Full Movie: Red Dot on the Ocean: The Matt Rutherford Story

foreign a man on a mission with a plan to expand my vision yeah it's either this or it's prison i'm trying to be free and expand my wisdom uh i gotta tell my story i did it for the journey the glory many men tried way before me i had to do it bigger cause i had to make his story from the streets to the sea far away not a soul did i see from chesapeake up to bathroom bay my motto is hard work first and laugh and play now let's take a trip through the northwest passage some say i got a problem i say it's a passion i'm just trying to reach my goals before passing and i'mma do what i wanna do without asking it's my life my right so i fight for my dreams no matter how hard it might seem this is my pipe dream my advice to get your mind right find light and do the right thing no matter the weather or whatever the night brings thunder and to reach my goals to find my dreams when i'm away to watch i am the tallest thing for a long long way in any direction it scares the crap out of me i'm looking for a challenge i'm looking for a way to push myself often mentally and physically to my limits and see kind of what i'm made of and compare myself to some of the heroes that i've had his attempt is a solo circle navigate the america's non-stop well there's a what if there's a boat behind him right there's a crew that's no he's by himself in a 27-foot boat attempting to accomplish this that no one else has accomplished and then they would say well how where is he going to stop and i said no the term non-stop means he is not going to drop anchor and then they would sit back and it kind of filters through and they would say you mean to tell me he's on a 27-foot sailboat with a year's supply or whatever a food he's not going to stop anywhere and he's doing it entirely by himself yes that's exactly right i don't think i ever made a conscious decision to want to be an adventurer or to to go out on various ventures it just was something that i have been doing for a long time i guess i grew up doing a lot of that kind of stuff although those adventures were not quite as healthy he would say when i get out of here i'm gonna go sail the world i'm gonna go sail the pacific ocean and the atlantic ocean and uh nobody's gonna stop me most people dream about crossing oceans and sailing around the world and very few actually pull it off to do it in a small boat not a steel hole ship is very difficult to do so i kind of took it with a grain of salt with one thought i like the idea of going around the americas i'm not sure that's really been done the small boat didn't worry me at all because actually it's easier to make sure small boats well maintained and in control and handle the gear on it but it was just that single-handed going into very dangerous waters and going non-stop in in the little community that's the sailing community of annapolis you know the people that were in the know heard about it and the talk was that he was crazy that it was just a suicide mission you know and there was why is anyone doing this i mean he's just going to go out there and perish if you die doing what you love it's not a tragedy just sat down with him i said matt i have got to say goodbye to you because you might not make it i might not get to see you again and i want to tell you i'm really proud of you because most people have dreams and they never follow their dreams when matt rutherford took off i thought he was a crazy man i absolutely thought he was bonkers i thought he was bat [ __ ] crazy i tried to talk him out last june on going on this trip his sales weren't even there i said you're taking a boat out you've never even had a sale on you got to be kidding me i hadn't even sailed the boat when i left annapolis so going down the bay was kind of a uh you know the first time kind of getting used to the boat a little bit it was like the 110 mile test run the kid wasn't even tethered to the boat my mom was gonna kill him you're not tethered to the boat no i mean you could have just flown off at any time i am heading out of little creek inlet and soon i'll be at the starting line the immensity of the task ahead of me at times just seems uh seems like so much it's just hard for me to wrap my mind around it's hard for me to to fully understand or accept that i'm going to be out here for another 300 days although i'll be feeling much better when i get through the arctic and past alaska and into the pacific you have got to get some sleep you've got to navigate you've got to eat when you're a solo sailor you're a mechanic you're the navigator you're everything i had a couple of lines outside starting to shave through i had a block fall off one of my uh reefing points a lot of small problems become a big problem so it's important to stop the small problems immediately and so i keep going over the boat checking things checking things making sure everything is tip top as good as it can be for a 38 year old 27 foot boat i always had a safety line off the back of my boat i always had a way to get back on board the boat it's a little messy right now i got a fuel bladder with 85 gallons of diesel in it a bunch of other stuff as you can see food all hidden behind all this stuff the boat creaks and moans my finger yummy the toilet seat broke in half in the beginning but i have a very little butt so i can just fit on half a toilet seat i think biggest concern with how heavily overlaid in the boat was i was worried that you know i'd rather ripping the rig out of the boat because the boat would be too heavy but there was no way i'd get around it i needed the food i needed the diesel well it is important to have a working engine up in the arctic because you do have quite a bit of light winds at times and so having that engine is going to keep you keep you moving when you don't have wind especially when you have a pack ice you need to work your way through it's kind of hard to sail through that because of the ais unit it gives me the ability to not worry about freighters so this thing will start beeping like crazy if a freighter gets near me normally when you're out at sea it's like your world is so big you know you can see out in three miles in every direction you can see storms and squalls move by uh you know 600 foot freighters look like tiny little toys out on the horizon of course they're not toys but when you sail in the fog it's like your whole world all sudden becomes very small and it's almost claustrophobic in a way and uh it's really eerie matt lives on the edge and always has at least since he was in his early teens because he has to it was a cold winter night and i get a phone call at three o'clock in the morning okay ma'am do you know where your son is and do you know where your car is while my son's in bed sleeping and my car's in the garage um no ma'am this is the macedonia police department they were about 45 minutes away and your son is up here with us right now yeah i mean i used to take my parents cars at night when i was a kid before i was old enough to drive i used to take them out on different missions you know and the police officer said well the only reason we stopped them is he was so short in the driver's seat and we followed him around quite a bit and kept an eye on him and don't tell him but he's a really good driver but you