Recreated the World’s First Kayak Expedition Between Greenland and Scotland
These days it seems as though lots of people are trying to do new and cool things, finding new ways to explore the world, take risks and have adventures.
Two adventurers named Olly Hicks and George Bullard decided that they were going to kayak from Greenland to Scotland, which is about one thousand two hundred miles.
These daring adventurers took sixty-six days to complete the paddle in their kayaks. The fact that it took just under seventy days for these two brave adventurers to travel one thousand two hundred miles is truly startling and an incredible feat.
The reason that Olly Hicks and George Bullard went on this expedition, to start with, was to show that an Inuit could have made the same journey in a kayak made of sealskin and driftwood in the early 17th and 18th centuries.
The inspiration for this journey came from a story that Olly Hicks heard – a man was found exhausted near the shore and died a few short days later in the 1700s, and he was also found with a kayak.
There are historical accounts of Inuits who paddled the journey. This story does have a vast history and is something that is often discussed, beginning in the late 17th century. The story did occur as a result of several fairly mysterious reports of weird visitors who were appearing offshore in what appeared to be strange boats.
Since there is a lot of mystery surrounding the appearance of these men, nobody really knows for sure where these people came from.
There are a lot of different theories going around about where these strange people could have originated, some people saying that potentially they were the fisherman from Finland, while there are other theories that the people who were coming up the shore were indigenous prisoners who escaped from ships returning to the new world.
The journey that these men took was started out of Greenland on July 1 – they paddled to Iceland and then crossed a stretch of the open ocean, which is ominously known as the Devil’s Dance Floor, in order to get to the Faroe Islands.
Both men said that the trek was physically tough as well as mentally challenging, but was definitely worth it as they were both completely happy to have pulled off the journey against odds that were not necessarily in their favor.
This was an amazing journey for a kayak expedition, and the men just wanted to prove the acceptability of one theory. They were able to follow through with it despite the magnitude of a journey across such a stretch of the sea.
There were also people who were able to watch the trek as it occurred – quite a historic spectacle to behold.