"We drive and drive and drive," said project spokesman Michael Grünert to YACHT-Online. The crew is still 600 nautical miles from the destination in the Azores and is highly motivated. "They all want to finally eat ice cream."
Not everything that is currently being made public sounds so positive. Voices were loud from the crew's surroundings, reports the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), among others, that expedition leader Dominique Görlitz wanted to force success and that some of the crew were not doing well.
You can read about a task and a hopeless undertaking in some publications in the past few days. In fact, according to Michael Grünert, the 17-ton reed boat is in good, that is to say, safe condition.
"We sailed into two heavy storms one after the other," reports the project spokesman. A lot broke in the process. For three days, however, the "AborIII" had good external conditions again and the crew had repaired and fixed everything on board.
According to Grünert, the broken swords at the beginning of the trip are not a problem either. They were immediately replaced by new ones brought by another ship.
The reed boat is now around 600 nautical miles from the Azores. A route that could be done in a good six days under good conditions. However, it is questionable whether the weather actually means well with the "AborIII". "If we get into a storm again, it can take a lot longer," says Michael Grünert.
By crossing the Atlantic in the reed boat, the biologist Dominique Görlitz (41) wants to prove that such journeys were possible 14,000 years ago. The man from Chemnitz claims to have discovered references to a transatlantic trade route in cave paintings in Europe and Egypt, which other scientists have so far considered impossible.