Aboard his 36-foot sailboat, Ryan Finn will depart New York for San Francisco, looking to best the record of 81 days sailing by eleven.
The area native tells the Times-Picayune/New Orleans Advocate he feels at home in the muddy waters of the Gulf Coast as he does in the deep oceans of the Atlantic and Pacific.
“I could spend months cruising around just in the Mississippi Sound,” Finn said. “I don’t have to go to an island in the Pacific to feel like I’m accomplishing what I want to in sailing. It’s all right here for me.”
Reflecting on his youth spent sailing around the Gulf Coast, “Going to Cat Island and Ship Island and Horn Island and Petit Bois, I fell in love with the freedom that it gave you to explore these places.”
Finn’s determination to take on such a difficult journey comes from the complicated past of health issues.
Finn was diagnosed with Hodgkin Lymphoma at 19.
He’s endured rounds of chemotherapy and radiation treatments.
That’s when he told himself: “I’m not going to be sitting around home. I’m not going to be like a normal person from this point on.”
Finn will be sail the Jzerro, a 36-foot sailboat based on a Polynesian-type craft called a proa.
Finn plans to set off from a marina in Brooklyn sometime in the immediate future.