Shane Acton

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Shane Acton was a sailor, known for circumnavigating the globe in an 18 foot boat. He first set sail from Britain at the age of 22, in 1972.

Raised in Coleridge, England without any sailing experience he departed in a used 18' 4" bilge-keel sailing boat for which he paid £400 - not an enormous amount even in the early 1970's. The boat was a `Caprice', a Robert Tucker design originally named `Super Shrimp' but referred to by Shane simply as `Shrimpy'. Later Shane was accompanied for much of the voyage by his girlfriend, a photographer from Switzerland, Iris Derungs, he sailed westabout through the Panama Canal, circling the globe and returning back to England as a local celebrity eight years later. The voyage is chronicled in his book Shrimpy: A Record Round-the-World Voyage in an Eighteen Foot Yacht. In 1984 he set off on a second voyage.

He lived his later years near Golfito, Costa Rica, and died of lung cancer on February 25, 2002 at the age of 55 in Cambridge, England.

[edit] Sources

• A Speck on the Sea, William H. Longyard. McGraw-Hill, 2003.
• Cambridge News, "World Trip Record Sailor Dies." Feb 27, 2002.
• Shrimpy: A Record Round-the-World Voyage in an Eighteen Foot Yacht, Shane Acton. Motorbooks International, 1993.