VIDEO: Geraldo at the helm

By Soundings Staff

Celebrity journalist Geraldo Rivera is known for voicing his opinion on controversial topics, but he’s also known for his love of sailing.

He bought a Sparkman & Stephens-designed 70-foot, aluminum ketch named Voyager in 1995. Aboard Voyager, Rivera was featured in a pair of four-hour Travel Channel specials, “Sail to the Century,” which chronicled a Rivera family circumnavigation, and “From Roots to Rain Forest,” which showed the vessel’s 1,400-mile cruise up the Amazon River as it passed through Brazil and Colombia and reached Peru.

Click here for a video tour of Voyager.

More recently, Rivera completed his fourth Marion-Bermuda Race, which he says is one of his favorites despite his lackluster finish.

GPS tracking during the race showed Voyager closing to second place in blustery conditions during the first two days of the June 14-19 race, only to fade and cross the finish line 12th among the 34-boat fleet.

“The phrase, ‘It was a dark and stormy night,’ was originally an example of a badly written cliché. Now ‘dark and stormy’ is an expression mostly used to describe a drink made with Gosling’s rum and ginger beer,” Rivera wrote for Fox News Latino.

“While I confess drinking several during the just completed Marion to Bermuda Race for Cruising Sailboats, actual dark and stormy nights at sea were in short supply during the 660-mile race. Which was too bad because my old sailboat Voyager, at 52 tons and made of half-inch-thick aluminum, thrives in bad weather; the darker and stormier the better.”

“The Marion Bermuda Race is a mini-adventure, whereas you can live the high life on the high seas and still be back to work a week later,” he told The Royal Gazette. “It’s got the Gulf Stream, weather changes, and it’s just far enough so it’s a challenging race. It’s also spirited, so you don’t have to be a rocket scientist or a professional sailor to do it, and aside from some local races in New England, this is the only ocean race I’ve ever really done.”