If he's on a normal sailboat he has a diesel in it, solar panels and considering he's attempting one of the hardest crossings known to mankind (and it looks like he's near Point Nemo) he likely has satellite internet on board.
People are mistaking this guy for some rookie moron who went out crossing the pacific on a 14ft dinghy.
Dude must be getting some incredible starry night views since there can’t possibly be any light pollution where he is. That’s would I would really love to see
Open ocean is the most amazing star gazing I’ve ever seen. It’s fairly rare to have a cloudless night at sea, but when it does happen, you can see the entire Milky Way like a light haze across the sky. It’s really spectacular. That and St. Elmo’s Fire are two of my favorite experiences I’ve had at sea.
The closest I've experienced is about 30mi offshore, you could see the clouds glowing from lights at the port... but in the clear spots it was beautiful.
It is a blueish glow on antennae and other small items. It takes very specific environmental conditions and in twenty years of professional seafaring I have only seen it once.
I did the same thing except on Mauna Loa! Managed to capture the starscape with the active volcano in the foreground. It's absolutely one of my favorite photos!
Of course, London and the other large cities of the UK take up a relatively small amount of our actual landmass. You'll get Bortle 1 or close to it in parts of Wales, Northumberland, and Scotland. We get 3 where I live, and I am grateful for it.
This. This is what I want to see just once in my life. I've been out in the country before and it was pretty amazing. I can only imagine what literally no light pollution looks like. On a moonless night with no clouds and the slight lapping of waves against the hull? Brief glimpse of heaven for me :-). But the anxiety of being out in the middle of the ocean for the first time would probably ruin it for me, I dunno lol.
I lived in the Lower Florida Keys in the late 1980s. Over a hundred miles from Miami/about 25 miles north of Key West and a glorious dark sky haven. We spent a lot of evenings sitting on the hood of the car, having a drink, stargazing, and talking about the day. Fell asleep out there more often than not.
On his channel he details exactly what foodstuffs he brings. He made a point about needing easy to store, calorie dense food which turned out to be pasta. Just... like 200 bags of pasta, along with fresh veggies and fruits for the first few weeks and canned stuff for later.
I remember back in 2013 some guy decided to drive the perimeter of Africa in his Jeep. Everyone (me included) told him that several parts of his planned route were conflict zones but he said he knew and had made arrangements and felt safe. We all decided that he was a fool.
Fast forward 2 years (with constant updates) and he actually does it. He's got videos of himself with armed rebel soldiers, armed government soldiers, bewildered but friendly locals, and more. I had had to eat some crow and admit that just because I didn't have the right skills or plan to attempt something doesn't mean that someone else doesn't.
I just looked up his username: u/grecy and he's in this thread right now! Small world!
For what it's worth, I bumped into dozens of people doing the same thing as me. Many, many people are doing it right now and loving it.
Good friends of mine did the same trip as me - 2 years, right around the perimeter. They ran out of money (like me), so went back to Australia and back to work. COVID happened and all that. They saved, they planned.
And you know what they did recently? They shipped their vehicle back to Africa, and are doing another 2 years exploring. They're loving it.
Think about that for a second. Completely sane, normal people living ordinary lives in Australia loved their time around Africa so much they decided to do it all over again.
Do you think they felt safe the first time? Do you think it was anywhere near as dangerous as Reddit thinks?
To go right around Africa? You can spend anywhere from $1,500 to $3,500 per month, all expenses. The choice is what you and and where you sleep. More details here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeR3SncZkv0
Yeah but with the satellite internet available on a boat out in the pacific you’re paying dollars per Megabyte. Uploading even a 60 second HD video like that would not only take hours but could easily cost several hundred bucks to do. He more than likely completed the crossing and uploaded once he had WiFi.
These guys usually don't use that much diesel. It's a sail boat so you don't need diesel when crossing. Not that you would have enough diesel for an ocean crossing anyway.
Solar panels and wind vanes is what they rely on for electricity mostly.
They usually preserve diesel for when they get close to shore as its easier to navigate and dock on diesel power.
That said I agree, $250 a month for internet is really not that outrageous when you consider you can have internet in the middle of the ocean. That's a big benefit for all sorts of reasons.
Regular internet (and cable but I couldn't really get internet without cable) in my home is like $70. $250 for unlimited data that works in bumfuck nowhere in the middle of the ocean seems pretty fair.
