“Perhaps this is the most extreme regatta in the world!” – says Englishman Simon Walker. Well, should you believe him, because the experience of the Walker does not hold: at the time, he was spared the globe from East to West, 17 times crossed the Atlantic, travelled under sail to the Arctic and the Antarctic.
So what Mr. Walker calls “the most extreme regatta”? It turns out that the race Kraken Cup!
In fact, one time we about Kraken Cup already. But it was already long enough, and readers have since become several times more. So sin is not something to repeat.
This race is very young – the first was held in 2015. Until recently, the route she was launched in the town of Lindi in the South of Tanzania, finished on the island of Zanzibar. All distance is approximately 280 nautical miles. Overnight on uninhabited Islands. Exotic! But in the summer of 2020, the organizers expect the distance to increase significantly: from the island of Kilwa in Tanzania to one of the towns in the South of Mozambique. About 800 miles!
But the main exotic is that the participants go to the boats, which are called ngalawa. Local people go to them for many centuries.
Ngalawa hollowed from the trunk of the mango tree. Body length – 5-6 meters. Width – 50 cm, with outriggers – again 5-6 meters (this is manual work, so the boats differ from each other). And Latin triangular sail with an area of 30-40 sq. m.
Russian publications on this adventure under sail are very rare but still exist. Here, for example, in such publications one of the participants described their personal experience:
“The first day we rolled and I lost all my stuff. I had a cage with a chicken, and while the mate swam around trying to collect everything possible, I was trying to hold her above water, her other hand clinging to the slippery algae from the hull of the boat. We chatted to big waves, the forces were on the wane and… Yes, I let go of the cage. Poor Willoughby… when they Reached the shore, that night we hardly slept, the repair of boats. Somewhere at four in the morning raked over the reef and waited for dawn to continue the journey (according to the rules of the regatta sail only in the daytime). Then I thought, “What could be more stupid – we just almost died on this thing, and here we are in the dark then leave it in the ocean.” By noon we were again in trouble – we barely pulled off the outrigger, had to jump in the water and snap it back. At this point, we have already begun to understand something in what I was doing, and managed to get to the first course of the island, where they found and other participants. Judging by their stories, it’s not chase, and tried to survive the boat was sinking, turning, it was falling apart. Until the morning we talked and shared stories and repaired the boats for the night was incredible!”
Now the organizers are accepting applications for the race that will take place in the summer of 2020. Involuntarily thought: maybe worth a try? Where we did not disappear!
Website adventure sailing
exoticextreme
What do you think?