GMAT Sentence Correction (SC) | Re: More on Rather than Rather than accept the conventional

However, question might be revised but I am intrigued by one thing. Usually, parallism indicates both verb should be in the same tense but this is not the case with the correct answer choice. I tried to understand it MGAT forum but I could not. Please help me to understand why "accept" is acceptable form along with "Sailed".

He SAILED west rather than ACCEPTED/ACCEPT the conventional wisdom

Transposing the sentence to follow the question's structure:
Rather than ACCEPTED/ACCEPT
...

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