Greta Thunberg’s sailing adventure no pleasure cruise
PLYMOUTH, England (AP) — Greta Thunberg’s two-week voyage to the United States will be no pleasure cruise.
The 16-year-old climate change activist who has inspired student protests around the world will leave Plymouth, England, later this week bound for New York in a high-tech but decidedly low-comfort sailboat.
Highlighting the urgency of cutting carbon emissions, the young Swede last month announced that while she would not fly to environmental conferences, she’d found a way to get there without hurting the planet. Pierre Casiraghi, the grandson of Monaco’s late Prince Rainier III and American actress Grace Kelly, and fellow yachtsman Boris Herrmann offered her passage on a racing yacht as she travels to U.N. climate summits next month in New York and in Santiago, Chile, in December.
“It’s not very luxurious, it’s not very fancy but I don’t need that. I need only a bed and just the basic things,” Thunberg told The Associated Press. “So I think it will be fun, and I also think it will be fun to be isolated and not be so limited.”
Sailing on the 60-foot (18-meter) Malizia II, outfitted with solar panels and underwater turbines to generate electricity, Thunberg will make a zero-carbon trans-Atlantic journey.
But to call it a no-frills passage would be an understatement. The sailboat is built for high-speed, offshore racing, with weight kept to a minimum. The only alterations for the voyage are fitting curtains in front of the bunk and adding mattresses for comfort. There is no toilet or fixed shower. There’s a small gas cooker and the food will be freeze dried.
Inside, the yacht resembles the interior of a tin can. It is dark and gray, with no windows below deck.
Herrmann, who is skippering the boat, will take turns with Casiraghi steering the craft. He described life on board as a mixture of camping and sailing, with a thin mattress and sleeping bag the only comforts.
“It’s a very simple life and then the rest of the day depends on the wind,” Herrmann told the AP. “It can be calm and smooth and going along and you can read a book, or it can be really rough and you hold on and try to fight seasickness and can be really hard.”
Casiraghi and Herrmann’s Team Malizia was founded to sail the biggest ocean races — the Vendee Globe 2020 and The Ocean Race 2021. They also developed the Malizia Ocean challenge, a science and education project aimed at teaching children about climate change and the ocean. Their vessel has an onboard sensor that measures CO2 levels in seawater, a measure of how atmospheric carbon is changing the oceans.