A Man, a Magellan, and a Guinness World Record
Robert Suhay, using a Magellan eXplorist 510 handheld GPS, set a new Guinness World Record for single-handed Laser sailing.
February 14, 2015
Oddly, after years of planning and practicing, it was likely middle-of-the-night delusions that landed Robert Suhay his Guinness World Record for the longest distance sailed in a single-handed dinghy.
Robert Suhay earned a Guinness World Record by sailing 283.5 miles in a Laser.
The mind games happened only once in all the years that Suhay has been out on the water long past sunset, and he's got plenty of experience. Growing up on the New Jersey shore, he learned to steer with a tiller on what he remembers as “a little pram” when he was six in and around Point Pleasant, about an hour north of Atlantic City. It was an era long before helicopter parenting, when kids had the freedom to roam neighborhoods well into the wee hours. “I got in my boat and I sailed,” he remembers. “My Dad would put me out in that little pram, and I’d sail all day long, and he’d pick me up when he got home. I kept going farther and farther, and it got to the point where they’d spend an hour or two driving up and down the rivers so they could tell me to come home.”
Now 51, a married father of four and living in Virginia, where he is a newspaper designer, Suhay still has the unquenchable urge to wander endlessly in boats. Today his craft of choice is the Laser, a 13' 9" dinghy, which he tows on a dolly to a put-in about two blocks from his home near the Elizabeth River, at the southern end of the Chesapeake Bay. He never dreamed of trying to break a Guinness record, but he did become increasingly interested in figuring out how such a thing might be done—and whether he still had the personal stamina to do it in his middle-aged years.
“It was about trying to go really, really far and test my own limits,” he says. “The record was a secondary idea. The main motivation was a personal challenge.”
Suhay made his first serious attempt three years ago, and he succeeded only at figuring out how not to do things. For starters, he thought he could pull off a float plan of more than 280 nautical miles in a bay that’s sometimes 30 miles wide by using dead reckoning and a compass.
“I got really lost overnight,” he recalls. “Huge currents move not only north and south, but also east and west. During an overnight period on my first trip, I got pushed very far west, more than I thought possible.”
He remembers awakening to the stench of dead fish, which is how he figured out, much later, that he’d ended up near an old processing factory in Reedville.
That whole first trip took him about 30 hours, and in the end, he was happy just to get back home—not only because of its familiarity but also because his rear end was nearly crippled with soreness, from sitting for so long. “It became debilitating,” he says. “I couldn’t sit in the boat anymore, and I couldn’t stand because my legs were tired and cramping.”
For his second trip, he had what he calls “cushion technology” along with a GPS, a borrowed older Magellan model from a friend. It was good, but he still struggled, even with basics like trying to see his cellphone in daylight. “It became almost useless,” he remembers. “I created a tent with my rain jacket so I could use the phone screen, but it’s tough on the Laser. It’s so small...”
His wife then connected him with the Magellan electronics company, which landed him a 510 eXplorist for attempt number three. The eXplorist is a rugged, handheld GPS designed specifically for outdoor use, and for Suhay, it made all the difference. He kept it in the pocket of his lifejacket, tied with a lanyard. He could see it day and night, and he could use it with one hand.
The Magellan eXplorist 510.
“On a Laser, you can’t let go of things,” he says. “You have the tiller or the sheet or both. It’s very easy to use this unit one-handed. There are a couple of different ways to approach different functions, so with a thumb or one finger, I could scroll through the menus and options.”
The eXplorist began recording his progress in increments of nautical miles as soon as he cast off in midsummer 2014—and it would become crucial as the going once again got rough, even before the delusions took hold.
For instance, Suhay’s Laser makes about four or five knots at best, and the current can run three or four knots, wiping out most forward progress. At those times, the Magellan handheld let him determine whether he was inside the tideline, so he could work his way closer to the shoreline if necessary. “It made the difference in being able to make smart choices,” he says.
The mental meltdown occurred on the second night, after he’d been awake for two full days. He got confused and began sailing in figure eights—not exactly making forward progress on his planned route, but with the eXplorist GPS continuing to add every last half nautical mile the boat traveled.
“For hours, I was struggling,” he recalls. “I knew I wasn’t processing information correctly, but I couldn’t find my way out of it. I looked at the GPS—which, frankly, became my watch too because it was easy to read—and at 2:30 in the morning, everything started getting clear again mentally. I could see the track, and I knew where I was.
“Moments after that, a big, white spotlight shone down on me, and I thought, ‘Turn that light off! I can’t see with that light on!'”
Then he heard two blasts of a horn.
Then he saw a big, black barge, being pushed by a tug, coming down atop him and his dinghy.
Suhay stood up, got to the front of the Laser and jumped into the Chesapeake Bay, with the handheld GPS still connected to his lifejacket by a lanyard. The barge’s bow wake capsized the tiny Laser hull, which landed on him. (“There’s nothing like that to wake you up at 2:30 in the morning.”) After he righted himself and got situated, sopping wet, he told the barge crew he was okay and intended to continue—but they had to report the incident to the U.S. Coast Guard. Suhay was forced to spend the next six hours heaving-to while waiting to give a deposition. To be honest, he says, the Coast Guard didn’t want him out there anymore even if he was all right. Hurricane Arthur was barreling up the U.S. East Coast, and a series of thunderstorms was moving in too.
“I was getting cold, I’d been awake and on the water for 86 hours,” he says. “I wasn’t thinking super-clearly.”
Suhay met with the Coast Guard at a nearby dock, gave them what they needed for their report and hauled the Laser out. Fate punished him a bit more, as there was no dinghy dock or ramp, forcing him to de-rig the boat and hoist it up about four feet using nothing but his exhausted muscles and one last surge of adrenaline. His wife came to pick him up in their vehicle, and he didn’t even bother to look at the number of nautical miles the Magellan eXplorist had recorded. His eyes were bleary, he needed a hot shower and a soft mattress, and anyway, he was too busy using the handheld GPS to plot a route home from wherever they were, “down the roadways from middle-of-nowhere Maryland.”
The next day, after he’d had a chance to rest, his wife and Old Dominion University sailing coach Mitch Brindley downloaded the eXplorist files to Magellan, where GPS Senior Product Manager Richard Tinnell and his team processed the information it had recorded. Suhay was neither despondent nor broken, but disappointed, feeling that he had yet again failed.
“Then they said, ‘What was the record?’” he recalls.
It was 282 nautical miles.
They looked at him and blurted, “You actually covered 283 and a half.”
How many of those nautical miles were figure-eights born of delusion at 2:30 in the morning is uncertain, but this past December, Guinness awarded Suhay the record based on the GPS data along with geotagged photos he used the eXplorist to snap. Magellan, obviously enthusiastic, issued a press release stating, “Thanks to Magellan, Suhay was able to prove that given the number of tacks he took, the total number of nautical miles he sailed solo, unassisted, was enough to set the new world record. All the electronic data plus verification letters from Magellan and the U.S. Coast Guard Homeland Security offices added up to Suhay and his sons celebrating his newly official Guinness World Record today.”
Robert Suhay with his award.
Suhay is grateful for everyone’s help—“The Magellan folks could not have been more supportive or more helpful,” he says—but for him, the most important thing hasn’t changed much since he was six years old on that little pram gunkholing way past dark.
“The Magellan was something that made it possible to go really, really far in a big body of water without getting lost,” he says, but “what kept me motivated, especially once I had gotten to my designated turnaround point, was just the image of my wife and kids in my head and a desire to get back home to them. That was the motivation. It wasn’t a number on the screen.”
For more, watch Robert Suhay: Guinness Book WR Longest Distance sailed Laser.
