Row, row, row your boat, TCP/IP...
Bon voyage and safe travel, Oliver Hicks! Afloat on a flying carrot in the company of virgins, the... *cough* okay, let's try that again. Oliver Hicks, the 26-year-old rower who was the first man to solo-row eastbound across the north Atlantic, has set off on an attempt to be the first man to circle the globe rowing alone. And technology is there.
Hicks' attempt is sponsored by Virgin, home of Richard Branson, who knows a few things about circling the globe in unusual conveyances. Mr. Hicks, who holds the record for slowest transatlantic crossing (124 days), expects to spent 18-22 months in his attempt, with an overwintering period of a few months factored in. The craft involved is dubbed the Flying Carrot. To keep things interesting, he's choosing an extremely southern route -- the circumpolar current, at around 50 degrees south. There are no significant landmasses at that latitude, so the waves can get up to 50 feet.
Readers who get cranky when their cell phone drops its signal for more than 60 seconds will be relieved to hear that Hicks is well-wired aboard the Flying Carrot. He's carrying a laptop and three satellite phones, one of which is built into the ship itself; from those, he'll keep in touch with the outside world, including his blog and his YouTube channel. The laptop's storing its data mainly in the cloud, lest the gear somehow encounter water.
He has three 80GB iPods.
He also has a GPS on board, allowing even deskbound creatures such as us to track his progress thanks to Google Earth, which has built his trip into a new Google Earth layer looking at ocean expeditions. It adds an interesting degree of understanding to his daily blog report, where this morning he reports frustration with certain aspects of his progress so far and concern about "a biig prooblem with icebergs after NZ.... Would have expected to pass nz in about a month -- not looking good!"
These expeditions are often connected to a cause for which they're designed to raise awareness. The Virgin Global Row is in support of Hope & Homes for Children, a charity for orphaned, abandoned, or otherwise vulnerable kids.