know it often involved some kind of trouble you know i mean we weren't taking these cars out just to drive them around the block matt was always very stubbornly independent he liked doing things best if he did it himself he went through a period we decided that all he was going to wear was boots rubber boots and that's all we'd wear he wouldn't wear anything else in the house or out of the house when matt decided something it was done he was offended if he had to order off the children's menu he gets up middle of the restaurant stands up on the booth and shouts out to the entire restaurant i am a man conceptually matt was well ahead of his age group in fact when he was in preschool they tested him and he was tested out let's say at fourth a level of maybe a third grader or fourth grader conceptually he understood the big pictures very well uh he had some learning disabilities that we well more than we knew at the time but at that time it was essentially um dysgraphia was it one thing a very difficult time formulating letters and doing small motor problems that say according to my mom i couldn't read till i was in fifth grade so i had i've had a lot of problems i didn't know my left for my right for a long time i know that and i didn't know how to tie my shoes forever i had a lot of problems with hyperactivity i couldn't sit still in class i of course daydreamed a lot and i wasn't i'll be sitting in class but my mind was somewhere else but what really made it the hardest was just this simple inability to sit still it was still in the dark ages for students with learning disabilities and it was hard you know i had to deal with each teacher on an individual basis some were better than others in fourth grade we hit a wall with i can't remember her name but she was not a flexible teacher and what she expected for one student she expected for all and that's when the ticks really started coming out and they started with coffee and he had this nervous cough going on and clearing his throat i didn't fit in very well in in elementary school and in junior high uh they they didn't know what to do with me at schools and a lot of the other kids know what to make of me because i was different we had him brain mapped and the neurologist came out and said your son's biochemistry is way off the charts and i really recommend we start a regiment of psychotropics so they gave me a lot of ritalin at a young age but ritalin was problematic ridlin gave me uh side effects ticks and so that doesn't help and so they started giving me a pill to counteract that but that pill ender all gave me low blood pressure and made me had numb toes and fingers in the summertime so it was messing with my with my blood pressure so they gave me another pill to counteract the ender all to counteract the riddling and then they started feeding me prozac when i was 13 and so i was taking fists full of pills three times a day all these crazy pills he was beginning to really resent this place that he went to where he was ridiculed by other kids because of his tics school just wasn't really his gig i was very depressed i remember i remember when i was 11 years old and 10 years old i was supposed to write a journal or something and all i ever did was write about killing myself there is a chemical difference there's not enough dopamine availability dopamine is one of the key neurotransmitters involved in adhd what happens is the individual is looking for ways to activate their brain so they find things that stimulate them whether it's caffeine or nicotine sometimes alcohol or pot those are more common or cocaine and then there are more optimal forms of stimulation people will do things that are kind of exciting and risk-taking adrenaline kind of producing activities i'm surrounded in fog it's been raining and there's been thunder and fog all day because of the water breaking over the boat a lot of places leaked i had a wet bed last night i had a wet fellow a wet sleeping bag everything was wet i imagine i'll be dealing with this weather for another i don't know five days hopefully not too much longer i get tired of the fog i like to be able to see and i don't have a radar god damn it [ __ ] water maker just blew up and now i have no water maker and it's gonna screw in my whole trip up i don't want to go to land i have adjusted to the ocean i'm in the rhythm i'm in the zone everything is really good and this has just totally come in and kicked it right in the balls i got a frantic call from matt because by then he'd realized that this particular piece of equipment was a make or break for the trip i mean it was his soul his sole supply of fresh water i had a sat phone which i hadn't been using much or nor did i use much because the minutes are expensive but under these circumstances it was a lifesaver he said well call me back in 24 hours so i called him back and he had found a water maker he had found a guy that would bring it out to me in a little boat in newfoundland and kind of set the whole thing up this is day 20 i think newfoundland is right over there the water maker is not going to come for another 48 hours everything is good i got the water maker yesterday was a beautiful day the fog went away the sun came out it was gorgeous they gave me a bottle of screech which is some liquor some socks some banana bread and newspaper so they hooked me up with some stuff some nice treats but yeah that's it i got the water maker and i'm i'm back in the fog and i've been in the fog since last night and uh it sucks but whatever um i'll be getting up to where the icebergs are soon so i need this fog to go away so i can see icebergs uh just my boat just got hit by the biggest wave of the trip as i was trying to set that up i thought it'd be a good time to get some footage because i hadn't heard a wave break over the boat sometimes and a big old wave came damn near swept me off my feet i had to grab on to my backstage damn it i had to grab onto my backstay while my feet were out i got completely soaked i didn't have any foul weather gear on because i hadn't heard a wave break for like an hour i figured i'd just go out and be real quick and come back always a mistake i should have took the two minutes to put on the foul weather gear because now all my clothes are completely soaked that i was wearing they filled my cockpit with water my whole boat was under water for a minute this boat leaks like a sieve this boat leaks terribly everything is soaked you can see look at this my raymarine got knocked off a big wave hit yesterday and it threw me and i hit this and i tore it off the wall on accident and i got it bungied off right now i'm about to have a drink of screech because i just had dinner and i'm just tired and frustrated and i just want a hot shower some dry clothing a nice couch and television to watch a movie i've never seen you know like a nice bottle of red wine maybe some bread and cheese or something mayday report man overboard man was last seen at zero four two two zero zero coordinate universal time the position four six one six north zero five one four all vessels in the area to keep a sharp lookout and report any sightings to the nearest coast guard radio station this is st john's coaster radio over now that is a sobering situation some guy fell overboard in the fog at night and i probably drowned somewhere