Having once vowed never to attempt such madness again, Ben Lecomte is set to take on giant waves, sharks and a pile of floating garbage the size of Texas in a perilous quest to swim across the Pacific Ocean.
Faced with an epic 9,000km adventure, his bid to become the first swimmer to accomplish the daunting feat begins in Japan and is expected to take more than six months, finishing in San Francisco.
Part adventure, part scientific research, Lecomte and his eight-person support team will conduct a host of marine experiments as they seek to raise awareness of ocean pollution and plastic contamination.
Photo: AFP
Two days after turning 51, Lecomte will enter the waters off Japan’s east coast Tuesday, after which the swimmer will be at the mercy of the elements.
The danger of sharks and paralyzing jellyfish also lurks — but the Texas-based architect tweaks the nose of fear. “I like to push my personal limit and try to find what that is,” Lecomte told AFP in an interview aboard his yacht.
“I’m like a tiger in a cage going around and around,” he added, after seven years of planning.
“The mental part is much more important than the physical. You have to make sure you always think about something positive or you always have something to think about. When you don’t have anything to occupy your mind it goes into kind of a spiral, and that’s when trouble starts.”
Lecomte plans to swim for eight hours a day, burning more than 8,000 calories.
The rest of the time he will rest, sleep and eat on the 20m support boat Discoverer that will drop him back in the water at the same spot he exits every day.
Lecomte, who will wear a wetsuit, snorkel and fins, is no stranger to adventure.
‘NEVER AGAIN’
After swimming across the Atlantic Ocean in 1998 he promised himself “never again”, but Lecomte felt compelled to take on the monstrous Pacific after starting a family.
“Pollution of the ocean has a big impact,” said the father-of-two, who will be gathering oceanographic and medical data for 27 scientific organizations, including NASA.
Lecomte says that when he was little he would walk along the beach with his father and see little or no plastic.
“Now every time I go with my kids, we see plastic everywhere,” said Lecomte, who will also wear a device to test levels of radioactive material from the tsunami-hit Fukushima nuclear plant.
“It made me think what (the) future for my kids is going to be like. It’s a problem we created and there is a very easy solution to start reversing it — single-use plastics for example, if we stop using them that will make a big change.”
Lecomte leaves from Choshi fishing port in Chiba prefecture — the same starting point as Frenchman Gerard d’Aboville when he rowed solo across the Pacific in 1991.
But Lecomte will actually be in the water, potential shark bait.
“In the Atlantic, I swam for five days with a shark following me, its fin circling,” shrugged Lecomte, who previously suffered nasty stings when jellyfish got caught in his snorkel.
“Everybody thinks of ‘Jaws’ but I’m more afraid of cold water and being in pain, and needing to fight that, than sharks.”
GARBAGE PATCH
Part of his daunting swim takes him through the Texas-sized Great Pacific garbage patch that floats between Hawaii and California, where tangled plastic poses extra dangers.
His team will collect water samples to learn more about the build-up of micro-plastics littering the area.
But Lecomte knows the application of science — and a boat stocked with 2.8 tonnes of food — will only get him so far.
“What is going to be difficult is every morning going back in the water (because) you hit a wall, normally after 4-6 hours,” he said of the mental challenge.
“I try to disassociate my mind from my body and everything that happens to my body — pain or cold, I try to put aside.”
“I have a schedule of what I’m going to think about for those eight hours... [I]t’s always about keeping my mind occupied. I will remember a family birthday for example and the trick is to engage all your senses — try to remember the wind on your skin, how the sun felt, the smells,” he said.
“Then ‘boom’, you are back in that moment reliving it and your body is just on autopilot.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby