- Due to language and adult situations
the following film is intended for mature audiences
and is not suitable for children.
Viewer discretion is advised.
[upbeat music]
[peaceful music]
- I said, "Mom, I want you to know something."
"I'm really happy out here and I'm doing what I wanna do
"and if I don't, if I don't make it
"and if I do die out here, I just want you to know that,
that I died happy."
[water splashing]
- It completely caught me off guard, like completely,
and I didn't believe it when I heard it.
And I still don't, but, yeah, it's crazy.
[upbeat music]
- I was a trader in Chicago, right?
Traded in the Soybean Meal pit.
I turned myself into a thousandaire.
I made thousands of dollars, right?
I saved it and I asked myself, "Now that I have this money,
what do I really want to do?"
'Cause I didn't need all the things
that I saw everybody else needed,
$500 pairs of shoes,
the other traders are spending around me,
like, expensive steak dinners, like...
I didn't need any of that, you know?
I just asked myself that simple question,
when I'd made this certain amount of money, is:
"What is it that I really want more than anything else?
What do I want out of life?"
- In Chicago, when he was trading,
he had a one man rowboat on Lake Michigan.
Wooden, little white-painted wooden--
I mean this thing couldn't have been more than five feet long.
And he would just take this thing out
and huge swells would come up
and people would be yelling at him,
"You need to go back to shore. This is dangerous.
What are you doing? You're insane."
Captain Alex just-- It was already there in him.
He was just going along, loving it,
and he just kept going back to it.
And just, that's what got him going.
- When he was a trader making as much money
as a person could make, he was living in his van
'cause he wanted to save as much money as possible
so he lived in a van, and got up, went outside to go to work.
I think he parked around the corner.
And that's a quick way to save up your money.
- It got to the point where I was making all this money
and I just wasn't happy anymore.
And then, the trading started to change a little bit.
And I came in one night and I think I was drunk
and I lost a bunch of money and it was like,
"What the heck am I doing here?
I'm not enjoying my life trading."
As much as I did enjoy it,
I knew there was something else missing.
- My sister goes Vanessa, there's this dude.
You guys are the exact same.
He likes to travel, he's crazy,
and she's like, "You have to meet him."
He's like, "Hey, I'm Alex Rust. My sisters set me up with you."
And I was like, "Alright, sweet!"
I gave him a high five and then we went bowling that night.
The Board of Trade, that he was working for,
they set up a bunk bed in his office
because he didn't have anywhere to live.
So we went back there at like midnight
and then we ended up sleeping in that bed
and we were thinking
we were gonna get up at, like, six in the morning.
and we woke up to a whole bunch of businessmen
and everybody all working in their business suits
professionally and me and him are
in the middle of the floor in this bunk bed.
- [Male] Board of Trade?
- At the Board of Trade
on the middle of the floor in a bunk bed.
- Vanessa ended up moving into the van with me
and I was like, "Where have you been all my life?"
She was-- We were just really perfect together,
but I'd already made this decision
to do this boat trip.
I quit my job and I decided,
okay, I just basically Googled on the internet,
"Where are the most sailboats?"
Kept coming up Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
I went down to Fort Lauderdale
and started looking for a boat.
I was like, "This would be a lot more fun
with somebody else, you know?"
So I called Vanessa up and I invited her to come down
and she was only supposed to stay for a week,
and then, it ended up being about six months.
- That's when we bought the Wild Sea Monkey .
It was a 27-foot 1977 Hunter.
It was a very, very, very small boat.
- Alex: It was cheap, paid $3,000 for it,
thought for sure boI was gonna sink it.t,
- Vanessa: We lived in a harbor in Fort Lauderdale
because the boat was basically a third underwater.
We spent 30 days fixing that beast up.
This is where we've been sleeping for the past five months.
Did not have a toilet, did not have a shower.
It didn't have anything.
And then, here's some of the food that we got.
Show 'em all the food.
We got storage for you guys.
We just talked to a bunch of people
who were boat owners
and everybody was saying how we had to take a course
before we started sailing
and he was definitely against that.
- and helped 'emere set stuff up on it
and just tinker with it
and he had never really drove it out in the water or anything
before we went out the first day
and they told us not to go out
because the waves are too big.
It was a disaster.
We had-- All the ropes off the side of the boat
were flying into the water
and getting wrapped around the prop
and boat stopped and we're just bouncing around.
We got one buddy, he's thro[chuckles]erywhere.
Alex has got a book called Sailing For Dummies
He told me to go down below and he and read onrious.
how we're supposed to turn the boat. [laughs]
- Thing is, I should have read it earlier on
because we got the jib sheet caught in a prop
and I'm reading the book later, I'm like, "Oh, man!
"It said you're supposed to do this with the jib sheet,
the stopper knot"
and then you don't get it caught in the prop
and I'm like, "Oh, that's great."
- He gave me a call one day, and he's like,
"Hey, Gerber, I need you to come down to Florida
"and we're gonna go sail.
Someone needs to teach me."
And I was like, "I barely know how to sail, man.
"I've sailed with my dad a little bit,
but I haven't sailed that much."
He had told me he had took a captain's course,
and it turns out he took
a celestial navigation, like, Booze Cruise,
which had nothing to do with--
He had no idea how to sail. [laughs]
- We've done practice sails in Fort Lauderdale
and we ran aground about nine times
before we actually decided to leave that harbor.
And then, after we ran aground about nine times
he was like, "That's enough practice.
We're just gonna go for it."
[radio static]
- This is day zero right now.
We're getting ready to leave
and having some engine problems.
Rusted down there.
Trying to see if we got a problem with the prop.
Seems to be having a panic attack.
How's it going down there, Rust? - Good.
- Yep, he's having a panic attack.
Think this is gonna be a good one.
Hopefully, I don't die.
Talk to you again.
- Vanessa: We left on December 30th, 2008
and this was our first sail ever.
We thought it was gonna take maybe four or five hours.
That's the normal time to get to Bimini.
It ended up taking us about 12.
We had emergency nothing.
We didn't even have maps.
If anything were to go wrong, we were done.
We ended up pulling into Bimini
early on December 31st
and we were all really, really excited
because we actually made it.
- It was the three of us and there was a V berth.
They were sleeping up there.
There was another bed, like another berth
that I kind of slept underneath
where you would sit when you were sailing.