about 50 miles from here you realize before you leave that you might die you know you realize that you might not come back when you leave the dock and you accept that so once you've accepted it there's nothing to be afraid of it would be hypocritical for me to try to ask for some kind of help from a higher power which on land i wouldn't ask for that help normally but i grew up in a cult and it kind of rained on my religious parade dorothea was called leader which is odd how many calls do you know of the run by females sometime in the early 60s from her story god came down out the heavens and made her the most enlightened person on the planet the bible was never taken literally it was just a centerpiece now there's other philosophies gone on a lot of eastern philosophies it was about life force and life force you get it from god somehow so if you get sick it's not that the bacteria or or disease that made you sick it's your life force is all screwed up you see you shouldn't be sick if god really likes you so when people get sick you shouldn't go to to man you should go to god of course when she was in her 80s she got a pacemaker at the first second she had any problems with her heart but she was a hypocrite and uh charlatan when i met and and fell in love and married doug rutherford he was already part of this group and so i accepted her and and the people as extended family it was a small cult it was bible-based but and we'd meet at people's homes and you know it for for a cult it was very much like wonder bread we got together regularly saturdays for breakfast sundays for what we call church wednesdays for bible study it was really the centerpiece of our life as she got older and her health started to deteriorate i think that she started tightening emotional reins more on people if you have the social network and then you don't follow the rules whatever rules there are imposed on you then you lose your social network and that part they've been like family members um it's it's a very uh strong method of control dorothea had this way of of bringing you up to a level and from what i understand and from what i witnessed and then tearing you down and making people feel like they were nothing like they were worthless like in a couple there'd be one that would get picked on more and one would be favored more and sometimes she'd flip it so if if she was picking on me doug would be the golden child if doug was the one getting in on the hot seat which is what it's she called in what they call it in most cults if doug was on the hot seat then i was doing great she would do that with siblings too well she thought matt was amazing and rachel was strong-willed and needed to be squelched after we left the cult um things kind of fell apart started falling apart from my mom and dad i think the cult gave them structure in their marriage when you leave group you lose everything socially i mean it's a tremendous uh wrenching experience we were all trying to feel our way forward and i ended up i ended up in counseling right away because i just i had almost a breakdown and i no longer trusted anything they had to say because i realized everything they had brought me up in was a lot of lies and there wasn't any explanation for it we didn't have um a recuperation period afterwards where my parents explained to me this is what you went through and this is the way it really is and something anything doug and i were both probably too caught up in how what else is going on between us what else is going on where do we fit in the world and what are we going to do about matt who's now starting to really struggle with school the fallout from that made me a very angry and confused individual as a preteen which i was in a hospital rehab program when i was 13 for drug abuse which i look at 13 year olds and i can't imagine some 13 year old being in a freaking rehab program for drug abuse but i was doing things well beyond my time and i was doing it full on i guess if you're going to do something you might also do it 110 so i was doing drugs 110 and i was being as much of a street punk as humanly possible welcome to the land of ice and snow the arctic icebergs okay that is my first iceberg the first iceberg of the journey i don't know if you can see it see it way out there about a mile out there is the first iceberg now how cool is that it's been a beautiful day i've been heading over towards greenland trying to get away from the ice pack i got away from the southern edge yesterday so i'm tacking back and forth up this corridor because i have northerly winds right now so i'm just kind of making very slow headway you know it's it's interesting i don't know where i feel like i sailed to another planet at this point that would do some damage beautiful huh what the hell the hell is that i just heard a really loud noise from over there i have no idea what it is but it was loud that is a big iceberg and i've got icebergs all around me right now i can see an iceberg right out this window i got another iceberg off my bow about a half mile i'm heading right at it right now which i'll change course in a minute but uh i'm in the ice it's beautiful i'm happy to be here i feel all amped up and ready for the passage whenever he's interested in something he has the amazing ability to hyper focus it's one of the advantages of his form of adhd and it gives them almost super human abilities been really crazy and really busy lately with all the icebergs and the wind and dodging them and trying not to sink the boat but i'm up here at 75 27 north so i've sailed about as far north as i'm gonna sail i've been trying to work my way around this giant ice patch that's pretty much all the bath and bay is covered in ice so uh so i had to sail pretty far north staying right along the coast of greenland in order to get over the top of this ice patch to get to the mouth of the northwest passage right now it's 10 o'clock at night i couldn't tell you it's 10 o'clock at night i couldn't tell you if it was 10 o'clock in the morning the sun is always up so whatever i'm always up but uh last night it got kind of crazy my fuel bladder started leaking fuel so it was panic you know and i started filling up everything i could find with with diesel uh jerry jugs water jugs my uh solar shower had got diesel in it my bottles of liquor emptied out put diesel in it everything got diesel in it i do have a couple bottles of a good scotch left i'm not gonna mess with those for anything so the idea was to get enough diesel out of the bladder that i could raise the end of the bladder up that had the leak and uh keep it above you know and force all the diesel to the other side of the bladder and then the leak would be up in the air and it wouldn't matter so that's why you see this right here but both sides were leaking so i had to do it to both sides so i now have a purchase here and i have a purchase over here both sides my fuel bladder kind of sticking up from putting all the fuel in the middle of it so you can imagine being on watch with lots of little icebergs big icebergs 30 knots of wind behind you steaming along in the pouring rain in the fog can't see nothing these little icebergs they barely show on the surface but they're gigantic you know they're still like the sky the size of a school bus underwater in a moment when there's