The 38-foot rugged steel cutter pulled up to the dock in June 2016, looking hardy and capable, with a hard-chined hull, a chimney and a pilothouse. I stood there on my sloop in Dutch Harbor, Alaska, thinking that the boat had the type of constitution which could weather many a long Southern Ocean crossing.
I didn’t recognize the ensign that was flying, so I struck up a conversation with the solo sailor on board. His name was Leiv Poncet, and he was from the Falkland Islands, that remote and harsh archipelago a few hundred miles off the southern tip of South America.
Poncet’s journey from the Falklands to the Aleutians seemed remarkable to me: He’d first sailed to Chile, then north through the Chilean channels, and then across the Pacific to the Gambier and Marquesas archipelagos of French Polynesia. He’d just arrived in Dutch Harbor after sailing 4,000 nautical miles from the Marquesas.
“You didn’t stop in Hawaii?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “I had a good wind.”
Such is the attitude that the Cruising Club of America rewards with its Blue Water Medal, one of the highest awards in cruising sailing. The club endowed the award more than a century ago to “reward meritorious seamanship and adventure upon the sea that might otherwise go unrecognized.” Former recipients include Rod Stephens, Sir Francis Chichester, Miles and Beryl Smeeton, Bernard Moitessier, and Sir Robin Knox-Johnston. As of 2024, Poncet has joined their ranks.
Over drinks aboard my sloop, Celeste,that evening, it became obvious that Poncet sails across oceans, around the great capes, and into the wildernesses solely for his own joy. In a world jammed with oversharing and self-promotion, with monetizing and advertising, he simply sails. He has no blog or social media, and certainly no YouTube channel. He takes superb photos, but just for his own enjoyment, and to show his friends and family.
Prior to sailing, he was a kayaker—having become one of the first people to kayak around South Georgia, east of the Falkland Islands. That was after he grew up voyaging in the Southern Ocean and living on a remote island in the western Falklands. He is the second son of high-latitude sailors Jerome and Sally Poncet, who were awarded the Blue Water Medal in 1992 for their pioneering sailing and wintering in Antarctica, coupled with their valuable contribution of a handbook to Antarctic voyaging. They took him on his first Cape Horn rounding when he was only 18 months old.
“My sailing trips began many years ago, growing up on a boat with my parents and brothers,” he said. “Living on a remote island within a remote group of islands meant that most of the sailors who visited were very accomplished, and that influenced me further. Most of them made journeys no less impressive than any of mine, and did so before GPS, reliable communications, and weather forecasts.”
He began his solo seafaring in kayaks, and in 2001 became the first person to circumnavigate the Falklands Islands by kayak. He continued that pursuit while attending college in Hobart, Australia. He paddled in the Bass Strait with friends and circumnavigated Tasmania solo, taking 45 days. He later returned to Tasmania with his sloop, Peregrine, and retraced some of his kayaking voyages. “Most of the islands we camped at in the Bass Strait are much better visited by kayak,” he said.“With my boat, it was just harder to get in close in the places where the anchorages weren’t so good.”
Yes, he preferred the wet, cold exertion of kayaking to the relative ease of sailing because he could visit more places that few people ever do.
After graduating with a degree in geology, he paddled the length of New Zealand’s Fiordland and then in Canada’s Haida Gwaii archipelago. His last major paddling adventure was his circumnavigation of South Georgia Island, a voyage that got nerve-wracking.
“I got a little worried about the food supply a few times,” he said, noting the storms and surf that held him in place.
His initial motivation for buying Peregrine, his 38-foot steel yacht, in Spain in 2008 was to sail to the Kerguelen Islands in the Southern Indian Ocean, and then circumnavigate them by sea kayak. Ultimately, though, the adventure of sailing itself—and the maintenance demands of an oceangoing sloop—left him sailing much more than kayaking.
His first solo sailing journey was the length of the Atlantic, to bring Peregrine home to the Falklands. He said that it wasn’t the most comfortable voyage because he had yet to modify the boat to suit his needs. It had been a liveaboard home for a couple in a marina, and he could’ve done the work before setting off, but he instead decided to sail some 8,000 miles so that he could work on the boat near his family’s remote sheep farm.
Peregrine is a Trireme 38, a French design built in 1977. It was ketch-rigged when he bought it. He converted it to a sloop rig and rebuilt the galley, removing a large refrigerator to make room for a woodstove. He also built a pilothouse on deck, and he modified the rudder to make the boat balance properly. All the while, he lived on board and cruised to Tierra del Fuego.
