Are they out of their minds?

A couple of days locked in with a person in a room with nothing to do will get on your nerves pretty quickly. Imagine being with someone for 1000 days in a confined limited area and that too being on the sea. For those of you who don’t know about the adventure that a couple started last Saturday - Reid Stowe, 55 years old, a veteran sailor and his girlfriend, Soanya Ahmad, 23 years old college student who had not done much of sailing, started their adventurous trip on a 70-foot schooner to go around the world, just like “Around the world in 80 days”, except it is for 1000 days, because that is how long it takes to go to Mars. This is a feigning trip to simulate the journey to Mars and hence they will have no port calls.

So what do they do when they have no port calls to re-supply or stretch their legs per say? They stuffed their ship with enough supplies of cooking items – in terms of food and materials needed for cooking and cleaning, fitted their ship with devices to catch fish that they can cook and eat; use tarps to catch rainwater and use desalination to make drinking water from salty sea water. Talking about desalination, I am reminded about the projects I used to work on as a Civil Engineer. Traditional chemical desalinating kits have very limited capacity and are really inadequate, to say nothing about the terrible taste of the water produced. A decent size produces only a liter of fresh water per hour, so they better be having “Survivor 34" which will produce nearly 1.5 gallons of fresh water per hour and they be drinking less water than what is being produced. Otherwise, the following will be true - "Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink"

Now that they are set with necessary items for survival, let me take a look at how their day-to-day life will look like. Even though they are equipped with technology on the ship to communicate with their families, friends and sponsors via email and such, don’t we all know how the call drops when it is very crucial and how the internet connection fails on us when we need it the most. Being on sea can cause sea sickness and I have experienced it myself even if it was for a couple of days of doing deep sea fishing. What happens when they fight or argue or break-up? I hope not but just think. When couples argue or fight, they will leave one another for a while and go out do something else to soothe their minds. In this case, they would just go out and have a swim.

At the end of the trip, the duo will be so tired of eating sea food and would never want to look at eating any fish in the future. At least I would feel like that. When patience and presence of mind is required for such trips, I also hope that they have read enough of Moby Dick and similar adventures to keep them savvy. Romance is part of the ingredient for this trip which will become stale when faced with challenge. “Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.” But let us forget about the Murphy’s Law for a minute and wish them luck for this trip. They will need that in plenty as well.