peril involved or a danger of some sort the adhd brain actually becomes optimized because it is a form of stimulation so that could be a good kind of brain style to have when you're going to be in in situations that are somewhat treacherous or somewhat difficult perilous i caught my first felony when i was 14 um and drunk out of my skull they broke into a neighbor's house and he sort of ransacked their bar and got caught they had a massive bar in their basement and evidently i drank a bunch of their liquor and passed out and woke up in a police station and i got a burglary charge because of it being locked up doesn't really rehabilitate anybody he was getting involved in more trouble with the law he was getting into drugs street drugs selling drugs he was you know doing a lot of things and it was the juvenile detention center doug they didn't even call me mr rutherford hey doug hey somebody what's up matt again yep when he was younger i used to say okay if we make it to 25 and he's not dead or in prison we might be okay so from 8th grade to 11th grade there was no real school in my life it was me on the streets being crazy i learned how to play chess though i got really good at that because i worked i lived in a well i spent a lot of my time in a coffee shop playing chess with guys with giant gray beards who could whoop on me he had his books because we were doing officially doing homeschooling and he did go through quite a bit of the material we had more success with that in fact the school district they came to me with a plan actually said we we want to do something for matt here at school because we have several other students now who want to do homeschooling and go to the same little cafe and do their schooling and we can't do that so he went into a resource room matt really resented a resource room because and i think for good reason a lot of the kids in there are truly slow learners that's when he really met a lot of the hoods those kids and for them living on the street that was a badge of honor the group of people that i fell into would be considered the the wrong group the bad kids but nobody was a bad influence on me because i was a bad influence by myself nobody was like hey matt let's go smoke the joint i was already ready his friends would come over if my parents were away and i was the one firmly defending the homestead and would occasionally had to chase his friends out of the house with a baseball bat because they were doing things that were inappropriate like breaking furniture i was never like a violent criminal you know i wasn't out beating people up or anything when i was a kid but uh you know i would you know steal radios or stole some cars every time matt went before a judge the judge said i want you to tell me every person you know and i want you to and that i said the same thing to him no the judge said to me after they put matt you know took him away for solitary for two weeks he said i really admire his loyalty but i i think it's misguided matt was from the very early time not just a tremendous amount of work to help him to get where he needed to go but i heard i went through years of hearing nothing but negatives about matt he'd been in a cult and we left that a number of years before and we had learning problems and we had a proclivity towards some depression and he had some substance abuse issues and it becomes a witch's brew you know and i was very angry i i really ultimately though what i hated the most was myself i mean i was most angry i was angry at the world but the impetus came from uh the hatred of my own self you know feeling like i had no self-worth or something a lot of teenagers can claim you know i can say well i was angry at the world and i caused a lot of trouble uh but i was kind of on a different level of that like i was seriously causing i was committing felonies on a regular basis and seriously angry at the world like ready to go crazy now let's take a trip through the northwest passage some say i got a problem i say it's a passion i'm just trying to reach my goals before passing and imma do what i want to do without asking it's my life my right so i fight for my dreams no matter how hard it might seem this is my pipe dream my advice to get your mind right find light and do the right thing no matter the weather or whatever the night brings thunder and lightning it's enlightening lost in the abyss i can't even begin to explain how awesome this is to reach i started getting interested in northwest passage reading stories about the explorers went through there originally looking for a route a quicker route to china and india nobody knew where exactly they were going or they had no you know maps or charts or they didn't know what the archipelago looked like so they're kind of just blindly going into the ice hoping to find a way through and expedition after expedition got trapped in the ice many many more people died in a northwest passage than in antarctica matt's been an explorer all of his life i always felt he was born in the wrong century that he should have been in the days of the tall ships and i don't even know why i felt that way because we lived in landlocked ohio ernest shackleton was an english explorer that tried to get to the south pole on a couple of different trips his boat was crushing the ice and his men and him lived on the ice for a couple years and he was able to get all of his men back to safety and nobody died and you know people like shackleton could be in very difficult situations mentally and physically and still be rather chip and cheery at the end of every blog entry i would use shackleton's family motto it's latin but what it basically means is the through endurance we conquer more buy endurance we conquer depending on who translates it okay this is day august 15 2011. i'm at uh 6827 north 103 20 west and i've been busy navigating the passage weather's been nice not a lot of wind i'm doing a lot more motoring than i am sailing but i've made it through simpson straight a real technical navigating pretty strong currents but i made it through okay uh made it down franklin straight everything there was a little bit of pack ice but no big deal i'm in queen mod golf now there's some pack ice in front of me but i've already navigated most of the islands on the eastern half and now i'm getting down the western half there's the package i have to get through after this is probably the last pack ice i have to deal with then i'm done then i'm off and i'm on my way yesterday the wind picked up and continued to pick up through the day through the night and through today and until it was blowing a gale i tried to cook a meal and a big meal and it went all over my floor which really sucks and i'm hungry and i can't cook and i've got food all over the floor like mocking me the problem with arctic gales or the arctic in general is the water is so cold that if you stick your hand in the water you get a burning sensation instead of a cold sensation so you know if i get cold i just rub my hands together or jump in circles i don't know you know you just do you can't really move around much either because the boat is so small and it's moving all the time so you got to be careful that if i was running my engine my engine became the world's largest hand and foot warmer but then again your hands are cold