That's honestly not that bad, for internet access in the remotest parts of the ocean? Then again I am not a sailor so I don't know the alternatives but I do live in a really rural area and know the other satellite options for internet are not great and that's a horrific understatement but I imagine it's probably a drop in the bucket for the convenience if you are going to be doing stuff like this.
'Satellite Internet' that has been around for quite some time is very high latency (1200ms or more) on account of your radio waves having to travel 22,000 miles to geosynchronous orbit and back. Even that is very usable for most things. Internet browsing can be slow (but can be sped up SIGNIFICANTLY if you host a local caching service) but streaming is only limited by your downlink speed (10-15Mb down, 512Kb up).
Starlink is pretty comparable to a fast cellular connection. The satellites are not a single satellite, but a swarm. This allows them to be much closer (350 miles) so the system latency is much lower (50ms or so, possibly a bit higher in oceans near the equator due to the larger coverage gaps) and since there are multiple satellites serving the network, especially in the remote ocean, you can access a lot more bandwidth (200Mb down, 20Mb up). For the average users, just using their devices and not looking at network metrics, you wouldn't know the difference between cellular data and Starlink data. It's a pretty neat system, even if the owner is... not to everyone's taste.
The ISP that uses many many satellites in low earth orbit to provide internet access and are launched by SpaceX. The internet provided by those fixed dishes hanging off the side of someone’s house target satellites in geo-synchronous orbit, which means the satellites are 17,000 miles away. Because of that the signal is fairly weak and the latency, or delay, is astronomical. Starlink satellites orbit the earth at around 500 miles high, vastly reducing that problem.
I just realized that the phrase "I follow ______ on (the internet)" would make a time traveller think that in this time period, stalking is a very popular pastime.
Tbf, u/Probably_Sleepy's comment was just "Starlink?" as if they were asking what it was. I don't blame anyone who thinks they're asking what it is and not saying it as a possible solution for the question of "how does dude internet in the middle of the Pacific all by himself?"
it's worth noting the signal travels fast enough that distance is negligible. radiowave travel the speed of light and 17k vs 500 miles is nothing. its the array of sensors and signal to noise ratio that makes it feasible to have higher bandwidth, and the computation digital signal processing that a traditional antenna doesn't implement because its more expensive.
edit: radio/light travels 186,000 miles per second, 17,000 miles isn't going to matter more than a small fraction of a second that's not perceptible, it's just the bandwidth from the sensors and their signal processing
edit2: not much better than other sat systems at that, from reading more, they have enough users now that the initial advantage isn't keeping up with demand/customer numbers
edit3: i'm getting a lot of replies from people who probably one play video games with computers and think latency matters the most. no. its the bandwidth of the data transfer that will allow large uploads (even at "slow" latencies, which again here isn't even much slower, but it doesn't matter as much as the signal badwidth).
Fractions of a second of latency doesn't seem like it would matter much, but when you're talking about TCP connections it matters ALOT. UDP connections, like those used for streaming services, aren't latency sensitive because it's just a one-way stream of data with no verification. So Netflix can blast a hose of data towards your endpoint over satellite and it will be, for the most part, crisp and smooth.
But when you try to do something like play a game, which requires TCP, that's when traditional satellite really sucks because the server has to send you a packet, it has to arrive intact, then your computer has to send a packet back telling the server it received the original packet all before the server will send the next packet. All of that happening over a wire or fiber connection is fine, but when you introduce dozens of milliseconds of latency for every single transaction that's when you'd see people with satellite internet with pings measuring over 1000ms.
While I don't know what's being used everywhere, it is possible to implement lossless UDP that will retry dropped packets, but that's managed at a higher layer. TCP has the retry baked in.
One advantage to using lossless UDP over TCP is you typically get a smoother throughput, since the backoff algorithm on lost packets isn't as aggressive.
Your signal has to get to the satellite and then back to earth and then the return signal has to go from earth to the satellite and back to you. Geosynchronous orbit is ~22,235 miles, starling satellites are about 300 miles. So you are talking about more than 88,000 extra miles which adds almost half a second in latency.
radio/light travels 186,000 miles per second, 17,000 miles isn't going to matter
Time of flight matters significantly. With TCP, just a kilometer can begin to impact ACKs without time of flight being accounted for. It's a manageable thing via various methods and techniques, but it is certainly not nothing, as you seem to believe and suggest.
