Eric Forsyth to Show Film at Brookhaven Lab About His Sailing Adventures, March 4
February 4, 2004
UPTON, NY - Eric Forsyth will present a one-hour sailing video, featuring highlights from his recent circumnavigation of the world aboard his 42-foot yacht Fiona, on Thursday, March 4, at noon in Berkner Hall at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory. Forsyth is a retired engineer from Brookhaven Lab. This video presentation is free and open to the public. All visitors to the Laboratory age 16 and over must bring a photo ID.
During his presentation, sponsored by the Brookhaven Retired Employees Association, Forsyth will tell the story of how he followed the routes that were used by the old clipper ships before the opening of the Suez and Panama Canals. He will chronicle his voyage to Cape Town in South Africa, past the Cape of Good Hope, across Antarctica's Southern Ocean, to Cape Leeuwin in Australia, and Cape Horn at the tip of South America. He will also describe his visit to the remote island of Kerguelen, which is a French possession located between Africa and Australia in the southern Indian Ocean, and to the remote island of South Georgia, once part of the Falkland Islands - now a British territory. The 15-month voyage was completed with leisurely cruising in the Caribbean, Bermuda, and Maine.
This was Forsyth's second circumnavigation made since 1995. He has also sailed to the High Arctic and the Antarctic. For this latter cruise, he was awarded the 2000 Blue Water Medal by the Cruising Club of America. This medal has been awarded annually since 1929 to an amateur sailor from any country for "a meritorious example of seamanship and adventure." Forsyth joined Brookhaven in 1960 to work at the Alternating Gradient Synchrotron, one of the Lab's particle accelerators. From 1986 until 1990, he was Chair of the Accelerator Development Department, at that time responsible for the pre-construction design and planning of the Lab's newest accelerator, the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), among other projects. In 1990, he took a leave of absence and sailed to the South Pacific with his late wife Edith who was a former physician in Brookhaven's Medical Department and died in 1991. Forsyth worked part-time on technical aspects of RHIC from 1992 and retired in 1995. More details of the cruise are available at www.yachtfiona.com.
2004-10120 | INT/EXT | Newsroom