In 2011, following his refit, Poncet set off to circumnavigate the Southern Ocean. He sailed west from the Falklands to South Africa and then to the Kerguelen Islands, his raison d’êtrefor the voyage. Kerguelen is a harsh, windy archipelago halfway between South Africa and Australia. The islands are solidly in the region of the high winds and massive graybeards that make the Southern Ocean so feared and so compelling. These islands are among the most isolated places on Earth. He loved his time there so much that he lights up when he talks about seeing the glaciated peaks rising up into the clouds, the hiking he did over the tundra, and cruising to empty cove after empty cove.
He spent two months sailing there with a pair of ornithologists who joined him on board to conduct bird surveys. Using Peregrine in a similar capacity in the Falklands has become a regular occurrence for Poncet since then, giving further purpose to his voyaging.
“It’s a great way of really getting to know the coastline,” he said. “When one is cruising solely for pleasure, there’s not always the same level of motivation to push on when it’s getting late or the wind is picking up, and we are usually less willing to creep in close to a rocky shore.”
After Kerguelen, it was a small matter of completing the rest of his Antarctic circumnavigation, via Western Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand and Cape Horn. He wintered in Hobart, Tasmania, and met a cruising family from Kodiak, Alaska, which made him increasingly excited about a voyage to Alaska.
Once spring arrived in Tasmania, he sailed for Stewart Island and New Zealand’s Chatham Islands before making his longest passage yet—across the Pacific and around Cape Horn, a distance of some 4,000 nautical miles. “I took the shortest route home,” he said about that trip, “through the southern Pacific, mostly at around 50 degrees south. Honestly, I got a little bored until the storms came. But for the rest of it, that’s a long time to be at sea alone.”
His passage home around Cape Horn took him over a place known as Point Nemo, the oceanic pole of inaccessibility, the point on Earth that is farthest from any land. In fact, the nearest inhabitants are on the International Space Station.
When one is cruising for pleasure, there’s not always the same level of motivation to push on when it’s getting late or the wind is picking up.
Back at home in the western Falklands, he used Peregrine to sail to Stanley, the only town in the archipelago, a trip of 170 nautical miles each way. Like he did in Kerguelen, he ferried around scientists. He also crewed for his father and older brother on their charter yachts, taking scientists, BBC film crews, and other guests on trips to the Antarctic Peninsula, South Georgia, and the South Sandwich Islands.
Then he got the itch again, this time to go to Alaska, and specifically to the Aleutian Islands. The Aleutians are subpolar, tundra-covered islands where wind, fog and large beds of kelp make sailing challenging. Perhaps this is what drew him; that summer when I met him, in 2016, Poncet had journeyed the length of the Aleutian chain in both directions, a total of about 2,400 miles, before crossing the Gulf of Alaska from Kodiak to Canada.
The following season, he returned to Kodiak and the Alaska Peninsula, where we cruised in company for a few weeks, watching bears snatch salmon out of rivers, fishing for salmon ourselves, visiting abandoned canneries, and dropping anchor in secluded coves near tumbling tidewater glaciers. We crossed to the Inside Passage at different times, met up again in San Francisco, and then were off on separate adventures. He made a beeline for Mexico’s Sea of Cortez to sandblast and repaint his hull before crossing the Pacific for French Polynesia’s Gambier Islands, and then another long passage south and west around Cape Horn.
His voyages in the years after that included sailing to Tierra del Fuego and Uruguay before heading to South Georgia, which he describes as probably his favorite place. For two months, he sailed along South Georgia’s coasts, poking into some of the least-visited regions of that island. He rekindled cherished childhood memories: being amid the abandoned whaling stations, seeing the penguin colonies, and spotting the nesting albatross.
Poncet had barely returned from South Georgia when he was planning another big endeavor. “I felt I hadn’t quite done justice to Alaska,” he said, and so he set off again, across the Pacific, to repeat much of his earlier trip to the Aleutian Islands. Following two summer seasons in the Bering Sea, again reaching the westernmost outpost of the chain at Attu, he headed for home just a few months ago, making his fifth crossing of the Gulf of Alaska and then sailing straight from western Vancouver Island to French Polynesia’s Marquesas Islands.
As of this writing, he is anchored in the Gambier archipelago, with some 5,000 miles and his third solo Cape Horn rounding to go before returning home to the Falklands.
When he was told that he’d been chosen to receive the 2024 Blue Water Medal, he said that he felt it “is not entirely mine. I am only doing what I know how to do, what I grew up doing.”
Ellen C. Massey is a circumnavigator, an award-winning writer, and an airplane pilot. She’s sailed almost 60,000 miles, including a global circumnavigation, a voyage to the Alaskan Arctic, and a second crossing of the Pacific to French Polynesia and Hawaii. She won the CCA’s Young Voyager Award in 2018 and the Royal Cruising Club Trophy in 2022.