We were hanging out, bouncing around the island.
The Bahamas and Bimini, they're beautiful islands.
We had an awesome time.
It gave all of us a good taste
of what cruising life is like.
I had planned to go back to work.
There was no plan for me to sail any longer
and I had a flight paid for
out of the Bahamas for me to fly back.
They had all the intentions of continuing to sail.
- At this point, our distances got a little bit longer.
We were going two or three days in between islands
instead of about seven or eight hours.
This is gonna be exciting.
I can't wait to see...
[slapping] - Alex: Pick it up, Vanessa.
You gotta hit him in the head. - No.
- Turks and Caicos, Dominican Republic,
DR, Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico, USVI's,
then we go to the BVI's, then we go to Saint Martin,
then we go to Saint Esutatius, Saint Kitts, Nevis, Saint Lucia,
Saint Vincent, Grenada, Trinidad, Tobago, Venezuela.
I actually thought that I knew
that I was gonna sink that boat
but I didn't.
I ended up making it all the way through the Caribbean.
Los Roques, Aves, Bonaire and then Curacao.
- That whole year of experimenting through the Bahamas,
once he realized he made it--
which a lot of people had doubts--
I knew he was looking bigger and beyond.
And for me,
it was time to move on at that point.
- Vanessa, on the first trip,
me and Vanessa got along so well
but she just, it wasn't quite...
- I took a flight home to Chicago shortly after that.
[gentle music]
- I sold the boat in Curacao.
At this point, I've been all in the Caribbean.
I've been to all of these islands
and I was like, "Well, this is great,
but, man, I'm ready to cross an ocean."
[engine running]
- Man: When'd your dad buy this land?
[shouting]
- Alex, he liked to do crazy things.
We had a six-wheeler, like a Gator,
and he would go and egg people,
knock their mailbox over with a hammer.
One time I went with him and I kind of wished I hadn't,
but I just remember, like, riding past the neighbors
and they, like, had their gun out the window
yelling at us to go home.
- Alex: I have eight brothers and four sisters.
Dad had 13 of us kids.
It was always a lot of fun with that many people.
I love being out in the country
and I like being away from it all.
When I was 12, I lived in Brazil for a year.
I was a bit of a misbehaved child
so my dad sent me down there.
And just seeing that planted a seed inside me.
- Man: What's wrong, bud? - Nothing.
- Man: So, where are we?
- Oh, yeah, so, yeah, this is back home.
Southern Indiana where I grew up.
We used to spend our summers here
playing in the water.
This is first experience with water.
Out here dad would take us out on a row boat,
we'd do a little fishing.
- Our dad was born, lived with a permanent address,
and died all within a three-mile radius,
but he traveled the globe. He went all sides of the world.
That carried on with us kids
and, specifically, with Alex.
- Alex: He died in 2003
while I was at Purdue
but I still made it through that semester,
still got good grades and everything
and stayed up with everything,
still got a good job after school
and all these different things.
- He showed it to be okay.
It's hard to say.
He don't show feelings very much
so it's hard to say how he really was.
- But, I think I never really
maybe dealt with the fact
that he was gone now.
I was like, "I wanna do a big trip
when I graduate from Purdue."
So I get three other friends together
and we decide we're gonna hitchhike across Africa.
Cape Town to Cairo.
There I was kind of opened up to a lifestyle
that was just free and open and simple.
Just so different.
It was a phenomenal trip.
The African continent
kind of put something in my mind like,
"Wow, there's this whole other world out there."
- It seems like he does something
and then needs to think of the next big thing that's bigger.
And so, every time he does something
we're like, "Oh, well that was probably,
like, the biggest thing you could imagine."
And then,
he came up with [laughs] going around the world on a boat.
- And the more I thought about it, it was like,
"Yes, no, that's exactly what I wanna do.
I wanna sail around the world."
- We didn't know if this trip--
'cause the way he talked about it is like,
"I might not come back."
And so, of course, for my mom that was really hard.
- I was ready.
I felt very confident that I was ready to cross an ocean.
I knew what I wanted, needed: an ocean-crossing boat.
What I really wanted, I wanted a pirate ship, right.
I want a wooden wheel with spokes,
I wanted a crow's nest and a plank.
Those are like my three requirements
that I want in a boat
but then after sailing in the Caribbean I realized that,
well, maybe I need to focus more
on rigging and anchors and things that make more sense.
What I found was so many boats for sale in the States
aren't boats ready to cross oceans.
They're ready for people to live on.
They just live on these boats.
They got carpet, microwaves in 'em,
instead of having anchors and sails.
They're just live-aboards
and I wanted a boat that was ready to sail across an ocean.
Then I had some buddies I was in contact with
that helped me find Bubbles in Tortola.
Let's see, I paid about $70,000 for Bubbles ,
39 foot mono-hull, cutter ridge flute.
- I don't know how he necessarily came up with the name Bubbles .
It sounds like a stripper's name of some sort
or some children's book.
It's a fun name and it was perfect for the boat.
- It was uncomfortable. it was dirty.
Had a lot of cockroaches and bugs.
And like I said, when I got up there
he had no refrigerator.
Hot as can be.
Stunk.
Just nasty.
[gentle music]
- Once I made that decision in the beginning
to sail around the world, there was never an option
of stopping, turning around, quitting where I was.
The only thing that would have stopped me was death.
Like, nothing else would have stopped me from this mission.
Nothing.
When I set sail for the first time
from St. Thomas and the US Virgin Islands alone,
I realized fairly quickly how boring
or an unenjoyable trip it would be
sailing around the world by myself.
Beautiful sunrise this morning.
Now we got some dolphins swimming with us.
There was like this big beautiful rainbow comes out
and there's a bunch of dolphins just swimming at the bow.
And at night, I remember just turning from left to right
and almost being like, "Oh my God, did you see that?
You just wanna share it with somebody.
I just wanted to be like, "Wow, this is cool,"
but I didn't have anybody else there
so there was no one to share the excitement with
and that was one of the reasons why I started picking people up
to share the experience with other people along the way.
- Alex has always been an adventurer.
He's traveled.
His passport stamps probably outnumbered 50
before this trip even started.
He's the guy that initially got me into world travel.
These off the wall experiences
whether backpacking around Columbia
in a Mitsubishi truck for five days
with eight guys packed in the back
or heading down to Honduras.
