(Credits: Far Out / Reid Stowe)

Around 30 years before Reid Stowe set sail around the world, his life looked a lot different. In the 1980s, he was immersed in the grungy, heroin-heavy circles of Manhattan’s Lower East Side art scene. Hanging out with the likes of Keith Harring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, making large colourful collages during the day and partying relentlessly at night. 

But Stowe had a double life of sorts. He was quite literally obsessed with sailing, so much so that it became his mission to spend the longest time at sea on record. And so he did.

Like a character out of a Christopher Nolan film, at just 21 years old, he had crossed the Atlantic twice, he managed to trace the figure of a whale through his voyage off South America, he was kidnapped by pirates in the Amazon River… the list goes on.

But the biggest adventure was yet to come. In the early 2000s, at age 58, Stowe set off to sail across the world, a voyage that would take him over three years. People thought he’d lost his mind. He probably had. He built the boat himself, a 70-foot sailboat named Anne, and to Basquiat’s dismay, he unapologetically sold a painting he had made of him to fund the trip.

Stowe was accompanied by Soanya Ahmad, a college graduate in her twenties. Not long after they set sail, she became his lover and then the mother of his only child, Darshan. Within the first year of the trip, Ahmad became increasingly sick, initially suspected as seasickness, so she was brought back on land. Little did anybody know that she was in fact pregnant with a child that Stowe would meet more than three years later. “People judged Reid for not being with me, but I supported him being out there,” said Ahmed.

Upon Stowe’s arrival in New York, after more than a thousand days at sea, he was welcomed with a surprise. The very first iPhone had just come out, nobody knew the impact that would have for decades to come. But something else diverted his attention, in the crowds of visitors waiting for him at the dock, he spotted his one-year-old child waiting for him in the arms of his former ship-mate. “My little baby!” he exclaimed, with tears in his eyes.

You would think that someone so extraordinary would become a fan-favourite amongst the sailing community, but apparently not. Stowe was extensively trolled online by mariners who saw him as a self-obsessed and careless sailor. But one can’t deny the odyssean nature of Stowe’s voyage, which is full of tumultuous challenges. Not only did he survive off of dried food and rainwater for all those years, but on one occasion, two weeks after setting off, he was caught in a storm near Cape Horn at the southern tip of Chile, which damaged the ship so badly that he capsized and his sails were torn. With a dead computer and no sails, he was forced to drift aimlessly across the ocean for a month.

Now, in the third chapter of his life, Stowe has become a domestic god of sorts. In a neat house in the suburbs of North Carolina’s Greensboro, Stowe lives a very ordinary life for a middle-aged man: mowing the lawn, tending to his old father, and home-schooling his son.

Nevertheless, it’s the turbulent experiences he went through at sea that remain the most exhilarating. “When a storm comes through, I hear the sails flap, and it makes me feel alive,” he said.