Emmanuel_Coindre

iafrica.com
June 08 2005
Rowing the Pacific
A Frenchman who has rowed across the Atlantic Ocean four times will this week attempt to become only the second person to cross the Pacific Ocean in a rowing boat, a solitary journey that will take four months. Emmanuel Coindre* (32) expects to row three million times as he travels the 9000km from Choshi outside of Tokyo to San Francisco, where he hopes to arrive at the Golden Gate bridge.
Coindre plans to head onto the ocean between June 10 and 15 and spend 16 to 18 hours a day rowing while on the Pacific, his website said. He will make no stops during the trip and will pack all the food he needs for the four-month trip on his rowboat, which is 6.5m long and 1.5m wide. The boat is equipped with the satellite-based Global Positioning System, a machine to desalinate water and a solar battery. The Frenchman has chosen to stay on a route just above 40 degrees latitude so as to avoid typhoons and other major storms. He is attempting to emulate another Frenchman, Gerard d'Aboville, who was the first to successfully row across the Pacific, taking 134 days to accomplish the feat in 1991.
Editors correction: * - true for the route 'Pacific West - East'. See the statistics for Pacific Ocean