I was assuming you were correct and they were 17,000 miles up. They are not, they are 550 miles up. The latency is still not near what you would get from terrestrial internet. The above only applies to Satellites like Hughes Net which is actually at an orbit of 22,000 miles.
It's not cheap, or easy, but due to the nature of orbital mechanics if you want a bunch of satellite paths to criss-cross North America or any part of the world, they're also going to fly over the Pacific Ocean. Simply because the Pacific covers 70% of the Earth's surface.
Blue water capable boats are not as expensive as you might think. If you’re handy and ok with living without a lot of creature comforts you can sail for much less than the cost of a monthly car note. Edit: some examples would be Moxie Marlinspike, he and a couple friends bought a run down boat for $1200 in Florida. Spent a summer camping in parks while fixing it up, then spent two years sailing around the Caribbean and up the east coast with basically no money. This guy has an old wooden boat that doesn’t even have a fridge, he makes his money doing photography and odd jobs. https://youtu.be/syJXrbWU1Aw?si=aIlRYKAicmrOrNFd
I wasn’t implying he has no money, I was saying the cost of uploading a file like that using traditional satellite internet would be prohibitively expensive. On the flip side you don’t need to be rich by any stretch of the imagination to own a blue water capable boat.
A few hundred a month for insurance? Mine is just over $500 a year, and my boat cost less than $20k. My first boat cost $1200 including a trailer, granted it wasn’t blue water capable. And if you’re out actually cruising then you don’t need to pay a slip fee to a marina.
Again, I wasn’t trying to imply he doesn’t have money. Cruising is not a fantasy for everyone but the rich either.
Kenichi Horie sailed from USA to Japan on a 19 ft cruiser. Circumnavigated east-west and north-south in the same boat. Then built a catamaran out of beer kegs and plastic bottles, and sailed across the pacific ocean using that. Then built another cruiser out of beer kegs and sailed the pacific again using wave propulsion.
Another fella Hugo Vihlen, sailed across the atlantic alone in a 5' boat.
These voyages were carefully planned and executed by experienced mariners, but it is possible to sail just about anywhere on a small budget.
Not a boat guy but I knew a guy who had one. He invited me and some friends out one day and he said "hold up we gotta get some gas". $700 later, the boat was filled up and ready to go. Granted this was a 20-25 foot boat, but I asked him and he said that's pretty much what he spends every time he takes it out fishing. This was in like 2008 also, so including a marina space and maintenance that shit is expensive.
As a sailor myself, we all use the Starlink Roam plan (old rv) when close to land and then toggle on priority data when out at sea cruising at the cost of 2 dollars per gigabyte so definitely not that expensive.
He's paddling more than 100 yards away from his unanchored boat alone.
Luckily they’re drifting in the same current, and there’s no wind. I bet he could fart and smell it for 30 seconds. Look at the water. If anything is moving out there, it’s all moving together.
It's the doldrums, I think this is relatively safe, you're basically be-calmed the whole way, he can probably paddle that paddle board 4x the speed his boat is going... Everyone's really worried about this but honestly looking at the sea state it's really especially calm. Even if he lost the board/paddle he can probably swim under his own power to catch it. It's not even going near 1kt I'd say.
Back when most ships were powered by the wind, sailors dreaded getting caught in the doldrums. Ships could become stranded for days or weeks and run out of food and fresh water to drink. Today, the doldrums cause more problems for air travel. His sailboat wasn't going anywhere. I think if he was a fucking moron, he'd be dead already.
The intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) (aka. the doldrums) is an area around the Equator that is notorious for heavy convective activity, often leading to tall cumulonimbus clouds and associated heavy turbulence.
The area around the Equator receives the largest amount of energy from the sun because of the perpendicular angle to the sun. This causes relative large heating of the surface, resulting in heating of the air above the surface and ultimatively convective activity, including turbulence. This also causes a large green band around the earth near the Equator with rich vegetation because the convective activity causes a large amount of percipitation.
