Greta Thunberg continues to set the bar high when it comes to rethinking the way we travel. The young environmental activist has refused to fly to the up and coming climate conference in Madrid, setting sail from America yesterday.
Via email (lightly edited);
I’m not wishing them any ill luck but I’ve made two trips from Sidney to Glacier Bay by slow boat. It can get real nasty out there and there’s a good reason why real sailors don’t cross the North Atlantic at the end of November. The Met forecast for that area really sucks – that big red blob is every bit as nasty as it looks.
She’s onboard Lavagabonde. Its crewed by a husband and wife who are internet darlings with 4 years of ocean passage “experience”. Their Facebook page is a hoot. There’s 4 adults plus Greta and their 11 month old baby on this publicity stunt. That’s the two principals on Lavag plus Greta’s dad plus one woman who may actually have some real blue water experience. They left New York (?) on Thursday.
If you look closely you can see some disagreement about the course in the early going. This is obviously just a WAG but it looks to me as though they chickened out and followed the coast so they could duck back in if it got too nasty. Then whatever happened early Saturday in the dark and they abruptly turned through 100+ degrees to head where they want to go. That’s a 3 week crossing in a capable boat and there’s some dispute whether this is the right boat. The heroes were given the boat as a publicity stunt by the mfr. They’re not going to want to see it go down and I’d be willing to bet there’s a chase vessel somewhere nearby.
I’ve never done this kind of a passage but I have some experience with bad conditions and long (18 hour) passages. Even the most capable sailors get seasick and it can completely debilitate you. You can’t think straight and you just want to curl up in a ball. My experience is on power boats where you don’t have to manage sails and move around on slippery decks with big things banging at your head in the wind. On a power boat when it gets ugly you close the doors, turn up the heat, turn on the autopilot and slow down. If you look at the Met forecast they’ve got 30+ foot stuff ahead of them and that means that the average height of the largest 1/3 of the waves are over 30 feet. Individual waves could be more than twice that and they’re short period waves which are the absolute worst. Long rollers can be huge and not bother you but short square shit is just plain nasty.
That big red ball is forecast to move slowly SE before turning NE. Right now its about where George Clooney went down in The Perfect Storm.
11 days until the UN conference, and they’re still not east of Newfoundland, and they’ve moved east 21 degrees since departure. 28 more degrees would get them to the Azores. I don’t think she’ll be there on time.
BTW – Are we supposed to be impressed with how travel should be in this brave new world she wants?