Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Pedaling to Hawaii

Of all the trips into the wild that I find hard to imagine, setting out in a pedal-boat to cross an ocean has to be the at the top of the "Are you CRAZY?" list. And yet it's been done. Successfully. Both the Atlantic and the Pacific.

The author of this book got the idea back in 1991 to circumnavigate the globe using only human power. He enlisted a friend, they scraped up funds and donations to have pedal boat Moksha custom-built, and left Greenwich in July of 1994. Biked to the coast, took the pedal boat across the channel, biked to Portugal, then headed out across the Atlantic. The Atlantic crossing took something like 110 days, October 1994 to February 1995. They used a hand-operated desalination device to get fresh water, and ate lots of freeze-dried food (but were lucky enough to come across a cable boat on Christmas day and have a turkey dinner).

They crossed the US separately on bikes and roller blades. After a long break for repairs, fund raising, and recovering from an accident with a car, they pedaled Moksha from San Francisco to Hilo, Hawaii in 54 days in the fall of 1998. After that, the author dropped out and his friend carried on alone from Hawaii to the Kiribati islands, then with other people by bike, kayak and pedal boat. The book was published in 2006, but according to the Expedition 360 website, the circumnavigation was finally completed in October 2007.

I find the whole idea just incredible. I would have said impossible, but obviously it wasn't. I can't begin to imagine what would drive a person to take on this kind of a task. It was quite an interesting read.