While Ralph and Mike are making the boat ready for its next nine-month-long adventure, a real tragedy has taken place on their point of departure, the island of La Gomera. We wrote in the article "New adventurers check in" on the 20th of December (see the Archive if you want to reread this article) that no less than four rowing boats had departed from La Gomera to cross the Atlantic Ocean: Graham Walters from England in the historic vessel 'The Puffin', Victor Gavrishev from Kyrgyzstan, Stu Turnbull and Ed Bayliss from England and Bhavik Gandhi from India. Just eight hours into their separate journeys, three of the boats were boarded by the coast guard and forced to return to La Gomera, after which the boats were impounded. Only Stu Turnbull and Ed Bayliss managed to escape the long arm of the Spanish coast guard as they were already too far from the coast (these men are rowing to set a world record and had therefore left at great speed).
Why the Spanish coast guard got involved remains unclear; in any case it was against the rowers'Â will. Bhavik Gandhi has written the following on this subject on his website:
"I cannot speak much right now. Enough to say that I am having more problems that I would have liked at the start. First the rudder, and then the coastguard. Will write more soon here in the following days. For now, in port for repairs. It was impossible to fix at sea. More on the coast guard issue shortly. I cannot state more at present. We have the Embassy and the lawyers dealing with it."
Graham Walters was more forthcoming. On his website he mentions 'some equipment' which was on board and shouldn't have been - or perhaps which wasn't on board and should have been, it's not that clear. He also reports that the coast guard towed the boat back to La Gomera at high speed, causing serious damage to the rowing platform.
All in all it's a sorry state of affairs for these adventurers, who have been working for years to achieve their dreams and are now seeing all their work come to nothing. Especially for Graham and Bhavik, as they have already had to abandon one attempt to row across the Atlantic Ocean. We hope things start to look up for you, guys!
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