09/06/2007

Abora Abandoned

Reed Boat Expedition Gives Up in the Atlantic Ocean

The crew of the Abora III had hoped to sail the reed boat across the entire Atlantic Ocean from west to east. But on Wednesday, with the weather uncooperative and the boat falling apart, they gave up.

Even before he set sail from New York, Dominique Görlitz's plan seemed almost negligently ambitious. He and his crew of 11 wanted to sail across the Atlantic Ocean in a boat made entirely of reeds to prove that trans-Atlantic trade was possible as long as 14,000 years ago.

Nature did what she could to make the crossing more challenging than even Görlitz thought it would be. A long period of no wind was followed by two storms in rapid succession. Damage to the Abora III was severe, and on Wednesday, after having sailed 1,489 kilometers from their starting point, the expedition was still some 900 kilometers off the Azores Islands, located well off the coast of Portugal in the middle of the Atlantic. They decided to give up.

"We have decided to transfer to our escort boat," Görlitz, originally from Chemnitz in Eastern Germany, told the Süddeutsche Zeitung by satellite telephone on Wednesday. "One just has to know when it's over."

Aside from sailing in a boat made completely out of grass -- employing a design used by Bolivian Indians on Lake Titicaca -- the expedition ran into a number of weather-related difficulties. Early in the voyage, the boat's leeboard -- which helps maintain direction when tacking into the wind -- broke. Then after one of the storms, the boat's stern had to be repaired -- and the cost of significantly shortening the 12.5-meter-long (41 feet) boat. At that point it became clear that the next storm would be the end of the trip. With a large low-pressure zone now approaching, Görlitz decided enough was enough.

The former biology teacher had been hoping to follow in the tracks of Thor Heyerdahl, who sailed in the balsa-wood raft Kon Tiki 4,300 miles across the South Pacific in 1947. Heyerdahl wanted to prove that people from Polynesia could have settled the west coast of South America; Görlitz was attempting to demonstrate that trans-Atlantic trade had been possible many thousands of years earlier than presumed.

Prior to the trip, Görlitz cited to SPIEGEL ONLINE the fact that tobacco traces had been found in Egyptian tombs -- plants indigenous to the New World -- and said that 14,000-year-old cave drawings showed knowledge of Atlantic ocean currents.

And the mission did accomplish one important item on Görlitz's checklist: It showed that even a clumsy reed boat like the 12-ton Abora III could tack into the wind, an important maneuver if traders from Europe hoped to make it back home.

Görlitz and his crew, for their part, decided that if they wanted to make it back home, abandoning ship was the only option. On Thursday they were planning on completing the transfer of as much of their equipment as possible from the Abora III for a possible exhibition later. As for the reed boat itself, the crew is going to leave it to bob around the Atlantic until it goes under -- with a radar reflector to warn approaching ships of its presence.

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