New Years, new resolutions. This is the philosophy of a Gábor Rakonczay who tries to cross the Atlantic alone, without an escort boat, with a surfboard special of own manufacture of five and a half meters long by meter and a half wide. Hungarian extreme sports athlete from 39 years old and holding two Guinness records, left last Sunday from Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and your challenge is to paddle to the Caribbean island of Antigua in no more than 60 days. Must travel 5,200 kilometers and in little more than a day it had already exceeded the first 100.
About 30 people fired him at dawn on Sunday in the port of Las Palmas and standing at his table (it took two months to build), little by little he was entering the sea. The table that will accompany you in the coming months has nothing more than a Counterweight keel and a rudder so that in the event of a storm, Gábor will have no choice but to withstand it. There is no superstructure that allows you to take cover. What’s more, he will sleep without protection and his idea is to take naps of no more than 20 minutes held by a rope to avoid falling into the water. It takes food for 70 days, although it has a reserve, in case the journey lengthens, to support another month.
He is the first in the world to paddle across the Atlantic in a SUP
In an emergency, the Hungarian carries two satellite phones, three trackers, a water treatment plant and a lifeboat. He is an experienced extreme athlete. In 2012 he already crossed the Atlantic by canoe (although he was lost for four weeks) and last year he reached the South Pole. In his forecasts is to find a northeast wind and once several days have passed he would face an east wind, “which could make it a little easier for me to reach the goal,” he commented on his social networks and later made it clear that “I am about to do something no one else has done before. ” And it is that, although it is his seventh transatlantic expedition from Gran Canaria, He would be the first in the world to paddle across the Atlantic in a self-built, cabinless SUP.
Gábor, who on his first day of the crossing covered 98 kilometers and did not sleep, is trying to take advantage of the good weather conditions to make this route Gran Canaria-Antigua, which is considered classic. “The first five hours were good and then the typical steep waves appeared. There were some more difficult moments, but I went through it methodically. I hope to spend 51 more days moving at this rate ”, wrote on his Facebook account. WHC Group is the main sponsor and the aim of this extreme challenge is to draw attention to health preservation and basic health education among young people.
