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Rescued sailor heads home

An intensely private man, sailor Ken Barnes had trouble understanding the commotion around his three-day ordeal aboard a sailboat stripped of its masts off the southern tip of Chile, his loved ones said Friday after he was rescued.

When Barnes and his girlfriend Cathy Chambers talked through a scratchy phone connection at 5 a.m., a little less than two hours after his rescue by fishing trawler Polar Pescado 1, Barnes initially had little idea of the level of media attention his troubles had attracted, Chambers said.

“He didn’t realize,” she said. “He said, ‘Why? It’s not that big of a deal.’ ”

Family members still don’t know what exactly caused the boat to lose both masts and start taking on water.

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When Chambers spoke to Barnes Friday afternoon, he was doing well after having a shower and eating hot food for the first time in days. A physician treated him for a wound in his right thigh that gouged him to the bone, she said.

His badly damaged 47-foot ketch, Privateer, was abandoned, Chambers said.

Chambers expected Barnes’ future sailing trips to be on a much smaller scale for the immediate future.

Barnes will take a couple more trips before he gets home, Chambers said. He will take Polar Pescado 1 to an island near the Chilean city of Punta Arenas, and then he will be flown by helicopter to the mainland by Sunday morning. He will travel by small plane 3,000 miles north from Punta Arenas to Santiago, and from there he can take the long flight back to California, where he is expected to arrive Tuesday or Wednesday.

It isn’t the way Barnes planned to end his trip, which he believed would be the first nonstop sail around the world from the West Coast of the United States. But he ran into stormy weather 500 miles off Cape Horn, the bottom tip of South America — a place known by sailors for centuries as one of the most dangerous on the ocean.

Forty-knot winds and 20-foot waves damaged Privateer badly, destroying both masts, cracking a hatch so it leaked water, ruining electronics and supplies, and setting him adrift. Notified by the U.S. Coast Guard, the Chilean Navy began a rescue effort involving multiple planes and boats that ended with Barnes safely aboard Polar Pescado 1.

During a news conference outside the Newport Beach townhouse where he and girlfriend Cathy Chambers live, family members said Chambers and friend Ron Vangell were going to fly down to Santiago to meet him, but apparently Barnes decided even that gesture was too much. Two minutes after the news conference, Barnes’ father, Ken Barnes Sr., said he had just spoken by telephone with his son, who vetoed the idea.

“He’s an understated guy,” the elder Barnes said. “He’s coming home by himself.”

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