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NZ springboard for rowing record bid |
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07 October 2003 |
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| Unless someone has at last managed to talk him out of it, British rower Jim Shekhdar will soon head out on the ridiculous, magnificent, quite possibly doomed attempt to kayak solo from Bluff to Cape Town, writes The Southland Times in an editorial. | |
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Many of us will hate to see him go, for fear of his wellbeing. He is a
stimulating character and the world is not yet so well-stocked with those
that they have become dispensable.
There are fine reasons for him to pull out. Unassailably good reasons. Reasons to make the bravest adventurer pause, slap his forehead and wonder what the hell he was thinking. Mr Shekhdar has admitted to his own trepidations about the journey but in the end, he is compelled by his own instincts and judgments, leaving the rest of us to marvel, or lament, or both. |
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No one can deny he has the credentials. In 1997 he rowed the Atlantic with a partner and in 2000-01 he made the first unassisted solo row of the Pacific Ocean in 274 days. This 56-year-old has undeniably done enough to have earned his place in the pantheon of great adventurers. This latest undertaking may now earn his place with the dead ones. This isn't any old 15,000km seven-to-12 month ocean paddle. He will confront seas unlike any other in a craft the size of an expansive coffin. Ahead lie hurricanes, seas more vertical than horizontal, the potential attentions of sharks and inattentions of passing tankers, and no doubt excruciating discoveries about the physical weaknesses of the human body. It is not lost on Mr Shekhdar that the previous kayaker to attempt this crossing reached half way and then came down with gangrene. Southland has not lacked for contact with great adventurers, passing through. Curiously, they've quite often been British men past their youth but with more than a little of that Shakleton spirit. Gerry Clark, who as Sir Edmund Hillary gently points out was "a mature 56" at the time, designed and built the small but fabulously sturdy kauri cutter the Totorore and circumnavigated Antarctica. The journey took three and a half years during which the wee boat was almost trapped by pack ice and twice dismasted. Under jury rig it rolled five times in two huge storms. Astonishingly, Clark survived and in subsequent years was a frequent-enough visitor to Bluff as he continued his adventures with trips around the sub-Antarctic Islands. Eventually, in June 1999, the world's worst seas claimed him and his crew, Roger Sale, at South Bay in the Antipodes. Before Clark, southerners marvelled at the slightly befuddled bravery of Harry Mitchell, who three times set out to sail solo around the world. He was also a latecomer to extreme ocean adventure; a 62-year-old Englishman smarting from redundancy, who developed the ardent wish to earn the golden earring, which, by seafaring tradition, can be worn by those who sale around Cape Horn. On his first try, in the BOC Challenge single-handed round-the-world race in 1987, he crashed into the southern coast at Fortrose. The second, he collided with a supertanker in the Atlantic. And the third, in 1995, he disappeared between New Zealand and Cape Horn. While sheer adventurism most certainly compels him, Mr Shekhdar is, to his credit, using his journey to raise funds for causes including a child cancer research fund, a St John-style British emergency service, and a facial surgery research fund. At the heart of the adventurous spirit, surely, is the desire to seize life. Sometimes that does mean imperilling it. Sometimes it means turning away from peril. Each of us makes our own decision. |
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