You won't get him on a mobile, you won't get him on a landline, you won't find him on the omnipotent Google.com. Designer oilskins? Not him, for anonymity is his second name, writes Lorna Siggins.
Adam Lalich has a refreshing approach to life at a time when "extreme adventure" has become a brand, a marketable commodity targeted at millions of impatient Western consumers with sufficient disposable income. Not for Lalich, the longest, fastest, highest coldest traverse to "immortality". Nor does he need paid guides, or the latest technology, or glossy magazine write-ups to satisfy sponsors for his extraordinary feats.
A newspaper interview proves to be a challenge for both parties, therefore, and this is no calculated modesty. "I guess it's not such a big deal," he shrugs, admitting that he has sailed single-handed to 72 degrees North in his 36-foot boat. The appropriately-named Vamos has been his constant companion for these Arctic exploits, and a familiar sight in Kinvara, Co Galway, where Lalich "hibernates".
Now in his mid-forties, Lalich is from National Geographic territory in Alaska - home, as the journal states, to 13 million acres of mountain, tundra, forests, ice fields and "solitude", now threatened by climate change. He began sailing with his sister when he was eight or nine and went to sea as a king crab fishermen after he left school. The work was, and still is, hard, tough, and unimaginably dangerous. Crews regularly risk going overboard in freezing temperatures or losing limbs while handling large cages on heaving decks.
Sailing might seem like a busman's holiday, but for him it represents escape. One of his first boats was a 25-foot Eric Jr designed by the late US naval architect William Atkin, in which he circumnavigated Alaska. "At that stage I knew I wanted something bigger, something I could stand up in," he says. He had his eye on a vessel designed by the legendary Scandinavian Colin Archer, and found it in Vamos, a New Archer which he bought from a French yachtsman.
Lalich continued fishing and saving, and in 2000 he knew he had enough money put by. He crossed the Atlantic, came to Ireland and sailed from here up to Iceland. It was one of several trips up north, and in 2002 he received an unusual request. He was commissioned to track Keiko, the orca whale best known as star of the Free Willy films.
Ironically, Keiko had been anything but free. Captured off Iceland in 1979, the whale was consigned to captivity in a series of aquaria - latterly in Mexico city - and made his film debut in 1992. Stardom helped to highlight the conditions in which the performing cetacean was being kept, and Warner Brothers was one of three film companies to sponsor the return to his own habitat, with support from the Jean-Micheal Cousteau Institute.
The whale was donated to the Free Willy-Keiko Foundation by the Mexico marine park Reino Aventura, and was initially flown to Oregon and then transported to a sea-pen off the Westmann islands, south of Iceland, in 1996. The initiative was closely supervised, given the concerns about the whale's ability to socialise and feed. During the summer of 2002, he was released altogether, and Lalich took the foundation's scientists on a voyage to observe his movements among pods of wild orcas.
Keiko travelled about 1,000 miles from Iceland to the Norwegian coast, in all, and appeared to be in good condition when he arrived. "We had a satellite tag and could keep a pretty close eye on him, and at first it seemed a bit sad as he wasn't really being accepted by the pod, "Lalich recalls.
"We got to know the orcas pretty well - we even swam with them - and of course the term 'killer' is a misnomer as all they want to do is play," he says. One day the whale vanished from their tracking systems. He turned up later in a Norwegian fjord where he spent some time before passing away from acute pneumonia in December, 2003.
Lalich enjoyed the experience working with the foundation's scientists, but generally he travels alone. "There's always something to be done. I listen to music, work on the boat, and I like to stop off and get to know areas, communities, talk with people, climb a few hills. I get requests, yes - I tell people where I will be roughly and where I am going, but when you are living by tide and weather it often doesn't work out."
Electronics have had a revolutionary impact on life at sea, but Lalich is self-sufficient to the point of relying only on paper charts. He does use satellite navigation, but finds it is not trustworthy in the far north. "The advice I was given was to buy two global positioning system [ GPS] receivers and compare them when things start going funny. Even the compass needle up there is something you can't depend on too much." He has "dreams" rather than "plans", doesn't worry about his pension, knows that somehow he will survive. He keeps a log and takes photographs. "A trip never leaving the farm aboard S/V Vamos" is the title of a CD of photographs he has compiled, named in honour of several friends who are farming back home.
Magical images range from Kinvara to whales tracking Keiko to communities on the Faeroe islands, Greenland and Iceland. Currently he is en route north again, taking his nephew with him as far as Scotland. "I know I will be up in ice this year until about September, and anything can happen in between."
So what does he think of a yachtswoman such as Dame Ellen McArthur, the mighty British sailor who holds the current record for a solo circumnavigation of the globe by sea? "I think she's great, but she's very driven and that's not for me. She's still in her twenties, so what does she look forward to now? Maybe she will find herself in a little boat again some day with a simple sail, and become anonymous for a while."