Solo sailor Henk de Velde called himself a ‘nomad of the sea’. The sea was his life. “Henk without a boat is nothing and nobody,” he says in his video diary 1000 Days of Solitude (2004) while frozen in Siberia.
Henk de Velde passed away on Thursday 3 November in a nursing home in Lelystad at the age of 73. He had been ill for quite some time.
Solo sailor De Velde sailed around the world six times in different boat types: the catamaran Zeeman, the keel yacht Campina and the trimaran Juniper. His last boat, on which he also lived, was the seaworthy motor vessel Solitario. Not because he felt lonely, as he writes in Travel between sand and ice (2014), but because every time he passed Cape Horn – and this happened four times – the lighthouse keeper wished him a good journey through the VHF radio: “Buen viaje, Solitario.”
Geography
De Velde was born in IJsselmuiden in 1949 as the second child of four. At school, geography was his favorite subject, atlases and maps he would cherish all his life. He skipped school to watch ships in Rotterdam. At the age of fifteen, De Velde signed on as a light sailor and worked in the merchant navy. He obtained his helmsman’s papers at the Maritime Academy in Amsterdam and became captain.
In 1978 he resigned and embarked on his first world tour, together with his then wife Gini. Their son Stefan was born on Easter Island, in 1981.
‘Impossible Journey’
His beloved Sunday school childhood book that went with him on every trip was The wintering on Nova Zemlya by P. de Zeeuw about the harsh wintering in 1596-1597 of Willem Barentsz and his men. Unintentionally, De Velde would also spend the winter on the Arctic Ocean, in the polar village of Tiksi. The purpose of that “impossible journey,” as he called it, was to follow the least traveled northeastern passage above Siberia and sail from there to the South Pole. So from pole to pole
He left in 2001. But the Russian bureaucracy in Murmansk refused him a visa. De Velde did something unprecedented: he resolutely changed tack, sailed 20,000 kilometers around the world to end up in the Bering Sea in 2003 and reach Murmansk via the Bering Strait, the western route. In Tiksi he let himself freeze, waiting for spring. In An icy breakthrough. Wintering in Siberia (2005) reports on this. A Russian icebreaker was helpful: the pack ice had damaged both Campina’s rudders and the ship had to be repaired. He eventually docked in IJmuiden in 2004.
De Velde wanted to improve world records, for example to travel solo around the world in 1989. That failed, it took him 158 days while the record stood at 150. In 1992 he tried again, but a collision with a loose container just off the coast of Madeira almost killed him. In his sleep he hit the mast bulkhead. A Russian ship rescued him and he was hospitalized in Madeira with a double skull fracture. His dream of sailing the fastest non-stop solo race around the world in 100 days was shattered.
De Velde was not undisputed within the sailing world. He would be too reckless.
In 2007 he started the Never Ending VoyageIn other words: never to return to the Netherlands. But the loss of his son Stefan and the realization that he had neglected him too much due to his years of absence, led him to interrupt that journey.
Fifteen books
When asked why De Velde kept risking his life, he answered that he had a great urge for freedom and a love for ships and the sea. In An ice-cold breakthrough he puts it this way: “he certainly believed in his dream, in his happiness and in the undertaking. He wasn’t just thinking about risk. He sailed out.”
Those last three words characterize De Velde’s sailing life. Colleague sailing writer Toine Heijmans visited De Velde in Tiksi at the time and registers VHF messages (2019): “Seamen and sailors: they want to leave as soon as they land.” De Velde has written about fifteen books about his longing for inhospitability. They are more than sailing travel books, he is looking for answers to the big questions of life. In the end he realizes that he is looking for God, for silence, for immensity.