Santa Rosa councilman at home on the high seas

At home in Santa Rosa, City Councilman Jack Tibbetts is just one of seven votes.

But on the open ocean, he’s the captain of his own vessel. Literally.

Still a few days off the island of Oahu, the first-term councilman has spent most of the past two weeks leading a crew of six in the 2,405-mile Pacific Cup race from San Francisco to Hawaii aboard a 41-foot boat dubbed Defiance.

It’s been a long-held dream to cross an ocean, to prove to himself he possesses the “perseverance and grit and all that,” Tibbetts said.

The surprise has been the perspective on home and daily life the voyage has brought into focus.

“A week before I left, I was so overwhelmed with how much I wanted to be with my fiancee, my mother, my father, my friends, my community,” Tibbetts, 28, said during an intermittently successful satellite phone call last week from his boat. “It’s really been an epiphany for me that I didn’t expect would be the result of leaving my comfort zone. All I want is to get back to it and be more attentive.”

Still, the trip consumes his focus these days. It’s a grueling, exhausting, rarified experience to be hundreds of miles from land, dependent on the integrity of his vessel and experienced crewmates, and the weather.

Out on the ocean, beyond sight of land or anyone not on board the cramped boat, there is both anxiety and calm, a “zen-like contentment” once you make peace with the isolation, he said.

‘It’s scary desolate, but also powerful and beautiful,” Tibbetts said.

Though skipper, Tibbetts said everyone on his crew - three of them former classmates and another a fellow Santa Barbara County lifeguard from a few years back - works the same grueling schedule with little sleep.

Many of the more than 50 participating teams reached port over the weekend. Competitors in the 40-year-old Pacific Cup race historically take six to 17 days to finish.

But Defiance has been taking the slow route, in large part due to a troubling “metal-on-metal” sounds in the mast rigging detected three days into the race, Tibbetts said. It has been concerning enough that Tibbetts notched down the vessel’s speed for the duration and is taking other precautions to minimize strain on the mast.

“If you lose a mast out here, it turns nasty, quickly,” he said.

High-pressure zones also have slowed progress, and a shifting wind near Hawaii required a course alteration, Tibbetts said via email Sunday.

After departing San Francisco Bay on July 12, he now expects to arrive on Oahu probably Friday, Day 16. Food has been rationed for much of the journey.

It was never about beating the other boats, Tibbetts said.

“I’m a conservative sailor, especially for this first oceanic race,” he wrote in one of several emails. “My only goal is to have everyone arrive, and the boat arrive, in one piece to Hawaii. We’re not going for trophies, we’re pursuing the accomplishment and doing this crossing and doing so in as safe a way as possible.”

Once a competitive skier, the Cal Berkeley-educated Tibbetts was first elected to the city council in 2016 and works as executive director of the St. Vincent De Paul Society Sonoma County.

He said he started sailing at 19 after catching the travel bug from watching celebrity chef and TV travel host Anthony Bourdain while he was laid up with an injury. But it wasn’t just about being in places. He wanted to experience the getting there, too, and increasingly dreamed of a chance to cross the ocean.

“It just became something I had to do,” Tibbetts said.

In addition to longtime friends from Cal and Santa Barbara City College, where Tibbetts also attended school, the crew includes two female sailors who had initially planned to crew a different boat and joined Team Defiance just last month.

One of them, a Hawaii sailing instructor, had to scale the mast in 8-foot waves Sunday to cut away the spinnaker sail after it wrapped around the boat, Tibbetts said.

There also was a frightening and loud encounter with a 5-foot-by-5-foot fishing crate just below the ocean surface that Defiance struck. It easily could have hit the boat’s rudder and disabled the steering, though fortunately it didn’t. But the growing abundance of ocean litter as the boat approaches Hawaii has been sobering, he said.

The crews is divided into two teams. Each spends four hours running the boat and four hours resting, which may include about 30 minutes of “deep sleep” and a few hours half-awake, moving with the ocean and listening to the sounds of the ship and the waves amplified through the hull, he said.

When the sun came out on Day 8 after an overcast week, there were refreshing showers and a change of clothes.

In a Facebook post written on the eve of his departure, Tibbetts wrote that the trip already had “given me an incredible gift - the gift of cherishing every moment with your people, and having heightened awareness of their needs.”

On the boat, one lives simply, Tibbetts said by phone, “and it’s amazing that little things mean so much.”