{alltv} Stephen Colbert to set sail in Bermuda Triangle race

 

Comedy Central funnyman Stephen Colbert writes with humor about his harrowing journey as a member of a sailing crew in 2005's Charleston Bermuda Race, a 777-mile plunge into the Bermuda Triangle.

The risk-taking comedian tells Outside magazine (on newsstands April 12) the tale of how he embarked on his first-ever sailing expedition, his intense (and sometimes messy) on-board duties, and why he's now going to do it again in May.

"Though I grew up in a sailing community—Charleston, South Carolina—I am not a sailor. I wasn't allowed to sail because I'm not waterproof. I have no eardrum in my right ear. As a child, I imagined that if the boat capsized, my skull would fill with water and down I'd go, bow first."

But, he says, "There comes a time in every man's life when he must ask himself, 'What can I endure? Of what mettle am I made?' This was not one of those times. I thought this would be a booze cruise to Bermuda."

He learned very quickly this was no luxury liner. "Boat toilets...are floating Porta-Potties. Ours through an understandable oversight had not been emptied since the Carter administration. We tried opening a relief valve (provocatively called an "ocean cock") - no go. It had to be pumped by hand. As a father of three, I was used to dealing with other people's waste, so I volunteered, as did two other crew members... I now knew that I would not drown. I would die from amoebic dysentery."

So why do it again?

He tells Outside: "What endures is what I can't rightly describe: Looking up at night to see the masts unmoving in your eyes but the stars dancing in synchronized figure eights...Flying fish slapping against the sail...Two ounces of gritty cowboy coffee. Eight friends together in a 45-foot world and alone at the center of a referenceless horizon. I can't explain what that all feels like. I just know I want to feel it again."

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