JIMMY CORNELL | AS INTERVIEWED BY ANDY SCHELL
Jimmy Cornell, now 86, has led an extraordinary life – he escaped communist Romania to go on to become one of the icons of cruising under sail. He’s circumnavigated three times, sailed to the far north and the far south, and will soon publish the 10th edition of his cruising bible, “World Sailing Routes.” He also invented the concept of the cruising rally, starting the ARC back in 1986.
I interviewed Jimmy Cornell just a few weeks before writing this up for Lats & Atts, and even after doing over 500 of these podcast episodes over the past 13 years, I’m still surprised. Like most cruising sailors, I have a huge respect and admiration for Jimmy Cornell and feel like I’ve read a lot and know a lot about the guy…and yet, literally in the very first thing he said to me, he tells me he got shot trying to escape Communist Romania by swimming to a Norwegian tanker in the Black Sea! WTF?! And with that, the interview was off to a flying start! Here’s a highly truncated version of what Jimmy and I talked about for about an hour one spring day earlier this year. You can hear the full audio of the episode by subscribing to my On the Wind Sailing podcast for free, anywhere you get your podcasts!
ANDY SCHELL:
Wait, you swam to a Norwegian ship and were shot!?
JIMMY CORNELL:
To cut the story short, my father died in prison, and I didn’t want to stay in Romania if I could get out. So in 1959, [my friend and I] were 19, and we went to the sea. We were both good swimmers, so one night we swam out to this ship. They lowered the ladder, we climbed up on board, the crew welcomed us, the captain came to see us, and we explained who I was and what had happened to me. We were hoping that they would be able to hide us somewhere on the ship and take us to somewhere and then put us ashore in the free world, as it were.Â
Unfortunately, within about an hour after we had arrived, they had the call from the Port Authorities that a ship, a small ship sailing across our route, had seen a person in the water.
