Broke and alone on a stormy sea, his dream comes true.

Be careful of what you dream of . . . it might come true.

Tim Kent dreamed of sailing around the world. Now, barring something unforeseen when this was written on the eve of the start of the Around Alone Race, he is in the Bay of Biscay, a place he fears, likely sailing into the misery for which that cranky region of the Atlantic Ocean is infamous, bound for more misery in the storms of the far southern latitudes, alone in an over-canvassed 50-foot boat.

By what perverse magic did this dangerous dream come true? As Tim tells it, it was set in motion in, of all unlikely places, the comfy surroundings of a Toys for Tots Christmas party at the Milwaukee Yacht Club in December 2000. A group of members were kicking around the conversation-making question, "What would you do if you could do anything you wanted?" Tim answered by outlining his dream of sailing in the wakes of the great circumnavigators he had read about since childhood and race singlehanded around the world. The next morning a friend who had been there presented him with a detailed project management plan for the 2002 Around Alone Race. A handwritten note on the last page challenged: "OK, it's your call."

You know what call he made. Three weeks later he was on San Francisco Bay on the deck of an Open 50, a boat designed for singlehanded ocean racing and offered for sale at a distressed price. A little more than a year and a half later, on September 15, 2002, he and the boat were on the Around Alone starting line in New York harbor.

People have said this about Tim Kent trying to live his dream: He's in over his head. He doesn't have enough experience. He doesn't have the support needed to keep his boat going through five grueling legs. He doesn't have enough money.

To which, Tim says: It's all true.

He facetiously calls his campaign "Everyman Does Around Alone." He claims, "I'm just a Wednesday night PHRF racer-everybody in this race has more experience than me." He says his is the only completely unsponsored entry of the 14 in the race, "a distinction I would prefer not to have." Because of that distinction, he's broke-"This race has literally burned through everything I have, my 401(k), my savings account, everything." Asked what he fears about the race, he says, "Just about everything, starting with the Bay of Biscay in October. If it's blowing a gale on the nose there, I'm going to turn right and sail around it."

Tim, who is 50 and sports a white beard that might be described as prematurely salty, is glib, as a former college textbook salesman should be, and just might be overselling his underdog status a bit. An offshore sailor for years, he and his wife and their crew successfully raced a custom C&C 41 on Lakes Huron and Michigan. Singlehanded, he won his class in the Chicago to Mackinac solo race. He has sailed his Open 50 thousands of miles with a crew and without, including a 2,450-mile transatlantic sail to Azores as his solo passage to qualify for the Around Alone. This Everyman is no slouch as a sailor, but then, his resume does not yet include the Southern Ocean or, for that matter, the Bay of Biscay.

Both Tim and his doubters, however, are right about his dream's fragile financial condition. For a perspective, consider Brad Van Liew, Around Alone media darling and anointed favorite to win the Open 50 class.Van Liew, a 34-year-old Californian, sailed in the last Around Alone and did well enough to make a career of being a professional singlehanded ocean racer. Months before the start of this Around Alone, he won the holy grail of around-the-world racing by landing a big-name, big-bucks sponsor, the clothing marketer Tommy Hilfiger. He has $2 million to spend on the race and six paid professionals working full time to keep his French canting-keel 50 Freedom America going. The boat was christened by Lauren Bush, who models Hilfiger clothing and has an uncle living in the White House.

While Brad spends Tommy's money, Tim spends his own, plus some that was borrowed or contributed. He's gone through half a million dollars and needs more. He can't afford a shore crew. He hopes that a young Frenchman who helped him prepare the boat will find a way to get to some of the stopovers to lend a hand. He started the race with the boat's original, four-year-old, too-full-cut mainsail and no prospects of getting a better one. He named his boat Everest Horizontal, but fund-raising has been like Everest vertical without oxygen.

Still, though he's short on money, he certainly isn't short on support. He didn't find a sponsor in the usual sense, but in another sense he has scores of them, people who made cash donations (by the start of the race, the total of small individual and corporate contributions had reached $40,000), or donated some of their frequent flyer miles to help his daughters Whitney, 9, and Alison, 8, visit him at stopovers, or volunteered to help get the boat ready in the weeks leading up to the start.

Most of that support came from fellow fresh-water sailors. A number of them, including seven of Tim's mates from the Great Lakes Singlehanded Society, paid their own way to Newport, Rhode Island, to work on the boat. Fellow singlehanders loaned him life rafts, an immersion suit and an EPIRB. The owner of a Santa Cruz 70-definitely not a singlehander, he sails with a crew of 16-donated an asymmetric spinnaker, which happens to fit the Open 50 perfectly.

Tim has something else going for him besides plenty of friends-a good boat. Jim Antrim designed it for the 1999 Vendée Globe singlehanded, nonstop around-the-world race. The owner backed out, so the boat has never had a chance to show her stuff. But Tim and others who have sailed it say the stuff is pretty good. Everest, though no slowpoke with her typical oversized Open Class sailplan, isn't likely to be as fast as the lighter, wider Finot 50 Van Liew is sailing, but she's probably tougher. "This boat was built to finish the race," Tim says. And designed to take care of her one-person captain and crew, with an unusual cone-shaped doghouse to give shelter from the storm.

Dreams end, of course, and the happy ending Tim has in mind is surviving to the finish line. "If I can just do that, and if everyone who has helped me can get something positive from the experience, then I'll feel completely successful."

Tim's story-Baby Boomer sails around the world-is an easy target for suggestions that it's a male menopause thing or a dilettante's quest to harvest bragging fodder. If you're thinking that, forget it. The challenges of this race are so fierce they disqualify anyone who isn't doing it for deeper reasons. You can call him a dreamer, but more than that, he is simply a brave man.

A few days before the start, he told me, "I would be thrilled beyond belief to sail into Newport next April."

The race ends there. May the dream endure long enough to end there too.

To keep up with Tim's progress, you can check his Web site- www.everesthorizontal.com -and read the reports he will be sending to SAILING during each leg of the race.