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Rowing the Pond Again
Gudlyf writes "Anne Quéméré, a French woman who had previously rowed across the Atlantic Ocean from Spain to the West Indian island of Guadeloupe, is currently on her way to doing it again, only this time in the opposite direction. This season's challenge will take Anne 2700 nautical miles, from Chatham, Cape Cod (USA) to Brittany (France), her native land. She hopes to make it in less than 90 days. Is it just me, or does the giant fish on her boat scream 'shark bait' to you?"
Did this woman give any thought to her daughter? A man was killed doing this in 2000, what if the same happens to her? What will her daughter think when she gets older? "My mom died trying to row a boat painted like shark bait across the Atlantic Ocean." I do give her snaps for doing something I could never do, but she should be thinking of her daughter's future without her mom.
As a computer, I am amused by the faith you have in technology.
Plus, there's all sorts of technology involved -- GPS, satellite phone, and the materials and construction of the boat itself.
But what it really comes down to is clearly illustrated in this bit from the article:Now if that's not geeky, I dunno what is.
She's navigating mainly by GPS
She has a custom made boat (physics, specialized transportation design)
She expects to lose 30 pounds (lots of nerds need to lose weight / Physical effects of long term physical stress is a good topic of scientific discussion)
Quit flapping your bitching hole.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
How does she sleep?
Where does she keep her food? (90 days of food in this tiny canoe?)
What if there is a storm? (Good weather guaranteed? A ship following her just in case?)
on the wrong day, just getting out of Chatham could be the worst part of the trip. Weatherwise, that is - and the bars (the ones in the water, that is - though around town there' s a bumper sticker that reads "Chatham - a quaint drinking village with a fishing problem.")
Fog blows up over the barrier beach outside of Stage Harbor so thick and fast you'd swear there's a forest fire raging on the other side of the dune - and crossing Stage Harbor on a busy day with a sea kayak is like crossing I-95 on foot in rush hour.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Really need to mention Raphaela Legouvella here as she recently arived in Tahiti on a windsufer. She already crossed the atlantic back in 2000. http://www.raphaela-legouvello.com/ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3236899.st m
As to whether this should be on /. windsurfing seems a more apropriate geek sport to me than rowing (obvoulsy I'm biased on this). Hi tech construction, always pushing the speed records, and it's 95% technique and only 5% fitness.
Her windsurfer looks biger than your average sailing boat but it was built with the help of the european space agency.
Offtopic or Interesting? You decide... :-)
Knos: Brittany has a specific language which is in most part unrelated to french.
I know this because my uncle, who is a Welsh speaker, struck up a conversation with what he thought was a fellow Welshman in Brittany. Only half an hour into chatting (and, to be fair, drinking), did he click that the gentleman was in fact a local.
Oh, and interesting fact number two: Brittany is the reason why the largest UK island is called Great Britain- because there is a Little Britain (Brittany) in France. At one point a line of regional kings [1] claimed soverignty over all the Britons (Britons being the Gaelic-speaking peoples of France, Ireland and the UK).
[1] You have to remember that kings were little more than tribal leaders until recent centuries. The word "king" conjures up images of gold and palaces, when in fact for most of Northern European history, kings were the ones who had slightly larger mud huts and slightly warmer animal furs.
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
People admire her because it is an amazing feat of human stamina. 'Stunts' like this show us that as humans, we can accomplish things thought to be impossible, or beyond our ability to endure. That is what makes it admirable, not the fact she isn't hurting anyone and doing this for herself. It helps inspire us to push the limits, do things that have never been done before and as a result advance ourselves as a species. Just because she has chosen to accomplish a physical feat instead of a mental innovation, does not make it any less of an accomplishment than it is. We do still live in a physical world, and physical ability is still necessary for our survival. We have not yet advanced so far that we can live by brains alone, though many of us do.
This is not a sig.