Rust opened my eyes to this world
and then all of a sudden the next thing
he's telling me he's sailing around the world
so I'm like, "Wow, what an opportunity
"for me to really take advantage of my buddy
"and jump on his boat in these off the wall places
that I'll never be able to get to in my life."
I have no idea what the f#ck is going on right now.
Kind of sick, but I'm gonna try to fight it here.
Get my sh#t together. Enjoy this.
- I knew it was gonna be a blast.
I knew it was gonna be a blast.
You know you get in with the locals
and you do stuff that I never would have probably--
I wouldn't have done much of it on my own.
He's just a friendly person.
There's always fun stuff going on around him.
He's always in a good mood.
We got along good for that reason
and it was gonna be an adventure.
[drumming]
- There was certain kind of freshness to it definitely.
I mean I hadn't been sailing before so this was first trip.
Didn't know really what to expect.
Different levels of sailing always
but, yeah, the trust was there
'cause we were open and we were all first-timers.
- Alex: There's Paunu. Say hi, Paunu.
- It looked like a wolf packe.
and three musketeers, right on.
It's probably like with all great adventures.
Fears are very real because it's the unknown.
- That's the really cool part about Bubbles
is that everyone does their own part
whether that's cleaning dishes
or even taking a night shift and sailing the boat.
So even if you've never sailed before,
Alex is gonna put you behind the wheel
and go to sleep and say, "Keep us heading in this direction.
"Keep this bearing
and if anything bad goes wrong, wake me up."
- Something's falling!
- Molly Smith: Everyone knew Alex in a different way
so they'd all shared some portion
of the trip with him.
It's almost like he's a brother figure
for a lot of people or even, I mean it sounds silly,
but a father figure maybe.
Bye, Atlantic Ocean.
Alright, give me a little smile while the gates close.
Yeah!
- Diego Eduardo Iglesias [inaudible].
- Man: And where are you from?
- I am from the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific.
I'm 21 years old.
I didn't know anything about sailing a boat.
But then I saw Bubbles
and that was the only boat with a big plantain,
like full of bananas, you know,
like real sailors, you know.
These guys are probably super good sailors.
I don't know how true it was with that.
I had no idea where we were going then.
I thought we were going to Indonesia.
But we're going to French Polynesia.
I told my mom, "Yeah, Mom, I met these guys."
I was like, "Super good sailors."
and she was like, "Okay, where are you going?"
"I think I'm going to Indonesia.
It's only going to take a month, Mom."
[chuckles] So funny.
- Quite a navigational path we've taken.
Take a look.
- We sailed a lot.
A lot of it was going the distance.
You just float for like a week
and then you end up-- you hit another island.
You're like, "Oh, these people look cool.
Alright, let's party."
[tropical music, singing in Spanish]
[yelling]
- There were people I knew that joined the boat
and there were people, I had no idea who they were.
There had to be something like 80 different people
that jumped on the boat.
- With the Dutch Waffle, Sheila the She-Wolf,
Ross Gerber the Gerb, Izzy the Israeli,
Jesse, the Body and Dougie Fresh.
Jimmy and Nicole are on board.
- That's counting islanders who would hop
from one island to another.
People he found on Facebook,
people he found on cruise sites,
just random people.
There were also great friends that were joining up.
[ Alabama "I'm In a Hurry"]
- Man: Video camera, make a movie, you,
with beetle [inaudible].
[laughing]
- Alex, he had some sort of aspiration
to make some sort of film based upon his trip.
He was meeting all these awesome people
and seeing these things that no one gets to see.
I think that he wanted to show people that.
He always had little point-and-shoot cameras
that were supposedly, like, indestructible
and he'd open his captain's drawer
and there'd be like seven cameras
in there just smashed to all hell.
Any time you came on the boat,
you had to get one of these Cannon PowerShots
or whatever they were called,
some indestructible camera
that was waterproof to 30 or 60 feet.
And he ripped through those things
like they were disposables.
He had tons of them laying around.
Whenever anything kind of neat would happen
he'd jump up and grab the camera.
If it was like a fun party or just something wild,
he seemed to always be wanting to tape it.
- This guy's good.
- ¡Ahora! ¡Oye!
Oh ho! [chuckles]
- Man: Now the fish are coming for you!
- He'd given up everything.
He was all in.
He had a boat
and he really had nothing else to go back to.
He never flew back to the states once
once he started.
- We on top of this here control tower.
Check these views out.
We're up pretty high.
[wind whips against camera]
It's a long way down, baby!
It's a long way down, but we're alright.
- Sailing is the absolute epitome of travel.
There is not a better way to travel.
It's so peaceful and it's serene.
The other side is you get cut and you get nicked
'cause it's rough.
You get bumps and bruises and cuts
and they will not heal.
Just the tiniest little thing
that wouldn't bother you on land
takes months to heal and is always open
and it's always raw and there's--
Salt just penetrates everything.
Your clothes are salty.
You feel crusty
and there's part of you that always misses the land
and everything that comes with the land.
There's just definitely a sense of security,
of being on ground.
- And this is Captain Alex. - Yar!
- The difference between what we did on Bubbles
and what most people do is they'll leave
from one port, they'll sail around the world,
be at sea the entire time and come back.
That is, I see no gain in that.
I mean I wanted to explore the world,
I wanted to see places, I wanted to meet people.
And so, the pace that we set with that
ended up being based a lot on I wanted
to see other forms of life that were living in the world.
Humans, animals, everything.
I wanted to see different places, what was out there.
That's like exactly what I wanted to go see.
I really wanted to go explore.
Holy smokers!
We did a route around the world
going from hemisphere to hemisphere
where the storm seasons weren't.
You actually see the colors and the formations
of all these tiny rocks.
And so you're always in summer basically, right,
you're always in a good time of year.
Come into this cave right here.
[yelling]
- Man: Oh, my god!
Oh, sh#t,
this is gonna be wet.
[siren blasting repeatedly]
- Woman: What the ####?
Would you like to tell everybody
what's going on?
- Water spout over there.
- Oh, yeah, water spout.
Appears to be a water tornado coming our way.
- He's a big risk taker.
I always told him limit your risk
'cause every day you're on that same risk
so if you are taking a risk
whatever's gonna go wrong will happen at some point
if you keep taking that risk over and over again.
