Anthony Smith wants to encourage people. At the age of 84, he wants to prove that you can still have adventures in old age. Without further ado, he has a raft built from plastic water pipes, gathers a crew of men in their fifties and sets sail.
64 years after "Kon-Tiki", "An-Tiki" is now rocking across an ocean. However, it is not the Pacific, but the Atlantic, and that is not the only difference to Thor Heyerdahl's raft trip. Unlike its famous predecessor, "An-Tiki" is not made of balsa wood, but of eleven and a half metre long water pipes made in England.
The construction material was chosen carefully, as the four-person British crew wanted to use their Atlantic crossing to raise awareness of the scarcity of drinking water and collect donations for the charitable organisation Water Aid.
organisation Water Aid. The aim is to raise £50,000.
However, the approximately 70-day journey from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean islands should also show something else: With the experience of age and correspondingly good preparation, even supposedly daring tours such as the raft trip across the big pond can be mastered. In addition, "An-Tiki" is equipped with modern means of communication and solar panels.
The CVs of the four crew members - 84, 61, 57 and 56 years old - make exciting reading in themselves. They are sailors, balloonists, globetrotters and adventurers who don't count themselves among the old.
Skipper Anthony Smith has already crossed the Alps in a balloon and has also flown from Zanzibar over the Ngorongoro Crater to East Africa. The 84-year-old says of the raft tour: "A stable and well-built raft like the An-Tiki is safer than a bus journey to Timbuktu." The bow sections of the four longitudinal tubes are even fitted with a kind of crash box that can break in the event of a collision without destroying the actual floats.
Eight days ago, the British set off from La Gomera, where they had spent two months assembling the raft. The individual parts were delivered from England in a container. So far, the eleven and a half metre long and six metre wide "An-Tiki" has sailed without any particular incidents. In the meantime, the crew have already been cheering about six knots of boat speed, and they are currently sailing at two to three knots south-west of La Gomera towards the west.
