Frenchman begins quest to swim 9,000km
CHOSHI: Ben Lecomte dived into the Pacific Ocean yesterday, kicking off an epic quest to swim 9,000km from Tokyo to San Francisco, through shark-infested waters choking with plastic waste.
Under sunny skies, the 51-yearold Frenchman slipped into cool and placid waters shortly after 9am in warm and pleasant conditions with a slight breeze.
He will face giant waves, sharks and jellyfish, and will also swim through part of the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” in his attempt to be the first to accomplish the feat of swimming across the world’s biggest ocean.
His son and daughter swam with him for the first hundred metres or so, then rejoined a crowd of around 70 well-wishers, with family and friends hugging each other on the shore.
Part adventurer, part environmentalist, Lecomte hopes to raise awareness of plastic contamination and ocean pollution and his support team will conduct a raft of experiments on the trip, expected to take between six to eight months.
Part of his daunting swim takes him through the Texas-sized vortex of garbage that floats between Hawaii and California, where tangled plastic will pose extra dangers.
He will be accompanied throughout by the 20m support boat Discoverer, where he will eat, rest and sleep before being dropped every morning where he stopped the previous evening.
Lecomte aims to swim around eight hours a day and will burn off more than 8,000 calories daily in the process.