[chuckling]
- Whoa!
Whoo!
Ahh!
Whoo-hoo!
- Some of the time you're kinda like, "Really?"
[hard wind blows]
- Alex: Yeah, we got it.
[excited yelling] Whoo-hoo!
- We got it, we got it!
- I knew that the sailing was gonna get harder
and I knew that the weather was gonna get crazier.
- The water's like 90 degrees. It's insane!
So we're having ourselves a little spa.
we're drinking some--
- If you get bad weather there's just a lot more to hit.
I was worried he was gonna make some bad decisions
around that.
We almost hit a reef in one of the Atolls.
- Ben: We'd like to go to that island to meet our friend,
but there is the reef line just in front of us
and it's too shallow for us to go.
- Man: Part of this lagoon wasn't mapped out.
We didn't have charts for it and Alex was like,
"We're going straight across this 'cuz we're in a hurry."
- Alex: What do you see, Ben?
- Ben: I can see it's really shallow on the sides.
There might be a passage in the middle.
- You're like threading the needle
going through all these reef spots
and he's up there saying, 'cause"Ah, try here."d here
He's pointing down and you're like, "Oh, yeah,
there it is."
- Alex: It's gonna be coming right off our--
we're gonna be in a port tack when we come out.
We're gonna have to sheet it in, it's probably gonna be--
- Why do we want to try and cut this corner?
If one of us slips up...
- If we're gonna hit it, we're gonna hit it.
The captain said we're sailing.
There's nothing we can do.
And I thought I saw different colored water.
[ominous music]
Brady was running up one side of the boat
and you could tell we were going into coral.
Like we're going full- bore into coral right now
and so I yell turn port and Brady yelled turn starboard
and if we would have turned port we would have sunk.
Russ threw the wheel, we did a U-turn out of it.
It was just a miracle we didn't hit anything.
Like, it was absolutely a miracle.
So then, we sailed into safer water
but I yelled at him like, "Dude, what the f--?"
Why was that worth it?"
He's like, "I'm in a hurry to get around the world.
"I don't got time to wait. Everyone's fine."
I was like, "You could have killed one of us, man,
to save two hours."
- Man: It's his boat.
- I like how he challenged me and I challenged him.
It's a good dynamic.
If anything happens, we sink this boat.
That was the coolest thing that we ever did in life.
We sank a boat in the middle of the ocean.
If worse came to worse, you lose a boat
with your sh#t on it.
Like, so what?
- Me and Diego, I know there was parts of us
that were slightly worried
that something might go wrong
and that we maybe lucked out a few times.
- We had a lot of hairy moments.
Diego got upset with me a couple times
the way that I ran the boat.
There was a couple of hairy situations it put us in.
- The baby stay was in between him and the pole
and luckily it was there and it just hit him in the chest,
but if it would have hit him in the head
even with that stay there
or if the stay wouldn't have been there
it could have easily killed him.
He just came back to the cockpit.
He just kind of like sat down and he was just like--
Like he would have died there
if it would have been a few inches the other way.
[descending whistle]
- And he was very upset with me that that had happened.
[gentle music]
- I thought he was gonna die for sure.
I thought for sure.
This is a dude who is living life to the fullest
and he's probably gonna make a decision
that his luck runs out on, you know?
And I guarantee
I couldn't have been the first person that said this.
We love Alex Rust but this is his life, man.
That's fate, that's destiny for him.
[revved up motor]
- Got good winds dead behind us.
Right now, we're sailing wing on wing.
Got the jib pulled out.
Life's good.
I get you a hat that says Barack Obama.
[chattering]
Papau New Guinea, it's one of the last wild frontiers
in the world.
Coming in to mainland Papua New Guinea.
This is like the last great world
that you can go explore
where people are still very tribal.
This is where the cannibals used to reign
up until just the 1970's.
The security guards there still use bow and arrow.
It's awesome.
Our first island in PNG.
It's not really an atoll like an actual island.
Kids are just everywhere.
- Reed joins in Madang, Papua New Guinea.
- So I get to the airport.
Get off the plane, of course Alex is sitting there
with a cooler full of beers
and a whole Papua New Guinean family
waiting for my arrival.
I come out.
He's only been there a week
and he already has this family that he's calling mom and dad.
- And girlfriend. - And girlfriend.
Within five minutes of being there and on the parent's truck,
we're driving around.
We out by the sailboat, we got like 30 little kids in the boat
standing around in harbor.
It's like he's been there for months,
but he's only been there for five days.
Everybody's giving him hugs.
Just how easily he can get into some new area
and people just fall in love with him
and wanna be around him.
- Man: That's a volcano over there in the distance.
There's a volcano right there.
There's another volcano.
- I was like, "Well, we'd like to hike the volcano."
We'd like to get a closer look at it.
So we take the dingy around the volcano.
We pull up to this place, this meeting spot,
and this is just the middle of the jungle
and it's like a rock.
There's no dock, there's no infrastructure there.
And instead of one guy waving,
every man in the village is there
to take us up to this volcano
and we're just swarmed by these people who were there.
They were just so happy and excited to see us.
We're like happy and excited to see them.
With all these Papua New Guineans
and they start climbing up coconut trees
for us and like these guys
will just hop on a coconut tree
and just like climb the tree, all the way up there
and started throwing down coconuts.
They're like taking us up the volcano
and as we start to get up the volcano then,
some of the guys start really freaking out.
It starts to rumble and then like all the 25 guys
that are with us, they start running,
sprinting down the mountain
'cause they're like scared of this thing
'cause it's like actually killed people.
- The guy's like this road, die road here.
We'Death, die here road.ng?
No be here, we go.
We're like no, we're good, let's keep going.
Finally, we had to turn back 'cause it was,
it was smoky, you couldn't see.
It's a steep climb, we were getting up
into the thick of it.
We didn't know if we were gonna start
dealing with dangerous gases.
- We love it.
People ride these sailboats around the world.
They don't do anything.
They don't stop and interact with the people.
That's why these people just embraced us
because they didn't see us as tourists.
They just saw us as some weird people
that show up in their island one day
that were interested in them.
And us being interested in them made them interested in us
and then the world opened up and we were--
- And it's a real genuine connection.
[flames roaring]
- Whoo-hoo!
[music playing]
[laughing]
This is something that's been around for hundreds of years.
