I see he is using a sea anchor of some kind to limit drift during adverse wind conditions.
well as he drifts farther and farther north he is getting farther and farther away from the favorable winds and currents which would take him across the Atlantic. At three weeks into his odyssey he is burning up his provisions which are finite. I know the period two to three months to get across was mentioned by him and unless he is carrying more than an extra month of provisions, at the rate he is making westing he’ll be out of food well before he makes land. In fact, if he ends up too far north, he’ll not even make it across, but wash up somewhere in Europe in the end. Sadly, I expect when he comes to realize there is no chance to get across the Atlantic, he’ll pull the plug and call for a rescue which will bring a very sorry (but not unexpected) end to this farce.
I question if he is even in the barrel.
I also thought of that but unless you wanted to fake your own death, what reason would he have to do that and 72 year old men are not looking to fake their deaths…at least I don’t think they are?
A big sea anchor is absolutely required so the Canary and the North Atlantic Equatorial currents will carry our hero across the Atlantic or rather south of the Sargasso sea to the Antilles.
I wished you were in that little barrel with Ombugge so you could be forced to smell eachother’s stink…
anyway…our wayward mariner might finally have reached the winds and current he was originally hoping for and is now moving quickly towards the SW. The question is if he will run out of food before he reaches where ever he ends up at?
It seems he is doing about 1 knot in almost the right direction. Food? There are plenty fish around. And fresh air.
Hopefully he has means of catching rain water, otherwise he may be smelling more than his own sh*t.
PS> I assume he has enough wine to drink though.
I prefer travelling on real ships - preferably in the Owners cabin - with good food and wine served. Friends of mine have often sailed across the Atlantic in small sail yachts but I haven’t had time for that. I have nothing against somebody using sea currents to drift across the Atlantic. It just takes extra time.
so Wrongway seems to be continuing to make good progress now in the right direction but he is one month into this drift and has a very long way still to go…by my estimate still more than 3 full months ahead still unless his drift rate increases a lot
tomorrow is day 31 of Wrongway’s odyssey and it appears he has slowed down in his drift and turned again to the NW…
reading his online journal, I was shocked to see he actually swims around his egg… obviously wearing a lifeline but still! talk about a horrible feeling if something happened and you watch your only chance to stay alive drift away!
It’s as slow and painful to watch as the US government shutdown (was).
Sir Robin Knox-Johnson used to swim alongside the Suhaili with no lifeline.
Periscope up!
This contraption is by the looks of it not too heavily ballasted. It will become a play ball of the winds but when it rolls it will, like a bath toy, quickly turn upright again. Due to the shape it will always ride beam winds and seas.
I have little faith that, what looks like a plywood hatch and a plastic dome, will be able to withstand the fury of storm driven waves.
The distant traveled at the 29th day is about 700 miles that is 24 miles per day and 1 mile per hour. At that speed it will take about 125 days to make landfall and about 100 days still to go. I suppose that food and water will become a problem. Caught fish probably has to be eaten raw, sushi style, although he has what seems a small pressure cooker on board.
Maybe the pressure cooker is used to cook sticky rice for the Sushi?
But where does he get the seaweed wrappers from??
The crossings have been made in all kinds of strange crafts before.
It appears to be a magnet for adventurers trying to set records, or prove a point.
The most famous of the last is probably Thor Heyerdahl’s RA expeditions in 1969/70:
He wanted to prove that it was possible for people to cross the Atlantic even before the Vikings around 1000 AD
You will have to bring those Nori wrappers with you, they weigh next to nothing or wait until you end up in the Saragossa Sea. Otherwise Sashimi is not so bad.
A solar cooker is nice ashore but on board you have to train it constantly on the sun and that on a rolling barrel. Cardanic suspension might help a bit, but still.
We have here our own Ralph Tuijn who likes to row. He just started his 7th ocean crossing from Portimão, Portugal - not from Las Palmas, that is for pussies - to Cayenne on January 21, a distance of 1742 nm.
On previous expeditions on the Atlantic , Indian and Pacific Oceans Ralph was attacked by sharks and he sat for days in the middle of huge thunderstorms. Collided with a whale and was overrun by a tanker from which he survived miraculously. He has endured hardships like rotting food which he had to compensate by catching fish and sharks. A faulty water maker made sure he had to survive on rainwater. Eighteen times he capsized due to severe storms and waves up to 10 meters high. His limbs became infected giving him blood poisoning.
Normally he rows 16 hours per day but this trip he intends to row 18 hours in total per day and hopes to break the current record which stands at 96 days. He hopes to do it in 50 - 55 days.
When he gets hungry enough to eat a lounging seabird, he’ll use less propane with the pressure cooker…
There will probably be a lot of it on the hull before this trip is over.