and you end up burning your hands on the engine sometimes because you don't realize that how hot the thing is got about 172 miles before i get to barrow point alaska then i'm done with the northwest passage and i started heading south again when you're dealing with 50 hour watches everything kind of slows down your brain slows down so i try to slow my body down to about half the speed i normally would function at because i figure my brain is only working at half the speed so therefore i make my body go at half the speed it kind of keeps them in line so but yeah it's kind of you know it's a wacky world of sleep deprivation as you get further north the days get longer days get longer and then all of a sudden it just the sun never sets it's kind of interesting to see the sun like going around and around and around on the horizon there is a weird quality to vision up there too i don't know exactly the elements that do it little things look big big things look little you gotta completely let go of attachments to life and land and everything as long as you remain optimistic and you and you just keep uh enduring then you can make it through i i had an epiphany i was sitting in cell 36 i believe uh with smith uh and my fourth time being locked up um and so we do our time together we both get out now it was like three months later i get arrested and locked up again and i get put back in cell 36 the same exact cell and i look over and the next day smith gets arrested and put back in the same cell not just that but there's three beds in a cell each ones are numbered and i got the same bed he got the same bed it was like we're in the same cell in the same designated bed and three months after we just get out it's like didn't we just do this man come on smith like we just did this like what's going on like some weird deja vu like why i mean we're in the same cell together so it to me that was just kind of like the the straw that broke the camel's back or whatever it was like this is ridiculous uh if i keep doing this i'm going to spend my life in prison i'm going to keep and it's and it's a it's a pointless life it's a life that goes nowhere matt was ready to change matt and eagle rock was the best of all possible environments there's a lot of student input it's a very wonderful place to end up for healing emotional healing for kids who've been in that at-risk area eagle rock school is a year-round boarding school designed to help young people for whom success has been elusive all students at eagle rock school are here on a full scholarship and there's a lot of service work there's a lot of community living there's a wilderness trip that starts it off we get to help shape and shift the environment in which they're located to constantly challenge them to discover who they are and do something of value with that discovery and i actually learned for the first time in my life that i enjoy learning because i always hated school my first recollections of matt are that he was not very educated i mean he was street smart and he knew how to survive and he knew how to protect himself physically emotionally he kind of had like that hard kind of look kind of like you know don't mess with me kind of thing once he decided that he wanted to align himself with our basic fundamental values at eagle rock school he decided to be an avatar of those values and he began to question and confront other students on whether they were fully committed to their own lives in their own education and then i began to get other feedback from people who just said he's just like magical kid like where there's a need all of a sudden you turn around and there's matt at that place at that time and you say to yourself how did he know at eagle rock he ended up teaching two classes on the vietnam war a course on conflict uh resolution and of course on the history of governments are some inspiring things as a manifesto you can drive like all your all the propaganda that was given to you for so long but communism being bad and you need to sit down and read there's some really good points about looking out for the basic proletariat worker you know looking out for the poor people basically and not oppressing poor people um really good point what made matt stand out for me was his curiosity uh about the world one day at eagle rock as i was in the library looking over an atlas and i just kind of hit me that if you had a sailboat you could potentially sail to about 80 percent of the countries on the planet he went to thailand on a special program that we helped to find and his world really opened up at that point and he began to see himself as a citizen of the world matt had some wonderful mentoring teachers in degrock james sherman was one james and i would have these talks together because he really admired matt like a son and he said to me you know what we've all come to understand about matt he's got more balls than a boatload of marines nobody i've ever met has more courage than matt the ocean often would pick up the album vega and shake the [ __ ] out of it and then throw it hard and everything inside would just go everywhere including me um biggest knockdown i've ever had nearly capsized shredded my dodger it busted my knee put water over my floorboards and uh yeah i'm just [ __ ] pissed and i don't know i just haven't been in a great mood for the last week i guess i shouldn't uh i need to keep my spirits up oh [ __ ] it's been more than a hundred days since matt rutherford has walked on dry land alexander gutierrez in onalaska reports the rules for contact were so strict that i couldn't get on his boat to interview him and i had to shout out questions from the supply boat brother ford seemed relieved to get the new gear but he was more excited for the hot pizza and the cold beer that we ferried over it's almost so good and so strange that you can't even wrap your mind around it he's had to put out a fire and cope with gear failures in arctic waters despite the harsh conditions rutherford takes plenty of joy in the voyage i don't got to worry about bills i don't worry about nothing i gotta go to work but then again it's a lot it's a lot of work to be out in the ocean alone so i mean it goes both ways but i got no boss my boss is poseidon the longest stretch of open water would be alaska to cape horn because about ten thousand miles uh it's the pain in the ass part of the trip very uncomfortable i'm just tired of beating into the seas you almost wonder how the boat can take it i come down off the wave and there's this terrible crunch kind of sound of all the wood and i mean you just think it's just gonna things are just gonna shatter like the wood is just gonna split or the fiberglass is gonna come apart or the boat's gonna come apart at the seams or i don't know i guess that's why people go through the panama canal and uh go around the world and the trade winds uh so you know it's important that i don't push the boat too hard and you know i'm not in a race here the cape horn is not going anywhere i've always been self-taught with everything i didn't have much interest in reading a book about sailing that reads like vcr instructions you know so i figured i'll just go out and raise the sails and figure it out in 2003 i bought a little 1969 25-foot coronado and that was in trap maryland i was living in