Posted on 10/17/2015 11:47:33 AM PDT by RoosterRedux
Some time in December, Ben Hooper will step on to a beach in Dakar, Senegal, and plunge into the warm blue waters of the Atlantic. He will not stop swimming until he hits Natal in Brazil. The distance is 1,763 miles.
But that’s only if he goes in a straight line. And swimming across the Atlantic in a straight line is a bad idea: “The currents in the centre are so strong, I’d never get there. It’s an absolute car wreck in the centre. Great for rowers, great for sailors, horrible for swimmers,” he says.
Instead he will go in a strange L-shape, heading south until he crosses the Equator before swimming back to the coast of Brazil. In all, if all goes to plan, it will take about 120 days: Hooper, a former policeman from Cheltenham, will swim for about eight or nine hours every day for four months. “I will be staring at a blue wall. There might be some marine life, there might be sharks, dolphins, cargo containers, some garbage. But mostly just a blue wall.”
If you thought this was an impossible challenge, you’d be right: 4,100 people have climbed Everest, 1,340 have swum the Channel, and 12 men have walked on the moon. No one has swum the full distance of the Atlantic.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Seems silly to me. But he’s not hurting anyone.
Farewell and adieu, you fair Spanish Ladies.....
I see a follow up story coming....
Oh, I think he might.
Too bad his (likely) very distant relative, Douglas Hooper, aka Ibrahim, could not join him in his swim attempt. It would be great publicity for mohamedanism and to overcome the ‘bad reputation’ of sharks.
The guy’s name is, “Hooper,”...same as Richard Dreyfuss’s character in, “Jaws.”
I predict a rescue call less than 100 miles offshore. The things people do to become famous, it’s bizarre.
Ripley’s “Believe It Or Not” had about a guy who rowed across the Atlantic from the US to Europe (an immigrant who wanted to go back for a visit).
He’s gonna need a lot of Red Bull and plenty of 5 Hour Energy if he swims 1700+ miles.
hes coming out of the water for naps I Trust??
I wonder what sort of digs the main support vessel boasts?
so wheres the challenge in that??
If he doesn’t have a raft to get into when he’s not swimming, and a few people in an escort boat to provide food, shelter and fresh drinking water, he will be fish food in a couple of days-people like him need a job or hobby that keeps them too busy to allow their imagination to run in dangerous directions...
That’s a long way to use a human body to troll for sharks.
Uh, algore on his way to the climate differentiational summit in gay paris? To avoid that yucky carbon stuff of course. :>}
It's all a very nice story and certainly an achievement of durance. But "swimming across the Atlantic?" Not quite. I walk 5 miles a day and so about every 600 days, I technically walk the distance from New York to Los Angeles. But it is not correct to say that I walked coast to coast. When somebody says they are swimming across the Atlantic, I'm expecting that they will be in the water the entire time. I realize that's not physically possible which is why truly swimming the Atlantic will never be done.
Check out the source for all that data.
Well, there is supposedly going to be two “shark safety experts” on the trip as well. Is that anything like “gun safety experts” like the lyin’ king or hildebeast or margabby kelly-giffords or shannon t watts?
Here. Hold my hook.
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