Arctic odyssey makes B.C. sailor a Turkish hero
A hero’s welcome greeted Erkan Gursoy as he motored his peculiar craft into the Turkish port of Çanakkale: Flowers, ceremonies, VIP dinners, TV appearances and “more flowers.”
In 1972, Mr. Gursoy had been a 25-year-old blacksmith when he left his Turkish home for a life in British Columbia. Now, at 68, he was returning in the most swashbuckling way possible: on a homemade aluminum boat he had guided through thousands of miles of Arctic ice and Atlantic hurricanes.
“I wanted to make a meaningful return to Turkey,” said Mr. Gursoy, speaking by cellphone from aboard his noticeably damaged boat, the Altan Girl, which is now moored in the West Istanbul Marina.
In July, a sudden freeze-up stranded the Altan Girl near Barrow, Alaska — requiring Mr. Gursoy to spend 10 days watching as the encroaching ice warped his hull. Until he could be broken free by a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker, the sailor had to ward off nearby polar bears by banging on a metal tub.
Three months later, while making the crossing between Greenland and Ireland, the vessel got caught in the tail end of Hurricane Gonzalo.
“It was sort of flying and floating at the same time,” said the sailor, who spent most of the three-day storm hunkered under a table with a portable stove and a water jug.
The Irish Coast Guard and Air Corps kept an eye on Mr. Gursoy — and captured dramatic photos of his boat being tossed around like a bathtub toy — but the Altan Girl safely made it to port in Ireland’s Aran Islands under its own steam.
“I didn’t need to be rescued — the lifeboat came to salute me,” Mr. Gursoy told a reporter for The Irish Times.
Completed over several years in Mr. Gursoy’s Nanaimo, B.C., backyard, the Altan Girl is a patented design he has dubbed a “non-deflatable” boat.
Like an inflatable boat, the rigid hull is topped with an air-filled ring. Instead of being made out of rubber or nylon, however, the ring surrounding the Altan Girl is made of tough, puncture-resistant aluminum.
The boat is “not nice to look at,” Mr. Gursoy said.
Last month, a boat spotter photographed the Altan Girl’s arrival in Malta, and its gruff appearance and visible welds indeed stuck out against the harbour’s sleek yachts and pleasure craft.
It’s also an “awful sailboat,” said Mr. Gursoy — and the hollow aluminum ring makes it extremely noisy.
“But it is safe,” he said. The boat’s tough design can withstand flooding and severe winds and would virtually need to be ripped in half to sink entirely.
Set to feature at a Turkish boat show this month, the boat is littered with dents, but remains as seaworthy as ever, Mr. Gursoy said.
The boat is not the sailor’s first non-deflatable. Through his Nanaimo-based company, Aldura Boats, he has churned out a steady stream of 122 aluminum tenders (small boats that service larger vessels) and motorboats that look inflatable, but are immune to puncture and UV light.
The Altan Girl is a bit more expedition-worthy than its predecessors: A line of vinyl fenders surround the exterior, it has a lowerable mast to get it into tight areas and there’s a smaller Aldura tender strapped to the back.
For power, Mr. Gursoy installed a 26-horsepower diesel engine he salvaged from a refrigerated trailer.
“Nothing scientific went into it, just my feelings,” he said.
Raised in the inland city of Burdur, Turkey, Mr. Gursoy originally worked as a shop teacher in Fernie, B.C. after moving to Canada. He spent seven years building a 53-foot steel sailboat, then hauled it to the coast where he, his wife and two young children took up a life as “live-aboarders.”
In 1993, after the family had secured land-based accommodation in Nanaimo, Mr. Gursoy took the sailboat on a trip around the world.
It took him two years, two months and two days to return to Nanaimo via a westward journey that took him through the Panama Canal. The feat gave Mr. Gursoy bona-fide sailing cred in Nanaimo, but his star rose much higher back in Turkey.
Mr. Gursoy’s portrait now occupies a spot on a heroic monument in Istanbul, and whil e Engli s h- l a nguage Wikipedia notably makes no mention of the B.C. boat builder, the Turkish-language version includes Mr. Gursoy among an elite fraternity of globe-navigating Turkish sailors.
This time around, Mr. Gursoy suspects he has become the first Turk to make a solo run of the Northwest Passage — as well as one of the oldest sailors to conquer the once-impassable sea route.
The idea now, said Mr. Gursoy, is to capitalize on his time in the spotlight, show off the damaged Altan Girl, build a Mediterranean interest in his unique brand of ugly, rugged boats and attempt to get his boat-building business off the ground in Turkey.
“I will teach the young unemployed people here in Turkey, and produce my boats here,” Mr. Gursoy wrote in an email to the National Post. “I will … give them a respectable life.”