columbus ohio at the time uh i bought it off the internet sight unseen which is a terrible idea you never buy a boat without seeing a boat but i didn't know nothing about nothing and so i just took off with a girlfriend down the coast to the florida keys so neither of us really knew what we were doing so i made a lot of mistakes and ran around i got hit by lightning and hurricanes in 2004 but that's how i started sailing and then i bought a 26 pearson sailed that around florida for a while and then i was able to get my 323 pearson most of the countries in the world are connected to the ocean so therefore if you learn how to sail and you get good enough at it then you can pretty much travel anywhere you want drop an anchor and live at a very low expense so i guess there's a freedom to it i sailed across the gulf of mexico and the bahamas and did the entire east coast united states single-handed before eventually taking that pearson from annapolis to europe africa the caribbean and back which was a two-year trip about 15 545 miles i had a very hard time when i was sailing in europe because although i was accomplishing this goal that i worked so hard to accomplish i was absolutely completely heartbroken depressed sad and miserable because i had lost the woman i loved and i didn't want to let go i didn't want to be alone by the time i uh get to the equator in another four days there's a chance i'll be at 28 west i was at 28 west 12 days ago i've been a close hauled all day down to a second reef point and a little bit of jib very uncomfortable i can't really go outside much because being close hauled uh you get the maximum amount of spray in the cockpit and if i stick my head out there for very long i get wet you know i get like bed sores almost on my butt because i can't stand up so i'm either sitting down or laying down and it's so hot that i get rashes because my everything's sweaty and besides that i just been reading and just trying not to get too entirely bored of doing the same things every day you know the day to day monotony the kindle got ruined in a gale in the gulf of alaska but i had about 10 books on the little ipod i spent three months reading the rise and fall of the roman empire by gibbons which has like nine volumes you read it one paragraph at a time on an ipod touch you know i brought a shotgun with me partially because if i became shipwrecked in the arctic i would have to defend myself from polar bears trying to eat me but mostly i brought the shotgun with the idea of if i ran out of food i could live off the seabirds and at one point early on in the trip i actually shot a seabird and ate it and it was the most disgusting thing i think i've ever eaten and all the hot sauce in the world would not get rid of that nasty flavor so luckily i had enough freeze-dried food to make it for some reason the last four or five days six seven days i don't even know how long it's been but i've been forgetting i've been having a hard time remembering what's what i've been doing in the last 24 hours what's been happening is everything has just become such a blur there are definitely sailors that have lost their mind at sea alone um some of them in the doldrums problem with the dole drums you don't feel like you're being productive you're going backwards and drifting around um still got an insane rash on my crotch you know i would take a picture of it because it's so incredible i mean it just looks so [ __ ] up it's even spread into my armpits i need some of that prickly heat powder but god damn and it hurts well i start getting two barnacles and a normal barnacle is grows on a boat that's not moving a two barnacle grows on a boat that's underway but a couple of times i've leaned over the boat to cut them off and i couldn't cut them off because they were my friends and they were hanging out with me and they were the only things that were hanging out with me so i let them grow the herald sing glory to the newborn king he saw an earth and something something something all right i don't know anymore the song merry christmas is christmas time and i got some good 15 year old scotch some highland park 15 year old some nice ham canned ham cooking up right now ho ho ho and all that good stuff my bilge pump died it's completely dead i take a lot of water on on this boat and i can fill the bilge in maybe six to eight hours i've got about you know a million and one leaks there looks like a gale on the sixth and i'm gonna be near the horn on the sixth so i'd like to be at least 10 15 miles past the horn when the gale starts i hope unfortunately i lost my buoyant safety line they must have wrapped around the wind vane rudder and and rubbing up against it shoot itself off and now i got this little stub i'm gonna have to make a new one he called me before he went around cape horn he hurt himself i don't know if he's told anybody but he fell during maybe some storm and he told me mom i don't know but i may have cracked a rib i slipped and i fell and i don't remember all the details but it scared him there's nothing he could have done it didn't puncture along or anything but it hurt like crazy and he called and he called quite a few people and just we chit-chatted but it was like you know it was like he's he's possibly touching base because he might not make it around the horn it's called the sailor's mount everest and there's a reason for that the whole time you're coming down the west coast of chile you're against the lee shore in other words the wind is blowing you against the land you have no room for air if you make any mistakes you're going to crash into the continent of south america the low pressure systems spin continuously around the bottom of the planet unimpeded by any land mass so they're able to really get some force going as they start to spin and they get become very very powerful storms and very very strong winds i need to push the boat hard i need to get the hell out of here because if you hang out here for too long i'm going to get hit by a storm that's so big that it's just going to sink me and it'll kill me it's time to get my ass around the horn i have the weather window and it's time to do it but yeah i'm going around cape horn as i speak right now it's been a beautiful day cape horn is beautiful this whole thing i haven't seen land in a long long time uh i haven't seen land since alaska this is where the pacific meets the atlantic nice to start some new heading north i always felt that i could do the that i could do these big sailing trips but the problem wasn't with my abilities or my belief in my abilities the problem was finances how am i going to buy the boat to do it and he met this guy named don becky who was wheelchair bound uh who ran this non-profit and volunteering taking you know disabled folks out to enjoy the beauty of sailing over one two three when i when i'm in control i mean it's just so much fun you just catch the wind and when the boat starts to move during your race it's just it's just an awesome feeling and that's what you live for i just think it's important to go out and help people this was a situation involved sailing which is something i'm really passionate about and helping people and it put the two together this red-headed fellow shows up and says i'd like to help and uh and he says i i sailed the atlantic and that's when