storied history in Europe, especially France, that stretches back decades. Today, major corporations sponsor the racers who compete in the Vendée Globe, bankrolling state-of-the-art carbon fiber boats and logistics teams that can cost tens of millions of Euros.
Simpson set a goal of one day joining the ranks of the small handful of Americans who have competed in the race. He spent 15 years based in California and Hawaii competing in smaller competitions, racing through the Pacific and the Caribbean while working on the side as a freelance journalist, charter boat captain and yacht broker.
His first stint in the Global Solo Challenge two years ago marked the closest he’d gotten. Though the boats in that race are cheaper and slower, Simpson hoped that a strong finish might prove that he has the sailing chops to compete at the next level. Just as important, he hoped the fanbase he developed on social media might show sponsors that he would be a worthy investment.
A key part of the strategy has been sharing his story and defining himself as a wounded vet-turned-plucky underdog in a world of extreme wealth. He bootstrapped his way to the starting line with the support of U.S. Patriot Sailing, a nonprofit aimed at supporting veterans through sailing projects, and smaller companies like Shipyard Brewing.
“I don’t have any billionaires writing me blank checks,” he said. “We have to scrap.”
‘This is a bad one’
Successfully rounding Cape Horn is one of most impressive achievements a solo sailor can log, perhaps second only to completing a full lap of the globe. But when Simpson passed that marker during the first days of February 2024, he couldn’t find much reason to celebrate; he saw what was coming.
“You’ll notice I’m not, like, overly stoked,” a bearded Simpson told his 40,000 followers on Instagram on Feb. 2. “I have a really, really, really bad weather forecast.”
Over the next week, Simpson posted several videos that painted an idyllic picture of his sailing adventure: a pod of dolphins swimming off the side of his boat; a perfect sunset set to a chillwave soundtrack. But the captions hinted at a darker reality.
“It has been brutal,” read one post.
“I got pretty screwed,” read another. “Another tough week or so likely lies ahead.”
Several storms chased him from the south as he made his way up the Atlantic toward the finish line in Spain. But it was another pressure system that formed off the coast of Uruguay and Argentina that proved disastrous.
On the evening of Feb. 11, while most people in Simpson’s life were watching the third quarter of the Super Bowl, he was battling a sea that seemed to rage from all sides. He watched as waves crashed into each other and formed what were essentially “launch ramps” that threatened to send his boat into the air. Simpson was below deck checking his instruments when he felt everything go weightless.
“Oh no,” he remembers thinking as he braced for impact. “This is a bad one.”
The heavy crash that followed could only mean one thing: The 75-foot carbon fiber mast that had powered Simpson for more than 21,000 nautical miles had snapped. Twenty-five days away from completing his lap of the Earth and finishing the competition in third place, Simpson’s journey was done, and his life was in danger. A massive storm, bigger than any he had yet faced, would arrive in a little more than a day, and his mastless boat was now dangerously unstable.
Too far off that coast to motor to safety, he quickly determined that he needed to abandon his vessel. He hoped a nearby container ship called the Sakizaya Youth might be able to swing by and rescue him. But without a mast to serve as an antenna, his radio was crippled, and for hours, he could not figure out how to get in contact with the ship over the internet. As the governments of both the U.S. and Argentina tried to reach the captain of the Sakizaya Youth, Simpson’s instruments indicated that his best hope of survival was getting farther away: 30, 50, 100 miles.
By morning, the math was looking bleak. Simpson remembers calling his girlfriend and explaining that, unless the ship turned around in the next few minutes, it couldn’t possibly make it to him before night fell and the storm arrived.
“I basically told her, ‘Goodbye, this isn’t going to work,’” Simpson said.
Then, suddenly, the Sakizaya Youth reversed course. Simpson credits Peter Quinn, the founder of U.S. Patriot Sailing and a former Navy intelligence officer, with forging the connection with the ship’s Chinese captain. Shortly before sundown, Simpson scuttled his boat and boarded the Sakizaya Youth. He was alive. But his dream now rested at the bottom of the Atlantic ocean.
Back into the storm
It was about a year ago when Simpson decided he would take another run at the Global Sailing Challenge. Wracked by feelings of failure and guilt over losing his boat, he had slipped into what he called the first real depression of his life upon returning to Maine, where he settled with his partner after the race. After pouring so much time, money and emotion into chasing a dream that came up short, it didn’t really feel like he had any choice but to try again.
“I do it because I have to. My life will be without the meaning I want it to have unless I complete this race or at least try,” he said. “I’m not going to lie on my deathbed and wonder.”
He can coolly recount his near-death experience in Iraq as though it were a movie scene. But tears still come to his eyes when he talks about how his race ended. He can’t help but think about where his career might be had he finished the job and scored the third-place finish that felt so close. Would he be in Europe racing some of the fastest sailboats in the world, like second-place finisher and fellow Mainer Cole Brauer, who became the first American woman to sail solo around the world just a few weeks after Simpson dismasted? Would he be on track to compete in the Vendée Globe?
Now 40, Simpson sometimes thinks that it’s foolish to keep going. Maybe it’s time to grow up and stop spending all his money on a sport that could take his life. But he’s not ready to do that yet. In July, he bought his new boat, the Koloa Maoli, which successfully finished the last edition of the Global Solo Challenge under the stewardship of a different American owner. He’s currently searching for sponsors to help fund his campaign, which will likely kick off in October 2027.
Though the sea has almost killed him, it’s also long been the place he’s turned to in order to search for peace. He hopes that next time he will find it.
This story was originally published by the Maine Trust for Local News. John Terhune can be reached at [email protected].
