Cross an ocean in a dinghy?

Well, it seems unlikely that there's another motorbike riding West Australian with the same style and the same love for insulting people (telling others with more experience that they lack confidence and should do things differently, complaining of poor workmanship that wasn't, saying that your gear may be wrong when it probably wasn't, telling others what they could do despite the fact they've been in the sport longer, etc).

Maybe you could modify your style and stop slagging off people who know more than you do about the subject at hand.

 

My humble apologies Sir...

 

Casually reading a book: Buckley,The Right Word.....Some of you will know William F.Buckley, writer, editor, author, as an habitual user of obscure words. (Buckley is/was also an intrepid sailor and teacher of celestial navigation in exchange for large sums of money)

While reading the book, I ran across the word; energumen. A noun. One who is posessed by a demon, also, one who is fanatical about an idea without regard to truth or practicality. Where would I use such a word?, I asked myself. Oh, Yeah! . Here is my chance........The boat forum.......

I propose that we surreptitiously include this nifty, but obscure, word into our forum vocabulary. Do you think that we sometimes see cases in which the term would be applicable? The accused might never know the meaning
but we will.

 

Subtle.

 

It is used a lot in French. it means slightly of the roof But can be of also a person who achieve a great thing thru unchartered path.
It is quite gentil, also at school, when someone come with a strange clothes.
It is a nice way to descrive even your own child.
In Engligh

It is more harsh more mean. Sad, it as a nice sound: Energumen
I like the sound of words, sometime they are right in target, sometime complitly off.
I think I can descrive myself an energumen. But no, I am not possessed by the demon, well perhaps sometime, who knows
Daniel

 

Idiot

I have been sailing for just 7 years and owned just 2 boats and allthough i also have the dream to cross oceans and see new land, i woulden´t dare anything near what you describe.
I have sailed the North Sea in a storm (...and it is not for fun!) i have had my boat half full of water with 600 feet under the keel...and it is no fun either.
To plan atrip around the world is one thing but to talk about it as if it was the easiest thing in the world, right after stating that you have NO sailing experience and no knowladge of nor weather or seas, rigging or even commen safety is just plain stupid.
I have built a stich and glue boat out of plywood and glassed it and sailed it and it was 4 days and 150 USD under way. It sailed well and it was fun. To build a boat to go around the world, you can not rely on half-whit drawings from a cracker-jack box, you must get the REAL plans and build the REAL boat...and it won´t be done for a few thousand dollars or in 6 month while trying to obtain a few skills on the local lake or river....IDIOT!

You are a dreamer and you proberbly will be untill you die.

This thread is quite old, so you have proberbly drowned by now if you ahev put your money where your mouth was

 

It can be done, after all it has been done before .
He will need a good design to build, not to hard to get. Then he will have to prepare himself .
Its all up to him , as it should be.

 

Its important to dream, dreams fuel our ambitions and endeavors, life without dreams would be not worth living. Those who air their dreams in public often expose themselves to ridicule, but every now and again someone makes their dream into reality. Its those few successes that make our own dreams feel as though they might one day be possible, and when the days work is just the same as so many that have gone before, and there is little chance of a change in the future, its dreams that keep us going.

Remembering that, take a long step forward to a time about 18months from now. A good friend of mine has taken my SCAMP design, is building one for a special solo expedition that will involve over 2000 miles of open and extreme coastal waters. As the guy who designed the boat I'm torn between heart in mouth fervent hope that the voyage goes as planned, and a wish that it was me that was going to be doing it.
My friend will be writing about the adventure, you'll know it when you see it, I wont be involved beyond the design and some discussions about changes to the boat but this summer I'll be cruising a SCAMP in waters many thousands of miles from where I usually sail and you can bet that as I round a headland that I've never seen before I'll be imagining what it would be like to be with my friend on his much more ambitious adventure. His dreams will be adding to my enjoyment of my much smaller adventure.