They've outlawed women on boats at sea.
They're bad luck.
- Man: I got you on video.
- Two ladies on Bubbles .
- Man: Here we go, there you go.
- Being a woman on a sailboat is interesting
because sailing's kind of, it's a man's world.
- I think the sailing experience
in any kind of long term way,
it's much better when matters of the heart
are kept out of it.
- You just stand there.
- Woman: When you're at sea or on a boat,
inherently there's tension
and then when you throw in a woman
there's just a different kind of connection
between a man and a woman,
just changes the dynamic.
- Alex: You're damned if you don't and damned
if you do type thing.
We got the girl and she's good and everything
and you're having fun when it's good weather
but then you've got everything else that goes with it
but then when the girl's not there
you want the girl, you know,
but then it's kind of nice to not have her.
It's just one of those things.
- He always wants somebody around,
a love interest of some sort,
but he's the captain so the women
just kind of gravitated towards him.
I'm thinking it's like this awkward situation
but he has a funny way of handling it
when nothing's ever out of place
and nobody seems to say a word.
- Alex: Molly joined the boat.
This is someone that I thought I could marry
and I thought okay, maybe this is the girl, you know?
- I got the feeling that in the past
women were passed around, I guess.
Girls become obsessed with him.
People just love the idea of Alex.
I've never met anyone like him.
- Right here, the equator into the northern hemisphere
and I, as Neptune--
- I mean there are a lot of conflicting things
within Alex.
There's a really beautiful child-like quality
about him and about the way he falls
in love with the world.
He has a willingness to open himself up
and feel things very quickly
and he feels things very strongly
and to have that and then also
have this drive to do amazing things in the world.
Captain Alex is this character.
It's very much a real part of him
but he's on display.
He has to be a certain way for his crew.
Some of my favorite moments were when Alex
and I were on our shifts together.
It was nice to get to know him more in that sense,
more intimately.
Alex behaves differently when it is just me and him.
- Three.
Two.
One.
Get clear, shoot it!
Whoo!
We're about two degrees north of the equator
on our way from Papua New Guinea to Palau
and this is pretty much what it's looked like
for the past three days.
Looks like it's gonna be like this
for the next few days
all the way til we get to Palau.
Think we got about 450 miles left.
- We were going through the doldrums basically.
It took us eight days
but it was one of the worst eight-day passages I had
and you might have heard the expression
being stuck in the doldrums.
It's when you're kind of down in the dumps
or something's kind of holding you somewhere
and we were literally stuck in the doldrums.
We had no wind, we're on the boat.
We're trying to get across this, it's just like so hot.
So hot.
I mean it's so hot you can't think.
Papua New Guinea waters.
You start to deteriorate and go a little crazy out there.
I remember at one point, I think this
was on day four or five, I was yelling at clouds.
Mostly just water.
So we need more wind.
The clouds, they're freaking me out.
They're like planning something against me.
Not a drop of wind.
I was like I need to get back home.
I need to do something productive.
I was losing it out there.
- It's a lot of down time.
Just sitting there chugging along
and all you have is just a self evaluation.
- Losing a parent like that, if that's something
that's still bothering you inside
that's something you can think about a lot.
- Alex: Gosh, it's hard to explain
unless you know my dad or who he was.
- Man: We'll talk about your dad.
Try to explain it to me.
- Man.
You got one of those beers, Claycamp?
Is there a beer down there?
- Sure do, buddy.
- Yeah, thanks man.
I knew nothing else as a father than him
but he was... yeah, one of a kind.
Just the way he did everything.
You know.
- There were times where he would cry
on the head of the boat.
He always said that he felt like
he was not meeting the expectations
of what his dad would want him to be at.
- Look at him, he's downing it, boy, he's really eating it.
Hey, come on, show Mommy.
- Alex: When you're growing up--
and I think a lot of people have this is, you know,
you wanna be like your dad, right?
You wanna do what your dad did
or you wanna do something your dad does.
My dad was older when he had us
so he already had this lifetime of stuff
that he had done and I saw how people
reacted to him and just his accomplishments,
what's still going today from things he did
and I was like, well, how can I even begin
to do something as big as what my dad did?
- Narrator: From its beginning as a small regional grower
in the 1950's, Rose Acre Farms has become the largest
family-owned egg producer.
Rose Acre Farms,
the fastest-growing egg producer in the United States.
- Alex: How could I possibly follow in his footsteps?
- His father built this amazing massive company
and I think he wants to do something
along those same lines but also change the world
and help people
and he doesn't know how to start or how to do that.
- There's a million sailors out here
that want to, in theory, they're sailing around the world
but there's always something to fix,
there's always something that's broke,
there's always something going wrong with the boat
and they never get out.
It's like easy excuse, you know.
Rust got out and he was just like, "We're doing it."
And that takes a lot.
- See we've got no wind.
Having a little trouble with the engine and stuff.
Trying to get to Thailand, the current's against us.
At least the crew's still in good spirits.
Over the course of the trip
probably spent close to another hundred on Bubbles ,
just different things that broke,
stays, we almost lost the mast in the Mozambique Channel.
[yelling]
We had the engine out two different times.
Transmission we had out five different times.
All kinds of weld jobs.
And auto-pilot, went through three of them
and nav. gear, wind vane.
By the time you add it up, it can be pretty expensive.
It didn't change the fact that I was gonna do this trip,
doing something that I loved.
- Phuket, Thailand.
He'd been trying to get me to come on
and off for a while.
I wanted to go bad, but I knew it'd be a bad decision.
I wasn't gonna probably ever make it home
and possibly die.
- Alex: I wanted to see somebody from back home
that I grew up with, that I hung out with for a while.
Being away for so long.
You miss your buddies from back home
so it'd be good just to see a familiar face as well.
- Say hello.
- Alex needed some help on his boat
and his motor was junk and he needed some parts.
His refrigerator didn't work.
I think the auto-steer was broke.
Pretty much junk.
- Alex: It was perfect timing to have him there.
We had that thing out in six hours I think.
- Claycamp: I think it was probably the dirtiest job
ever in my life.
Covered in grease head to toe.
We had parts laid out on the dock
and it's always rocking, me rolling off in the water.
- You kind of need those.
- Right, important stuff.
We sailed it, we got it running, I think, the next morning.
He knew we'd find some way somehow
to get it moving again.
Alex is one of a kind, unique, smart, dumb.
I guess I could describe him as
"the smartest idiot I've ever met in my life.
- We made it. [laughs]
- He was just away from home that whole time.
Yeah, I missed him.
Just be several times be like, hey, Alex isn't here.
It'd be nice to hang out with him or see him.
He's kind of half a world away.
I followed along on Facebook a little bit, see pictures,
but...
it's not really the same thing, you know.
- The first time it was like this long extended party
and it was just party from place to place
everywhere that we went. Party with different people and it was a lot of fun.
It really was just like a big super long extended party
and that was kind of like what everybody was into.
The second time that I came on Bubbles
it was definitely more business Alex.
Your were like really concerned and
it was something that I hadn't really seen from you before
and obviously over the months
that I had missed of you sailing you had become a sailor.
And before,
you were just a guy that owned a sail boat.
- I feel like he was trying to prove to everybody
how hard he worked.
Instead of everybody looking at him
as being just this crazy person
that travels and does crazy things,
that he was proving something deeper than that.
- He realized that true satisfaction
isn't with just partying.
The adventure, the exploring, the meeting people
and the beauty,
the beauty that he's seen around the world
that's given him a new desire,
a new direction or new perspective
for what is fun, what is a party.
- Jim was fortunate enough
to point out a storm coming in from the south
so we got the spinnaker down just in time
and Jim's now at the wheel
trying to control the madness of this insurmountable
amount of wind that's coming in.
Now let's go outside to check it out.
[ Styx "Come Sail Away"] ? I'm sailing away ?
? Set an open course for the virgin sea ?
? 'Cause I've got to be free ?
? Free to face a life ?
? That's ahead of me ?
? On board I'm a captain ?
? So climb aboard ?
? We'll search for tomorrow ?
? On every shore and I'll try ?
? Oh lord, I'll try ?
? To carry on ?
? Come sail away, come sail away ?
? Come sail away with me ?
? Come sail away, come sail away ?
? Come sail away with me ?
? Come sail away, come sail away ?
? Come sail away with me ?
? Come sail away, come sail away ?
? Come sail away with me ?
- Hallelujah! - kids: Hallelujah!
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
- We're crossing the south Atlantic
from Africa over to South America.
About to make landfall in St. Helena
in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
We're in a tributary of a tributary of a tributary
off of a bigger stream
off of a bigger tributary off of a bigger river
off of the biggest river in the world, the Amazon,
and just kind of spending our day
having a look around.
- In the Amazon, constantly you come
across these little communities,
going off tributaries and that I think
was the most interesting part of the trip for sure
and for people who've never seen that before
I think it's also the most stirring
because it really makes you think
about the way we live versus the way they live
and what you actually need to survive
and what you actually need to be happy.
- Alex: These people, they lead richer lives
than almost anybody I see in the rich world.
They understand the Earth way better than we do.
The way the go about their daily lives,
the way the wake up in the morning with the sun
and go fishing and then how they just sustain themselves.
There's no technology, there's no media,
there's no advertising or business.
All this junk that's just in your face
so much here in the States.
There, it's just the world that's around them.
Shake one of the bigger ones.
[blowing shell trumpet]
It's tough sometimes when you get
to a beautiful place and you start
to get to know a lot of people
and you start to become involved with the community,
it does get hard to say the goodbyes
but that's something that we had to do time and again.
- Man: How did you do it?
- Alex: Usually with the flare gun.
We'd shoot on the way out.
- Man: Do a little salute?
- Alex: Yeah, we did the flare gun salute.
- Man: We're gonna count down from five, ready?
Okay, five, four.
[flare blasting]
- You know, it's more than just the US out there.
There's more to the world than
people worrying about taxes and the economy
and minor family issues.
There's people that
have so much more and so much less to live for.
I decided, alright, we're gonna push
to make it home before hurricane season this year.
I knew it was gonna be in the May, June area
'cause that's when hurricane season starts.
I did start to get a little bit low towards that time period
'cause now when I'm sailing from port to port
I'm starting to recognize ports
because before I got to Tortola
I'd sailed that whole chain down to Trinidad
so things are becoming familiar again
and there's like, there's one sense of excitement
of getting back and finishing it
but there's another sense of like, "Oh, my gosh,
this is almost over."
The boat's called Bubbles .
If you ever watch a little kid,
like I'm talking two, three year old kid,
if you ever blow bubbles and just watch the eyes
of a little kid just grow and kind of shine
looking at this but smile,
the smile that comes across their face
when they see these bubbles just floating by,
that's what this trip is to me,
me being a little kid again,
just seeing the world and taking it all in as I go.
It's just like bubbles floating.
I sent an email out to all the crew
that accrued on Bubbles and just tried
to get everybody that could come to come.
I knew I wanted to do something special
for the crew with some ceremony,
some passport stamping, some awards and things like that,
but I wasn't for sure what the turnout was gonna be either.
- It was an emotional time to, you know,
you've accomplished a huge goal.
This is, it's three years in the making, man,
that he probably never thought he was gonna make.
Here's a kid from southern Indiana
that never had sailed before in his life.
He jumped on a boat and he did it.
Me and other people switched jobs in three years.
People graduated from college, people had kids
that were walking around in the three years
that he was sailing.
- That was the way we were brought up
was you don't finish a job until it's done.
You do a good job of it.
And so for him that's what it was all about.
Pretty much a mirror image of some
of the stuff that my dad did,
take trips to places that people hardly ever go to
and meet new people.
- I think dad would love it that Alex
is going out and seeing the world,
getting other people to get that experience as well,
open doors and see different cultures and lifestyles
that they're not accustomed to.
That's what Alex did in a big way for a lot of people.
He shared it with people.
I think dad would have been really excited about that.
- What's the scoop?
It ended up being great.
There was people flying in from all over the place.
- That was an amazing homecoming.
Never seen like that ever before.
- Great souls bring people together like this.
Doesn't matter if it's spiritual leaders or politicians
but great people have this tendency for sure.
(upbeat music)
- Alex: The ceremonies that we had.
And we're going to start with Theresa.
It turned into this huge party
where we'd have 40 people crammed in the boat.
People were stuffed inside and out
watching these ceremonies.
Alex was stamping their passport,
giving them that memento
or that sign that they had successfully
had a journey on Bubbles .
We are gathered here today to send off
another great crew member.
- And that's how it was.
It became a performance and people
expected a certain amount of performance to it
and we'd all take our shot of rum
and we'd go through and just do this ceremonial thing.
Everybody talks about the beginning of things
but tomorrow is the end of one thing
that's the beginning of another.
(yelling)
- My memory, I see all those different ceremonies
and they started with the 30 to 40 people
and then they slowly dwindled to 10,
to six, to five, to four, and then boom.
It was just Alex and I.
I had that image of Alex writing
on the one open spot.
It was just perfect and he just wrote we did it,
dear Bubbles, we did it.
- It was such a mixture of emotions then,
of joy that it happened and sorrow that it was over.
Joe kept having to tell me, he was like
"I'm gonna take you home, now it's time to go home."
And he kept having to tell me this over
and over again because it's like there was a part of me
that didn't wanna come home.
I could honestly say I'm definitely the worst sailor
who ever sailed around the world for sure, by far.
Just going out to sea and figuring it out as we went.
There can't be a less-experienced sailor
or somebody that knows as little
about sailing as I do and have done it.
There can't and make it, I don't know.
I thought okay yeah, it might take me a little time
to get adjusted back into America
after being out here and seeing this
and running on my own schedule for all this time,
but it's been way different and way harsher
than I thought it would be.
I went and traded again for two months in Chicago
and I was just miserable
sitting in front of a computer screen
doing the numbers thing.
After seeing almost every sunrise and sunset
and sailing under the stars at night
and meeting tribal chiefs and having Amazonian mayors
come aboard and getting greeted
by government officials and having the whole tribe
would come and do a dance for you
just 'cause you're there.
I got addicted to it,
but right now I'm going through like a crazy withdrawal.
- He told me, he was like,"Reed,
"I thought I had it all figured out.
"It was so clear during those couple years
but now I'm more confused than I was before I left."
- There's no freer feeling than leaving a port behind you
and sailing over the horizon, to the horizon
knowing that you've never been
to where you're going.
You're leaving one port and you're going to the next port,
you don't even know exactly
where you're going but you're just out there
and you know that what you're going to see
you've never seen before.
And being out at sea on that voyage,
for me that's the best drug you can have.
- For three years, that was his identity.
He didn't lose it, he'll always be that person
but he's not on a boat anymore
and to see him struggle with that, it hurts me.
- I'll find myself-- I'll just sit down sometimes
and I'll just-- It's like comatose.
I just drift off
and I can sit and stare at something for a long time
and not even-- it's pretty weird really.
Maybe this trip was running from responsibility,
you know, I don't know,
or maybe it was trying to do something great,
to do something equivalent that,
something great that, like, my dad had done.
I'm still trying to deal with what it means
and what the deeper issue is.
[children yelling]
Pieces of jaw, you can clearly see the tooth here.
The one thing that was my dream come true
and then like actually made it
and it's like, what do you do after that?
- I think he has a deep-seated unease
that causes his unrest.
Time in a little bit more of a spiritual place
could be good for him.
- Hey, what's going on? It's Alex.
I just wanted to connect with you guys.
I know I've been kinda bouncing around and hard to get a hold of
and I might be going to India pretty--
I am going to India pretty soon
and so I also wanna talk to you about that
to figure out what's going on with everything and what not,
also I have some more footage.
This is the home of the Dalai Lama in exile
in north India.
These are all prayer flags.
- I think with Alex, he's always jumping to the big thing.
[singing in Indian]
- He had always wanted to go to India
and he had decided that that was gonna
be a good place to either clear his head
or just do some traveling and to get away from the city.
- Vanessa: One of the very last emails he wrote me
was on May 24th, 2013 from India.
- Parvati Valley, north India.
- It said, "Hey Vanessa, I'm in India.
"I just got out of the hospital.
"I had an episode of Typhoid fever
"and my temperature got up to 105 degrees.
"I'll be back in Chicago July.
Hope to see you there."
He wrote a lot of people on Friday, May 24th
and then nobody really heard from him on the 25th.
So I have no idea what he did that weekend.
- Very nice scene, [inaudible] ceremony.
[phone ringing]
- I had a feeling it was gonna happen eventually
but to get the call is tough for sure.
He was in northern India near Pakistan
and he caught Typhoid fever.
After he contracted Typhoid fever
he was in the hospital for a few days being treated.
He felt he was healthy and he traveled to Varanasi
which is 800 miles away.
He got a room at a guest house in Varanasi
and the next morning they found him dead.
From talking with the manager of the hotel
they said he looked like a perfectly normal person.
They think that he died of the complication
of Typhoid fever.
- Definitely Alex was a daredevil.
He had a daredevil devotion to conquer himself,
to find himself.
In the most purest of manner, he went 100%
on what he did.
Was it loving the children of the street,
was it reflecting of 'Who am I?', 'Why am I here?'
His greatness in his way of expressing himself
in an existential way is something
that changes peoples whole directions of life.
- Molly: I wish he knew how much he has helped everyone
that he
encountered and that he kind of already,
I wish he could be content with what he did
because he did something great
and I wish that he could see
that he already changed the world.
- Words can never be enough to explain anybody
and to say that Alex, even less.
I know I am still talking about Alex [choking up]
and his trips and his remarkable example
of what you can do with human life,
where you can reach,
and what are the true limits
'cause we are limiting ourselves.
Others can try, but it is us in the end who does it.
And to me, persons, like I said earlier,
such as Alex who overcome this
is a fine example of human spirit.
[sad, hollow breathing]
- Excellent, you did good.
Thank you.
(piano music)
- That's all I got.
(gentle music)
- Growing up on a small family-run farm in Indiana,
Alex Rust from a big family though, in Indiana.
13 brothers and sisters?
That's a lot of family.
Was it hard to stand out in a family like that?
- We were on a road trip out in Iowa once
and we loaded up in the van to leave
and they did a head count and they missed one of us
and it was me. [audience laughs]
- What was it, like 5 minutes, 10 minutes?
- About a day. [laughter]
I was just kind of sitting there so they called the police.
The police picked me up and
they let me hang out in patrol cars all night
while they tried to track down my parents.
- Host: Are you serious?
- Oh, I had fun with it. I kind of liked it.
- Well you're 15 questions away from one million dollars.