we picked up our ears and we started putting him to work so most of the stuff i do is the work on the boats that they sell i help them get them ready so they can sell their boats nobody really wants to do a bottom job and nobody really wants to install a new head so that's the kind of stuff i do he just had a reservoir capabilities you know he he had no problem with painting bottoms and scraping and all that dirty stuff but he could diagnose you know the outboard problems or something broke he could fix it he was really gifted that way so i was sitting over at white hall with a local uh boat yard here in annapolis and painting the bottoms of boats that they're trying to sell we were chatting about the arctic and shackleton he knows a great deal about all the explorer lives and things like this and we were leaning up against a old folk boat that we had been donated and i said hey hey don why don't you let me take this boat up to the northwest passage and uh we'll raise money for crab and so i said well okay i'll give it to you you can have it and then somebody called and said who also volunteers for crab lee and and colin and they said well why don't you take the album vega and so i kind of said why don't i just once i get through the northwest passage continue on sailing around the americas i went around dumpster diving around annapolis and actually replaced quite a bit of both of my bulkheads with wood i pulled out of dumpsters gaining sponsorship is often one of the most difficult parts of any trip we wrote 800 letters off the different random people that was on crabs list and it ended up costing us more money and postage than what we got back from those letters people thought we were crazy we we got a lot of stuff saying you know you're sending him to his death and all kinds of stuff but some people still believed in me enough to to put you know to put new rigging or sales or you know help out with a wind vane or whatever you need your boat to steer itself i mean i'm not out there steering it you know 95 of the trip it was steering for me predictwind gave me a satellite communicator they call it it has a tracking device so the little track in the little red dot on the website so people could track and see my position it also has a very basic email function and it gives you weather reports i learned about math butterford initially from an article in the local newspaper he was giving a seminar to explain the trip and i think to maybe do some fundraising for the trip i introduced myself to matt asked him about what he was going to do for food and he was very perplexed and i said why don't you come over to my house and i can show you some food that might be a solution for you you're able to provide him with about 780 pounds of freeze-dried food the whole thing from start to finish was about eight ten months from having that kind of aw shucks idea to is going off leaving the doc i don't think the glory aspect of it entered his mind at all it was really to do something for somebody else or and to do it for himself you know just for the satisfaction after cape horn after being at sea for about 220 days in some ways i didn't want to return i just wanted to stay out in the ocean forever and there's a sense of of freedom this kind of ultimate freedom that you experience when you've been alone at sea for that long and you just want to stay out there sailing uh in your own little world forever and had my boat not been falling apart around me there's a chance that i might still be sailing right now amahi popped up next to the boat and i was going to shoot it with an arrow because right next to me and i got ready to shoot it and pull back the arrow and then another mahi popped up next to it mahi made for life and if you kill one of them then the other one will kind of roam the ocean alone forever so at the last second i hesitated and i'd end up not killing the mahi i ended up not fishing anymore the rest of the trip after that that was the end i answered some questions from a reporter from the washington post today and uh yeah he seems excited to do an article about the trip which is good nice to talk to somebody i haven't talked to anybody in a while um so yeah we'll see if that helps raise some money for the you know the trip and all that for the organization hopefully it will uh two out of three gps units broke the ias broke engine broke uh vhf broke my mast was grinding pretty badly my bulkheads were warped i was taking on water below the water line so again i'm just called simon and a little dinghy came out and threw me some stuff and then they took off but i came within about two miles of brazil so i could see the houses i could see the cars i could see little people walking on the beaches tell us about our adventure well it's 260 days today about 23 000 miles when i got uh french guiana not far from the mouth of the amazon after i pass that i'm moving good i wake up in the morning like two in the morning and i see a big black bow towering over me my my engine had been broke for a long time at this point and because of the light winds the boat was moved very slowly like i was trying to move the boat and like come on man move um and they didn't see my nav lights they didn't see me on the radar they didn't know i was there they never knew they would have ran me right over smashed me in a million little pieces and no one on board would have known any better um and sort of freaked me out what it did i mean i'm really lucky i woke up to take a piss and check for freighters matt was getting closer and closer to his finish line and i cracked him down about 600 miles out i was very excited to see him of course it had been a while i didn't really know what to expect matthew he looked amazingly fit he uh he still had a tremendous sense of humor mostly at my expense and again he was getting light on food so we had spare food and we put it all into a uh ice box and floated it across to him and some spare batteries don't tell me that ain't cool man and then i don't want to hear one complaint ah oh he's gonna toss back to us but we didn't send him i was in a much bigger more comfortable faster boat of course so we sailed alongside for a few hours talking and then i left them your ais doesn't work right excuses after seeing people i feel charged up like i could be out here for another couple of months or something just a little bit of human contact you know makes a big difference like you know but uh yeah and yeah you know this boat's just been through a lot it's falling apart so i hope i can finish this trip without any any more strong winds you know i'd rather have nice weather of course i'd rather finish it i'm you know i'm tired you know it's 301 days for god's sake i'm freaking tired we're going to try to ease him into it gradually that he's not just going to come home step off the boat tie the boat up and be done that there are people that this has grown a lot bigger than he ever expected mr president i've come to the floor today to speak about a truly remarkable american a truly remarkable visionary a dreamer an adventurer a doer most importantly a young man who has devoted himself to service to others far and above the normal call of duty i still have a hard time putting my son to these laudatory words matt to what i've imagined he would have taken that kind of