Paddle power

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This article was published 31/08/2019 (2258 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Antonio de la Rosa can cross another item off his bucket list — paddling across the Pacific Ocean.

The endurance athlete from Spain completed an epic 4,749-kilometre voyage from San Francisco to Oahu, Hawaii, last Saturday, in his specially designed standup paddleboard.

When the 50-year-old Spanish adventurer paddled his way into the Waikiki Yacht Club at 8 a.m. in his 7.3-metre, submarine-shaped vessel named the Ocean Defender, he became the first person to cross the ocean as a standup paddleboarder.

“I am feeling so good after 76 days in the middle of the ocean,” de la Rosa told CNN of his solo journey, which he undertook to bring attention to the problem of plastic pollution in the ocean. “This is a record! For me and for everybody.”

There was no escort vessel following him across the ocean, so de la Rosa packed everything he’d need — food, a desalinization system and other necessities — on the craft, a combination paddleboard and small boat.

There were solar panels on board to keep his GPS, communications and other equipment charged, but the vessel didn’t have an engine. “My arms and my legs are my motor,” the athlete chirped, noting his trip was powered by wind, currents and lots of elbow grease.

De la Rosa has paddled his way into excellent company, as we see from today’s waterlogged list of Five Extreme Sailors and their Epic (Albeit Slightly Crazy) Voyages:

 

5) The extreme sailor: Rosalind (Roz) Savage

The epic voyage(s): Conquering three oceans

Anchors away: It seemed Roz Savage had the perfect life — a job as a management consultant in London, England, a red sports car, a husband and a home in the suburbs. But, somehow, it wasn’t enough.

On a train trip in 2000, at the age of 34, she sketched two obituaries — one for the life she was living, and one for the life she wanted. “They were very different, and I realized then I was going to have to make some big changes if I was not going to end up full of regrets,” Savage recalled in an interview with travel website girlabouttheglobe.com. Which explains why she gave up her husband and steady income to set her sights on a rather unique goal — becoming the first woman to row solo across three oceans in a seven-metre rowboat.

“At the time that I decided to row across oceans, I had two main goals. I wanted to test my limits and find out what I was really capable of. And I wanted a platform for my environmental message — I had just ‘got green’ and wanted a way to get people’s attention. Rowing alone across the ocean absolutely met both those criteria,” she told girlabouttheglobe.com.

On March 14, 2006, Savage completed the first leg when she finished the Atlantic Rowing Race as the only solo female competitor, taking 103 days to cross the ocean. She finished despite breaking all four of her oars and having to complete half the crossing with patched-up oars.

On June 3, 2010, after 249 total days at sea, Savage became the first woman to row solo across the Pacific Ocean. At the start of that voyage, her small boat had capsized three times in 24 hours.

On Oct. 4, 2011, despite dangers from pirates and a faulty desalinization machine, she crossed the Indian Ocean in 154 days. Savage now holds four records for ocean rowing, having rowed more than 24,000 kilometres and taken around five million oar strokes.

 

4) The extreme sailor: William Willis

The epic voyage: The “Seven Little Sisters” Expedition

Anchors away: By all accounts, William Willis was an extreme sailor, although the word “eccentric” might be more appropriate.

He became a sailor at age 15, leaving his home in Hamburg, Germany, to sail around Cape Horn. We’re talking about a rootless adventurer, a man who wasn’t trying to prove any scientific theories about human migration, but simply testing his mettle against the sea.

At the age of 61, the American sailor hatched a plan to sail a balsa wood raft solo from Peru to American Samoa. He travelled to Peru and selected seven great balsa tree trunks for the construction of his raft, named “Seven Little Sisters.” His companions on the perilous journey were a parrot and his beloved cat.

“Shortly into his 10,800-kilometre journey across the Pacific, nearly all of Willis’s freshwater supply was contaminated,” the website listverse.com says. “For the majority of his crossing, Willis survived on rainwater, raw flour, condensed milk and small cups of seawater.

During one particularly nasty storm, a large wave tossed a 2.7-metre shark onto the Seven Little Sisters. Willis fought the shark off and eventually pushed it back into the ocean, but the shark severed an artery in Willis’s forearm — which the sailor somehow managed to suture himself.”

He dreaded the thought of losing his feline travel companion. “Which is why each time rough seas threw Willis’s cat overboard, the grizzled old sailor flung himself after it and, without so much as a rope or life preserver, swam against the full force of the Pacific Ocean to rescue his friend,” listverse.com notes.

Amazingly, Willis and his companions and their living-room-sized raft reached American Samoa intact. Willis chronicled the voyage — one of the longest unbroken voyages of its kind ever recorded — in a popular book. For an encore, at age 71, he sailed a raft 17,700 kilometres from South America to Australia.

In 1968, on his third bid to sail a small boat across the Atlantic, he vanished, though his boat was recovered.

 

3) The extreme sailor: John Pollack

The epic voyage: The Cork Boat

Anchors Away: Not many people quit a high-profile job to pursue their childhood dream. But John Pollack is definitely not most people.

“I always loved boats,” Pollack told ABC News in 2008. “I built a boat when I was six years old, and it had a very short maiden voyage — straight down.” But dreamers aren’t daunted easily, so Pollack pressed on. “I decided, OK, the next boat I build has to float,” he told ABC. “And I thought, well, why not build a cork boat? Because you can’t sink (a) cork, how could you sink a lot of corks?”

