Читать книгу Little Ship of Fools. Sixteen Rowers, One Improbable Boat, Seven Tumultuous Weeks on the Atlantic онлайн

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If you to go to bigbluerow.com or to rocexpedition.com, you will find photos of the boat and of our training, will get at least sporadic updates from the journey and will be able to follow our progress on a map of the Atlantic, where we will appear as a tiny dot. We will also appear as a tiny dot in real space and time on the actual Atlantic—but let us not get poetic. If all goes well, the dot will reach Barbados sometime around mid-February.

As you know, we will be chasing not just a world record but a fine six-person rowboat, a tri-hull named Hallin Marine (formerly Triton), which will be leaving the Canary Islands a week or more prior to our own departure and may well establish a new record before we get to Barbados. So in effect we will be chasing Hallin’s record, not the existing thirty-three days. A more conventional single-hulled rowboat named Sara G will also be setting out from the African coast at about the time we do. So we are braced for rivalry against muscular British rowers who I am led to believe carry far higher pedigrees than do we. Indeed, our respective crews remind me of those dog teams that compete in the Alaskan Iditarod or Yukon Quest dogsled races across a thousand miles of subarctic wilderness. Some of the teams are highly pedigreed purebreds, or carefully bred crosses, while others (the canine version of the Big Blue crew) are made up of strays from the pound and are apparently the more resilient for it.