On May 19 Kaohsiung Harbor was abuzz in anticipation of the homecoming of New Era, the first sailboat to circumnavigate the globe from a Taiwan harbor.
Crowds packed pier 21 as fishing boats and jet boats escorted the 16m sailboat on its final gracious glide into harbor. The crew on board, skipper Nelson Liu (劉寧生), navigator Bernd Doerper and Fu Kuo-hui (傅國會), could barely contain their excitement as their families, friends and fans came into view.
New Era started its trip, dubbed 2001 Globe Expedition, in Kaohsiung Harbor on Dec. 24, 1998 and after 886 days sailing three oceans and seven seas, anchoring at 62 ports and covering nearly 28,000 nautical miles finally returned to its home port.
Liu, 53, has been sailing the Pacific since 1992 and is something of a pioneer, being the first ethnic Chinese to circumnavigate the globe in a wind-propelled vessel. His adventure has prompted comparisons to the Ming dynasty explorer Cheng Ho (鄭和), who led a fleet to Africa's east coast.
Bombarded with questions upon his arrival, Liu said what impressed him most about his NT$12 million trip were the people he and Doerper encountered along the way. Whether it's the unknown farmer by the Nile River who insisted on offering the crew tea, or the 50 guest crew members that boarded New Era for portions of the trip, Liu said it was people who brought meaning to his project beyond the fulfillment of a personal dream.
Liu began sailing in the early 1990s after losing his wife and the export business he'd run for about 20 years. He decided to start his life anew, this time geared toward his life-long dream to sail. "You should do what you've always wanted to do," he recalled himself as saying then.
So, in October, 1990, Liu went to Australia to learn how to operate a sailboat and began a search for his own boat that took him from Australia to Hawaii and then to San Francisco, where he finally found the boat he wanted -- Water Torture. He changed the name to Lucky Dragon and sailed it back from the US to Taiwan, becoming the first Taiwanese to sail across the Pacific.
It was while in the US that Liu met Doerper, who would become indispensable to the 2001 Globe Expedition. Doerper, an experienced sailor of 40 years had much in common with Liu -- a failed marriage and collapsed business in Germany which led him to the US in search of a new life in his middle age. The two met in Long Beach, California and together they sailed Lucky Dragon across the Pacific to arrive in Taiwan in August, 1992.
During the trans-Pacific sail in 1992, Liu made friends with another person, Kuo Ting (郭廷祥), who later helped organize the round-the-world trip. Kuo, now 50, was an office worker with vivid memories of his first sailing lessons in the US while he was in high school. Ever since, he fantasized about boats and eventually he returned to the US for more lessons and got certified to operate a sailboat.
The three began offering sailing lessons and making contacts with competent deckhands who would share their dream of sailing around the world. "It's hard to find experienced sailboat operators, particularly for a project like this for which you have to leave everything behind, family and job, and not be paid for two years," Kuo said.
By 1996 plans were beginning to take shape for the round-the-world trip. The men searched for a boat that could sustain the long trip around the world and eventually Liu dropped his life savings to buy a boat from Hawaii named Christine with his partners. The boat was merely a shell and needed to be completely refurbished over two years before it could be considered seaworthy. Costs began to skyrocket for the project, approaching NT$10 million, leading the group to turn to private and corporate donations. In 1997, the three men founded the Taipei Offshore Sailing Association (台北市帆船協會, TOSA) as a channel to prepare their project and recruit crew members.
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