At the age of 34, he quit a prestigious job as a speechwriter for U.S. president Bill Clinton to chase his dream — building a boat out of wine corks and taking it on an epic journey. “I’m getting burnt out on (Capitol Hill)… and I just thought, I’d like to just take a break and do something fun. Why not build the boat?” Pollack recalled.

He chronicled the journey in the book Cork Boat: A True Story of the Unlikeliest Boat Ever Built. He enlisted more than a hundred volunteers, teamed up with an architect and cajoled everyone from bartenders to White House staff to collect wine corks on his behalf.

Reportedly, most of the corks for the wacky project were supplied by Cork Supply USA.

In the end, Pollack and his pals constructed a “two-ton hippopotamus” — a 22-foot Viking-style longship from more than a 165,000 wine corks, held together entirely by rubber bands. When it was finished in the summer of 2002, the clumsy ship was transported to Portugal — the largest supplier of cork in the world — and the skipper and his mates spent two weeks rowing down the Douro River to the sea. It became a media sensation.

“The whole country started following these crazy Americans, who were on this goofy mission,” Pollack recalled. “When we would walk into any village along the way, people would say ‘Cork boat! Cork boat!’”

 

2) The extreme sailor: Thor Heyerdahl

The epic voyage: The Kon-Tiki Expedition

Anchors Away: He may not be Magellan or even Christopher Columbus, but Thor Heyerdahl remains one of history’s most famous explorers.

In 1937, the newlywed Heyerdahl and his wife travelled to the South Pacific, where he became convinced that people from South America could have settled the Polynesian Island in pre-Columbian times.

He decided to prove, using only materials available at the time, that such a voyage was possible, even if it meant risking his life. He recruited a five-man crew who built a 30-by-15-foot raft made of nine balsa wood logs harvested from the Ecuadorian jungle lashed together with hemp ropes.

The vessel, famously christened Kon-Tiki after the legendary Peruvian sun god who had vanished westward across the sea, was built only with tools available to pre-Columbian South Americans, and an open bamboo cabin with overlapping banana leaves provided the only protection from the elements.

On April 28, 1947, Heyerdahl’s recreation of an ancient raft departed Callao, Peru, with six men and a Spanish-speaking parrot on board. “Borne along by the northeast-east trade winds that billowed the massive square sail bearing the image of the bearded Kon-Tiki, the raft groaned and creaked as it drifted across the vast blue desert of water,” according to history.com.

“All arrived safely — except for the parrot that had vanished during a storm out at sea — after covering 4,300 nautical miles in 101 days, an average speed of 42.5 miles per day. Heyerdahl had proved that an ancient voyage from South America to Polynesia was possible,” history.com notes.

Heyerdahl chronicled the epic voyage in his bestselling 1950 book Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific by Raft, and in an Academy Award-winning documentary the following year. The legendary seafarer led similar expeditions across the Atlantic and Indian oceans in primitive vessels similar to Kon-Tiki, which is now on permanent display in the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, Norway.

 

1) The extreme sailor: Winnipeg’s Don Starkell

The epic voyage: Paddle to the Amazon

Anchors Away: Call us overcome by hometown pride, but the No. 1 adventurer on today’s list is the late, great Winnipegger Don Starkell.

After his death from cancer in 2012 at age 79, Starkell was remembered in the Winnipeg Free Press as “a determined distance paddler who embarked on epic voyages purely for the sake of the challenge.”

A stubborn risk-taker, Winnipeg’s most famous canoeist and kayaker will forever be remembered as the man who paddled 19,490 kilometres from Winnipeg to the mouth of the Amazon River in Brazil with son Dana in tow, braving heavy surf, armed bandits and drug runners along the way.

Starkell reportedly discovered canoeing at age 10 when he found a canoe in the backyard of his newest foster home. “That canoe gave me the first freedom in my life,” he told adventure-journal.com. “From that day on, for as long as he had the strength to hold a paddle, Don Starkell was logging miles,” according to the website.

In 1980, Starkell and his two sons, Dana and Jeff, launched their 6.4-metre canoe from their Winnipeg home and headed for Belém, Brazil, at the mouth of the Amazon. It was a grand adventure, but a harsh one. “The route Starkell had chosen was more than 12,000 miles and passed through 13 countries, each of which posed an array of challenges and natural hazards. Civil wars smouldered in Nicaragua, Guatemala and El Salvador, while Honduras served as a base for U.S.-backed counterinsurgents,” adventure-journal.com noted.

Adds listverse.com: “Hostile wildlife like snakes and sharks were certainly dangerous, but were ultimately the least of Don Starkell’s worries. Nicaraguan rebels, drug runners and Honduran robbers proved far more dangerous to the paddlers.”

In Mexico, son Jeff decided he’d had enough and returned to Winnipeg, while Don and Dana continued south. They reached Belém on May 2, 1982, exactly 23 months after leaving Winnipeg.

In 1986, the names of Don Starkell and son Dana were entered into the Guinness Book of World Records for having completed the longest canoe journey ever. He will also be remembered as the man who paddled 5,120 kilometres across the Canadian Arctic, negotiating ice-choked channels and evading polar bears before getting stranded in the Northwest Passage and losing parts of his fingers to frostbite.

He also left behind a lifetime paddling record of more than 120,000 kilometres, a distance equal to three times the circumference of the planet.

“If you try something that’s never been done before, you can’t lose,” Starkell told the Free Press in 2009, when he was still paddling almost daily. “Even my own kids will say, ‘My dad was sort of weird, but at least he did something.’”

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca