119. Safest Man On The Planet

Bert ter Hart has been described as the “safest man on the planet” having completed a 267 day circumnavigation of the planet during the COVID 19 global pandemic and coming into contact with …….. no one. His solo, non-stop circumnavigation around the world in his 13-metre yacht Seaburban took in the five southernmost capes (Cape Horn, Cape Agulhas, Cape Leeuwin, South East Cape (Australia) and South Cape (New Zealand) using only celestial navigation. No GPS, just a sextant, an almanac, log tables and paper and pencil. 62 year old ter Hart is the first North American and one of only five people to have accomplished this feat.

Celestial navigation can be a time-consuming process, but Bert said navigation wasn’t his biggest challenge, Neither was the hurricanes, the waves as tall as his mast or eating the same meals every day – oatmeal for breakfast, salmon or tuna for lunch, and pasta, quinoa or rice for dinner – for nearly nine months. The hardest part was not being able to relax for even a moment. Meals were eaten standing up, wedged into a corner of his yacht, and he slept, never for more than two hours at a time, strapped into his bunk with a seat-belt pulled as tight as possible across his hips. By the time he sailed back into Victoria Inner Harbour on Saturday 18 July this year he had been awake for three days.

Meanwhile ……. back at the Ophthalmology department of the Royal Stoke University Hospital this afternoon ….. Mr Sadiq declared himself very pleased with the “excellent” progress at my first post-op review., tweaked my eye drop routine – 3 drops a day for the next 6 weeks – and told me to come back again in 6 week, at which point he intends discharging me.

For Diabetes UK and the National Autistic Society see

https://justgiving.com/teams/keithsclipperadventure

For UNICEF UK see

https://justgiving.com/KeithWinstanley-TeamUNICEF

Please take a look. Thank You.