At 72, and happily married, world-girdling yachtsman Nick Vartzikos recalls with a laugh his courtship formula: “First, I ask them if they get seasick,” he says. “Then I ask, ‘Do you love me?’”

Such priorities well suit a man who is a sailing legend in Greece and a hero to his native island, Samos. He’s now home from the sea, working through a bout with leukemia, which does not seem to bother him at all. And he recalls his most famous single-handed voyage, sailing his 38-foot steel ketch Samos from the Chesapeake Bay to the Greek island without stopping. He returned with the boat in 2002 and now keeps it in a well-known Maryland boat yard, Hartge’s of Galesville.

Though a public welcome met him in Greece, and a book (in Greek) about his feat is in its second printing, he is little-known outside his neighborhood in the 400 block of Independence Avenue S.E. He is a courteous man who could well be from a previous century, but in his utterly shipshape row house, hung with rare nautical gear, including two navigation sextants and a brass binnacle and other items, shines a sense of order and utility and the calm of a good anchorage.

He hates the word “dream” when it is applied to his voyage. “There is no time for dreaming at sea,” he says. “It is hard work.”

Unlike many sailors, he had no seagoing heritage when he began. His father, who first emigrated to the United States from Samos, reflected the island’s agricultural essence, famous for grapes, timber and fertile lands. It is less than a mile from the Turkish mainland.

The Vartzikos family gained citizenship here when the father served in the U.S. Army during World War I, and then returned to Greece, where Nick was born in 1932. Discovering his rights as a citizen, he came to the United States and sought work with the government, starting a 30-year career that ended at the Department of Health and Human Services, supervising contracts.

“I hated my job,” he says. So he welcomed the chance to retire early at 55 in 1987. Thanks to frugality and investments, he was independent. He bought his pleasant row house, for instance, in 1966 for $25,000; it is now worth many hundreds of thousands, and he bought other houses on the Hill as well. But he was a stranger to sailing.

Vartzikos applied himself to the art of sailing with typical diligence. After two smaller boats, he decided that the perfect instrument for his plan was a 38-foot steel boat, the model of which was Bernard Moitessier’s Joshua. That boat won immortal fame for its French owner in 1969. Though leading, Moitessier dropped out, declining the $25,000 prize in the first Golden Globe round-the-world race, declaring that he would keep sailing on.

“I have no desire to return to Europe with all its false gods,” he radioed, a sentence that stunned the sailing world. The boat instantly became sought after by sailors, and 75 copies have been built; Vartzikos located one and fitted it out for voyaging, adding solar panels for electricity, modern electronics and self-steering.

Like Moitessier and his sailing idol, the Argentine Vito Dumas (who sailed the world in 1942), Vartzikos sought a large challenge.
Alone on May 8, 1988, he set off across the Atlantic from the Chesapeake and did not stop again until he tied the boat up at Samos on July 14, having sailed through Gibraltar and through the whole Mediterranean. His book, Alone in the Atlantic, tells the story — gales, whales and close scrapes — in Greek. For 14 years then, he left the steel ketch at Samos, sailing her in the summer and returning to Capitol Hill in the winter, meticulously restoring his houses.

When he returned home in 2002, he was joined by a friend, Maryland sailor Don Kilpatrick, for the ocean trek. He married his wife, Jan Campbell, 13 years ago. She’s a publishing executive and, he says, is ready to start voyaging with him. The ketch waits quietly at dockside in Galesville, Md.

His advice to weekend sailors wearing out their days on shore, thinking of far horizons?

“If you can afford it, go sailing.”

Freeway mural spared: What does it mean?

Thousands see it, as they idly sit in Southeast/Southwest Freeway traffic or whiz home to Maryland on the daily commute: It’s a gleaming dash of color and form on the edge of a playground near the South Capitol Street exit.

The mural sits on the back wall of a building that has been a center of controversy — formerly, art promoter Bill Wooby’s Millennium Art Center on I Street S.W. and, before that, long-mothballed Randall Junior High School. The building now belongs to the Corcoran Gallery of Art and is due for rehabilitation and reuse.

Painted in 2002, the mural juxtaposes an odd set of images — flowers, butterflies, a gargoyle, a large white egret in glowing plumage, and the head of a baby — that some say from a distance bears a remarkable resemblance to former mayor, now councilman, Marion Barry.
The artist who painted the mural, Byron Peck, a well-known local illustrator and muralist with several works on buildings in Northwest Washington, denies the Barry connection. “It was a kind of a fusion of two different visions,” he said last week, “the local neighborhood and the recreation center [a large public swimming pool is nearby] and the river.”

Two other artists, Cheryl Foster and Ivo Kotcher, assisted Peck.

The child holding a butterfly (with disturbingly adult hands), the artist related, represents youth and energy; the gargoyle in the center is inspired by a bas relief on the tunnel carrying tidal water in and out of the Tidal Basin and symbolizes the influence of Washington’s great river. The bird represents the spectacular Great Blue Heron common to the Anacostia and Potomac, like the water lily and the swimming figure.

Peck recalls thinking that the blank brick surface, one of the few at ground level not pierced by windows and doors, would make a perfect canvas. He applied to the D.C. Arts Commission and got a small grant and set to work, unheralded and unannounced.

The mural faced an uncertain future while the Randall campus was the center of a fight among homeless advocates, the Corcoran and Wooby’s plans. Now the Corcoran has pledged to preserve it in place, Peck told The Hill.

METRO

• Barry Watch: Don’t mess with the mayor. Former Marion Barry Campaign Manager Dion Jordan is trying to collect close to $1,500 he says Barry owes him from a brief stint guiding the former mayor’s reelection campaign in Ward 8. A Superior Court judge agreed last Tuesday that the debt was legitimate, but Barry plans legal moves to stave off garnishment of his $92,500 council salary. ...

• D.C. has the big bucks. Not only did the city end the fiscal year with a $230.5 million surplus, according to Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi, but the general fund, which includes escrow funds for bondholder payments and other restricted funds, topped $1.2 billion, the highest total ever. Within that sum is $285.4 million in cash reserve. ...

• To Hillites, it’s the Baltimore-Washington Parkway ramp: the quickest way to Orioles games. But to developers, it’s Washington Gateway, formerly Fort Lincoln, where a $10 million shopping center anchored by the discounter Costco is a-building. There’s to be a Shoppers Food Warehouse and Staples there, too, if letters of intent mean anything, says Washington Business Journal’s Eleni Kretikos. ...

• Eastern Market’s best-known artist, Mike Berman, lives by his skills and his wits — so it was a double tragedy when his car, containing $25,000 worth of his art, was stolen before Christmas. Berman recovered the car with the help of alert D.C. cops — without the art and his vital supplies. Berman is starting over, and his work can be seen on www.his.com/mberman. ...

• New Washington Post rival The Examiner hit the streets (but not us on the Hill — Georgetown’s row-house neighborhoods got home delivery). It’s a lively, crude instrument, chock full of photos, short takes. Managing editor: Nick Horrock, worthy investigative pro, ex the Washington Daily News (RIP) and the Washington Evening Star (RIP). ...

• Mayor Anthony Williams (D) vacillates about running or leaving office after his second term as a supposed decision deadline passed Jan 31. Meanwhile, pretenders to the mayoralty are lining up, led by Councilman Vincent Orange (D-Ward 5), an old-fashioned “get along, go along” D.C. politician poles apart from Williams’s technical/financial style of governing the city.