Up the creek with a paddle

If we were all thinking ahead when the 'rona first came to our shores, we would have figured that the best way to avoid it would be to go offshore...far offshore.

A Latvian adventurer, Karlis Bardelis, just finished rowing across the seas. It took him 140 days of solo rowing, and now he has advice for anyone coping with lockdowns.

His trip had nothing to do with the coronavirus anyway; he left Peru in July 2018, got to French Polynesia in five months, and wound up in Malaysia this past June.

His adventures at sea included having his boat rammed by sharks off Papua New Guinea, losing an anchor (replaced with an old battery) and several near misses with other watercraft.

Let's start calling near misses "near hits."

At one point, he was asea for five months without seeing another living being that didn't have fins, and I hear some of you already hollering, "Where do I sign up?"

Back in his native Latvia, the 35-year-old Bardelis spent two weeks in quarantine, and then said, "If we can't change the circumstances, we can change our attitudes towards them." 

"A lot of people asked me if I didn't lose my mind or become insane. No, I just enjoy it, because that's what I choose to do," he told the homefolks.

All told, he rowed 16,155 miles.  You can catch up with him on his Bored of Borders Facebook page.

Remember, he had no engine and no sails! He rowed that 23-foot boat for as many as 13 hours a day from South America to Asia.

Reaching two metres at its widest point, the row boat is equipped only with a small cabin for sleeping and storing supplies and equipment.

"I'm 200 percent certain that I made the first solo rowboat trip from South America to Southeast Asia," Bardelis says.

Along the way, he talked to people in Tuvalu, French Polynesia, the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. His long blond hair and big hairy beard made him quite the object of curiosity among the folks he met, and he reports that everyone was invariably welcoming, which is nice. Indonesians helped him drag his boat ashore to scrape the hull for barnacles and shells.

And, Bardelis says that after all this time alone, he never felt lonely.

"The ocean is full of life: I wasn't alone, but rather together with birds, fish, whales," he said, adding that podcasts and audiobooks, downloaded while at port, also helped.

He wasn't doing this for the first time, either. Four years ago, he and a buddy rowed the Atlantic from Namibia (known by the current US president as "Nambia") to Brazil.

And why row, when other ways would be easier?

"It would be easy to pull up a sail, but I love rowing, and using sails would feel like cheating, even if only to myself," he said.

You have to figure he won't need to work out until the year 2046, after all that!