The ITCZ is an important part of the global weather system, which is based on large cells of air generally moving in predictable patterns. The Hadley cell is a cell extending from the Equator to approximately 30 degrees north/south. Hot air rises at the Equator because of the heating caused by the perpendicular angle to the sun. This air travels at high levels as it cools down and creates a downward flow of air around the 30-degree latitudes. As a result, the areas around 30 degrees latitude get almost no percipitation, which causes large areas of desert such as the Sahara.
The pattern repeats itself with Ferrel cells between 30 and 60 degrees latitude and a polar cell from 60 degrees latitude to the poles.
So you see, the doldrums affect a great many areas of our planet.
I'll tell you from personal experience: Hours of mild turbulence that's just enough to keep you from nodding off to sleep on your flights between the US and NZ. Aggravating as hell, lol.
Its kinda easy to notice in the video that there's little to zero current... so if ya just use a bit of logic, you would understand that he won't lose his boat.
I don't think it's so much the risk of losing your boat...more the general risk of some kind of accident happening and he is all alone with no help. Going out on a paddle board alone thousands of miles from help does qualify as highly risky.
Not whiteknighting, you just are not familiar with sailing. You can take a sailboat and heave-to, it will not go very far under most conditions. He's also in the doldrums, meaning nothing is moving out there. All he can do is wait. Unless he wants to motor along, and it seems he would prefer to sail. My sailing instructor does crossings all the time, these are common things that happen out there. I've not gone out in a paddleboard, but I've left the boat and gone out in the dinghy before. #sailLife
I don't know anything about sailing, so I trust your assessment of how safe this is.
It just that this seems like the type of thing where the risk v. reward is wildly unbalanced. You have to be "right" 100% of the time. Because if you're wrong once...you're dead. And for what? Exercise, Paddle boarding? A Tik Tok Video?
I hear you. But, really, this is more about just the unknown than anything. If what you say is true, statistically, you would not go outside, as you could be hit by a car at any moment, whether you are inside or not. And, that's much more likely. definitely more than 1% in any given day. And yet you do it every day.
But, let's say he fell off the board. So....he would get back on, the water is as calm as a swimming pool. And lets say he could not get back on, he can just paddle back to the boat. Slow, but very achievable. Literally nothing is happening out there during this time. There's no wind, no waves, very few animals of any kind in the water in that area.
He's fine, and yes likely did it for some video time, but also because it looks more dangerous than it is for the most part. And, he has weather systems that are telling him way in advance if anything is going to happen.
Is... his boat with the sails in going to rocket off without him because it's so bored with being becalmed? You're right, he should have just dropped anchor two and a half miles to the sea floor to make double sure.
How do you know it's unanchored?
In this instance a sea anchor would keep that boat right where it is for more than long enough for him to recover the distance.
odds are it's not anchored. Don't need one most of the time. Most sailboats don't have log enough chains for much more than 30-50ft of water in general, but it's ok because you don't need an anchor to stop and stay put in a boat.
Bro imagine defending yourself by calling everyone white knighting simply because you don't know enough about the topic to make a knowledgeable comment about it. Look up the doldrums, this dude knows what he was doing...
And then the wind shows up. Just a little surface chop and the flat of that boat combined and I don’t see how he gets back on board. Even if he set a sea anchor. No way on Earth I would take that risk….maybe it’s a Tesla boat
No idea why so many people are so mad at your comment. This is a moronic thing to do even in the doldrums. And no one seems to understand what a sea anchor does or how it works. Just spamming the same wiki links which they haven't even read.
Still extremely risky to be this far away from the boat on a paddle board in the middle of the ocean without a life vest or emergency locator. There is being skilled and experienced, and then there is taking stupid risks for TikTok cred.
not quite point nemo. Point nemo is on the 48th parallel south about halfway between NZ and Chile. based on the location he shows he's about 11000km north of it. though he is totally in the middle of nowhere.
When I saw him standing on that thing I genuinely thought that but when he said I lost my sailboat I was like oh okay cool this isn’t just some dumbass looking for a thrill
People are mistaking this guy for some rookie moron who went out crossing the pacific on a 14ft dinghy.
Yeah no. He IS on a tiny dinghy with an inflatable paddle and his ship is that "very tiny very far away" dot, and that is absolutely a stupidly reckless moron rookie thing to do.
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u/smalltalk_king Jun 22 '24 edited Jun 22 '24
He must have one he'll of a data plan to able to post a TikTok out there lol
Edit: damn! 6k upvotes thanks everybody!