Due to the weather, circumstances, etc..

We've decided to turn around and abandon our FOOLish endeavor...





you know what's next, right??

APRIL FOOLS!!
Onward South, in the rain.
Looking to get South of Wrightsville Beach today :)

Also, today I'd like to make mention of the Boat, "April Fool".

Hugo Vihlen was a $23,000-a-year pilot for Delta Air Lines when he decided a few years ago—for no reason he has adequately explained—to cross the Atlantic Ocean in the smallest boat ever used for such a purpose. His vessel, called April Fool and measuring precisely 5'11?" from stem to stern, was less than half the length of Robert Manry's Tinkerbelle, the previously smallest craft to make the crossing.

The voyage is described by Vihlen in a diary he kept and which is now published as a book, April Fool (Follett, $5.95). The book jacket suggests the reader may appreciate Vihlen's feat the more by imagining sailing the Atlantic in "your bathtub with a mast and a three horsepower outboard motor...." Certainly the photographs that accompany the story are no help; they make April Fool look as though she has been cleaved in half—or thirds, as if perhaps both bow and stern are missing.

Vihlen had not sailed for 18 years when he decided on his trip, and so when the plywood and fiber-glass boat was launched he kept making elementary mistakes—things like getting hit by the boom. When he asked people for advice or help, he was usually advised not to go. His first attempt was aborted when—after getting two months' leave from Delta and crating his vessel off to North Africa—he got hung up in official red tape, design deficiencies and by the African inshore winds. When he gave up, the Delta company magazine commented: "Rub a dub dub, Hugo's tub was a flub."

But Hugo Vihlen is nothing if not determined. He shipped his boat home to Florida, where he made extensive modifications, learned a good deal more about African coastal winds, and re-embarked from Casablanca the following March. This time he cleared the coast, caught the trade winds and—in spite of idiosyncrasies in his vessel like not being able to sail any closer to the wind than 90 degrees—made the 4,480-mile trip to Florida in 85 days.

The trip was predictably wretched. He was forced to sleep on his back with knees bent in his 5-foot cabin, and to set his alarm for two-hour intervals so he could keep adjusting his steering. It was also boring, but his health stayed good, his only complaint being a sore arm from steering.

When he finally reached the waters off Florida and was picked up by the Coast Guard, he was astonished to find himself a hero. The state appointed him a commodore, Astronaut Walt Cunningham sent his congratulations, and so did President Johnson. A whale was named after him.

And Delta Air Lines suspended him for being late getting back from vacation.