Are you ready to play? - Let's do it.
- Audience, are you ready to play?
(cheering)
- Host: In 2005, what former presidential hopeful
was elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee?
Richard Gephardt.
- Howard Dean!
Wasn't that him?
D!
Final answer.
[laughter]
- Yes! He got it right.
[cheers and applause]
? ?
- We're in the Bahamas.
There's this island full of iguanas.
Nobody lives on the island, deserted.
We're gonna get up in the morning.
We're gonna kill the iguana and eat it.
So we grill it up and we have an iguana tasting party,
invite people over, dip it in barbecue sauce,
tastes like chicken, great.
- Vanessa: The next day we posted our pictures on Facebook.
We went back to the boat, slept,
and we got woken up at like five in the morning.
- Our boat was surrounded by Bahamian police officers
and we'd heard that locals do eat iguana meat
but what it turns out is that particular iguana
happens to be endangered and only lives on that island
and there's no signs or anything,
I mean, we didn't know.
- And he said that we're arresting you
for eating and killing an endangered species.
- They were like we have reports
that you're leading iguana hunting expeditions
through the Bahamas.
This thing just blew up, like real crazy out of control.
- Vanessa: We both spent about two days
in the Bahamian jail.
- All of the sudden I got journalists contacting me,
I'm getting hate mail from conservationists,
environmentalists,
and this is the same day that I posted the pictures.
Like this is how viral this thing went.
It made the London Metro , a paper in Australia,
TV news in Canada.
- The way my parents found out about it
is they read about it the next day
in the Chicago Tribune
but we ended up going to court.
We each paid a thousand dollar fine as a penalty
and then we went on our merry way.
- Columbia produces a lot of cocaine, right?
And they need to get it over to their main market,
the States and Europe, so one way they do this
is they take it over to Venezuela
and they put it on boats in this peninsula
right over here and this is one
of the most dangerous places on Earth to be in a boat
is right here in Venezuela
between Trinidad and Tobago and Isle Marguerita.
So when we're in Trinidad and Tobago
there's this boat pulls into port.
We'd heard the Navy is escorting a man,
the Trinidad and Tobago Navy and we talk
to this guy Dave, this British guy,
and he has 26 bullet holes in his boat
so I talk to David 'cause I was getting ready
to sail exactly where he was coming from
'cause we're heading to Venezuela.
- And everybody said that there would be, like, pirates
or you could come across a robbery or something.
We were like that doesn't exist.
We're good people. We're never gonna do that.
- And the Wild Sea Monkey was slow
so what we did is we're like okay,
so we're gonna sail outta Trinidad and Tobago
in the daylight and then we're gonna wait
right before we cross into Venezuelan waters,
we'll make sure it's dark and then
we'll just go as fast as we can at four knots,
as fast we can to try to get through this dangerous area
and then hopefully by the time it's light
we'll be on the other side, we'll be good.
- Vanessa: At about 5:30 in he morning it was my shift,
we find this small little vessel
going extremely fast off in the distance
coming right towards us.
- I'm like holy-- like, I'm freaking out.
I'm like who are all of these guys?
We're in troubled waters.
We don't have an EPIRB, we don't have a life raft.
We don't have any emergency equipment.
We don't have a gun.
- We're thinking we have to do something,
we have to do something
'cause we're not just gonna give ourselves up.
- They came up to us and they circled us
and they had guns.
- So our first thought to do, of what to do
was we were gonna get absolutely naked.
- When I popped out naked with the flare gun,
I didn't point it at 'em, I just held it
and I just showed 'em that I had the flare gun
and that if I had to I was gonna shot it at them
with their machine guns-- I don't know.
[Vanessa hollers boisterously]
- And I think it totally worked
because they stopped in their tracks
and I think they didn't know what to do with us.
- They just left, they circled us once and left
but that was a very scary moment there, yeah.
I fell off the boat once actually
sailing from Panama to the Galapagos.
We were kind of in the doldrums again,
crossing the equator and there was just kind of a weird swell
and I was doing something up on deck with the boom
and the boom kind of rocked and came back
and just knocked me right off the boat
but I was able to get back on pretty fast.
And another time I about went that was really scary
was in the Indian Ocean and this time we had,
this was when we had no engine,
almost everything was broke on the boat
but I was doing something with the jib.
Something was caught and I was up there
and we just hit a big wave and it just threw me
off the boat into the air and I came down
and my back landed on a stanchion
that run along the outside of the boat
and it knocked the wind out of me
and I could've bounced either way
but luckily I bounced inside the boat
but if I would've bounced outside,
even with those two people
and even in the middle of the day
I don't think they would have been able to get me in time.
You go through, anytime you go through a squall or a storm
people are on deck and it only takes one wave
to kind of push the boat in a funny way
that'll just throw you or jerk you.
Even when Claycamp was there in Thailand,
Irish, I think, was sleeping on the bough or something
and we had just some wind picked up
and it just took the boat over
and I remember counting everybody
and I was like we're missing one, you know?
And Irish was up hanging on to the lifeline.
He was just hanging on to the lifeline
on the front of the boat and yeah,
so we almost lost him there, you know?
I mean there's definitely lots of close calls.
- Christmas, and we're in Cape Town, South Africa
which I think was Christmas of 2011.
Mom was like Alex found some buried treasure
so he's buying us a trip to go down
to see him in Cape Town
and Alex had found this orphanage,
heard of it and got a hold of 'em
and basically they have a school,
the kids live there and everything.
They don't have anywhere else to turn to.
They're just turned out on the streets.
But we did a visit actually there at the orphanage
and it was just a really good experience
because the kids were,
they were showing us their rooms and their school
and everything, they were real excited
to see people there.
Alex had rented a van.
- Alex: There's Mom on video.
- Dave Rust: We went and picked 'em up and took 'em on the boat.
Joe's dressed up as Santa the whole time,
you know, Father Christmas, Father Christmas.
They kept calling out to him.
And then we handed out goodies
and they just got to talk to Santa
and got their gift and what not.
That's what Alex did in a big way
for a lot of people.
They got to go out and sail, you know,
do stuff like that and he shared it with people,
wanting people to be able to go places
and open doors and see different cultures and lifestyles
they're not accustomed to.
- For more information on Chasing Bubbles
go to facebook.com slash chasingbubbles.