Its been interesting watching this thread, and while I expect that the originator did not get as far as the edge of the water, watching the reactions from both supporters and detractors suggests to me that there are still those who dare to dream, as well as those who cannot admit that they cant.

John Welsford

 

Excellent reply, I whole heartily agree. If we are afraid of risk we should just sit on the porch and exchange stories of those that took the risk. Of course it's called risk for a reason, not everyone comes back.

 

The real problem is load carrying capacity. Every time you add stores enough to provide for a voyage of an expected length, you slow the boat down which means more stores, which slows the boat down, which means-----. You get the picture?
A very small boat has very limited stores carrying capacity if those stores are not to seriously degrade the boats sailing ability, and even with modern aids such as watermakers and dehydrated foods there is still a mimimum requirement per day if some semblance of good health is to be maintained.
Given that, planning a circumnavigation in a small boat becomes an issue of coast or island hopping to keep the legs short enough, and sadly that means that some of the optimum routes are in areas of the world where political instability and criminal activity makes them very risky. That plus its difficult to plan for seasonal winds and weather patterns when short range per "hop" makes it difficult to be in the right place at the right time to take advantage of seasonal winds or to avoid the storm seasons.

So the chain of connection between the risk, and the real cause of the risk, are a lot like the old saw about "for the lack of a nail the kingdom was lost".
Short range and slow speed means much fewer options in course and route, and sometimes the options that are left are not the attractive ones.

John Welsford

 

You probably can get more attention if you swim and you will set a more significant record.

 

Walking works even better.

 

Someone tried that, bit polyurethane foam floats and paddles that resembled ski poles with blades. I gather he got far enough out to not be able to swim back and had to be picked up, but you have to give him marks for actually getting that far.

But the motivation behind these small boat adventures can differ greatly, some want to set records, and thats not something that I'm into either for myself or in support of others. Some though see going very small as the only way that they can do it, generally for financial reasons.
The truth for the latter is that there are real bargains in the way of second hand boats out there and if you were pragmatic rather than romantic you'd hunt for something that would suit and tidy it up enough to cope with the voyage in mind.
But there are so many books in our small boat voyaging library about boats that were built by determined people with no money and only beginner skills, then sailed off to paradise that its become the definition for achievable.

I enjoy working over the constraints and limitations inherent in this genre, and have had several different ones built, but you wont see me anywhere near a 6 footer, or even an 8 footer. I think that 10 ft could be made to work, but the margin for anything going not to plan is so small that I prefer to have more to work with. 12 ft though, thats close to twice the nett payload ( after crew and safety gear) of the 10 footer, the reason being that other than the boat itself the variable is the consumables, not the crew weight which is the same for both.

When someone comes up with a way of scaling down the person as well as the boat, then the very small boats might work.
John Welsford.

 

I am reminded of an old WWII story - the one where they started surveying the shrapnel damage on English bombers. They wanted to see if there was some statistically high location(s) of damage that could be usefully armour plated.

They stopped the survey when some-one remarked "Of course you realise you can only survey the bombers that made it back !"

Adventures are like that. People only read and marvel at the people who make it - the ones who don't rarely write about their failures ( especially those that don't survive )

Years ago, I was talking with a nice chap who built a 40 foot yacht in melbourne, australia with 4 of his best friends, to sail around the world. They spent several years and all their savings on the project. Finally they set off from Williamstown on the round the world voyage, and got into a severe squall in the middle of the harbour. In the ruckus, one of the chaps broke his leg, so they could only sail to the other side of the harbour, and get him to hospital. He took many weeks to heal, and in the meantime, one of the other guys got a job, another one proposed to his girlfriend, so by the time the 1st guy got out of hospital, there was no crew. They sold the boat shortly afterwards.

Someone ought to assemble a book of epic failures to put a bit of reality into the dreaming public.

 

Here is a good (bad?) example. The made it 275 miles before the CG had to rescue them.

http://www.equipped.com/0698rescue.htm