A deep thinking computer science university lecturer, Carl Huber discovered sailing a little late in life. He did not set foot on a boat until he was 40, and it soon taught him that many of the things he had always dreamed of were achievable. After taking sailing courses on the Chesapeake and in the US Virgin Islands, he began bareboat chartering in the Caribbean where he formulated plans to use small sailboats to transport goods cleanly and inexpensively in support of impoverished areas like Haiti.
A circumnavigation has been a lifelong dream and Huber intends to use the Golden Globe Race to bring attention to the size and fragility of the planet and the potential to put untapped natural resources like wind to work in practical and creative ways.
To complete his 8,000 sailing mile qualifying distance, Carl joined the crew of the former Whitbread Round the World Race yacht Ceramco New Zealand from the Caribbean through the Panama Canal back to her home port of Auckland.
Huber is using his participation in the GGR to call attention to an ideal he often thinks about. He sees many of our problems as human beings, individually and collectively, are a product of how we relate to the planet and if we were able to see things through a different prism, we would all be better for it.
He says: “We do not relate to our planet as a symbiotic organism. We relate as an adversarial organism—humanity against the planet. We take advantage of earth instead of living in harmony with it… I think we need to fundamentally change the way we think of ourselves in relationship to the planet. The ultimate question of what should be done with a human life, or how a life should best be used, led me to the 2018 GGR. My entry has evoked the single most significant change in my life since my first child was born. It has allowed me to turn from a career and livelihood from which I have wanted to flee for many years, but I am ashamed to say, to which I have held myself in bondage by the illusion of security and necessity.”