a turn never saw that one coming anything out here um now i could try to get on the other tank head back out that way yeah well i knew this was gonna happen i'm gonna sit here and stare at the finish line because the wind had died and the bay was flushing out it pushed me for 16 miles the wrong direction south so after 308 days alone on a boat and roughly 27 000 miles i nearly wound up shipwrecked on a beach within sight of the finish line the next morning when the sun came up the winds picked up now there were headwinds and they were strong 25 to 30 knots but i could at least work my way up into them get through the bay get through the mouth through the finish line and as i was doing it waves were crashing all over me and i was completely soaking wet well i didn't care one bit what matt has shown is that you can do it with nothing but yourself and that's really all he had i mean had a second third hand boat that was falling apart before he left but he had himself well he's right up there with all the great heroes in maritime history in the state of maryland as well as in the united states he is the first person to do this on his own so he really is a hero in our country perhaps around the world you know you might get young people to have a spirit of adventure and challenging the forces of nature just something that does wonders to the human spirit and matt has done that he's given us all this sense that we can do more than what we think we can matt's quest was so pure and he pulled it off with such style and panache and he did it for a great cause and organization i'm blown away by what matt did i i was his biggest skeptic and now i'm his biggest fan what he has done is a voyage for the ages i've been all around the world and back around the world to find myself to reach my goals to find all around the world fall but i'm the type to go the distance and finish the brawl they said that it was suicide that i would die for sure but i was like the printer tied in the eye of a storm even all around the to find my world to find myself to reach my goals you know it's really strange being here is like a dream any minute i'm gonna wake up and be in the middle of the ocean and you know which happened over and over and over and over again so uh how does it feel to be in land are you rocking a little bit uh no you know it's fun i i'm very lucky guy when it comes to seasickness and motion sickness and i can deal with it all so i have no problems with nothing although i don't know maybe later maybe after a few beers i'll be rocking did you see any pirates along the way uh every time i looked in the mirror man i i've heard from single-handed sailors that get out there in the ocean and actually have an imaginary boat that they're racing against did you have another boat you're racing against oh no i would have lost i was going really slow for the most part yeah and that's the doldrums what was your slowest day run uh backwards 60 miles you've completed this circumnavigation of the americas very strong feet cheering for you all the way my big question what's next i need to get a haircut you guys see this going on thank you all for coming out to welcome matt home matt well done all of maryland is proud of you thank you i followed your vlog oh thank you okay great we have to do a couple media interviews bro yeah okay we have to do some media interviews real quick take okay no this is yes yep yep okay matt what's your uh regular occupation and are you going back to it what do you mean sailor was my occupation i just quit like you know an hour ago so yeah i don't know i go back to being a vagabond i guess what's the number one thing you missed that is number one on your agenda now that you're back on land oh talking to a nice lady i don't know was there ever a moment where you were all by yourself things are breaking down you're like i'm not going to be able to do this this is ridiculous i can't do it you uh i never i never got to a point where i wanted to turn around and if even if i did mostly i was so far out in the ocean i couldn't have done it if i wanted to but um there were times when things were breaking and you're you're holding your way we all have a gift we all have a place in this world as long as you're doing something that you really love doing then you are you are living the right life you know the what is the meaning of life the meaning of life is being happy the point of our existence is to enjoy our existence find something that you're passionate about find a way that you can you can add to this world that you can help this this this giant group of people living on this this round ball you know floating out in outer space there's a line in tennyson's ulysses i cannot rest from travel at all times i've enjoyed greatly have suffered greatly i will drink life to the leaves strong and will to strive to seek to find and not to yield that's meant rutherford ever made a movie that's permanent so action i really want to practice but i need a better actor so how can a man with a plan get exactly the chance that he wants by relaxing when in fact he's a master of rap such a passion to act in the pond of a bad fish he combats with the laws of attraction speak no bad things don't want you the captions we know that but they always distracted we shifting our axes with wishes of mansion asking yourself what is it for will you survive if i take you to war if it's survival of the fittest then you better work out more when i'm married to the game when you die it's divorce so i'm sure what it's for if i ever went to war tell you what i do when i'm walking through the door when you're married to the game when you die you've got big plans you're just a talker man i'm getting rowdy like a european soccer fan i spent more time in the ocean and aquaman it's time to turn around and start walking and through my trials and times i found piles of crimes and i still sit back right miles of rhymes been doing this a long time me and smoke dropped my first cd back in 99 31 now i'm too old for the game and commercial rap is overrun by lames gold digging dames mary jane hopes me very pain because i'm barely sane and that's fairly plain worried about a dollar being a bala i'm worried about the fact i'm half caligula half caracalla you can't follow the scholar sale around the world in a drop top impala i'm so sick that you need a vaccination confrontation proletariat nation inspiration commercial rap annihilation examination lyrical inspiration no consideration of corporate cooperation spreading knowledge commercial annihilation examination lyrical inspiration no consideration of corporate cooperation spreading knowledge all across the nation across the nation you

Channel: Extreme Mysteries

Views: 147,606

Keywords: matt rutherford, red dot, red dot on the ocean, red dot on the ocean full movie, red dot full movie, atlantic crossing, sailing, nonstop around the americas, janson media, albin vega, albin vega atlantic crossing, cape horn, northwest passage, full movie, full movie red dot, full movie red dot on the ocean, red dot in the ocean, dot in the ocean, dot on the ocean, the matt rutherford story, rutherford, sailboat trip, sailboat, first person to sail northamerica, amy flannery

Id: n12nnrEGWXQ

Length: 77min 7sec (4627 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 17 2020