French rower nears end of historic journey

SAN FRANCISCO:  A French rower is on the verge of ending his historic solo voyage from Japan to the United States, members of his team said on Wednesday.

Emmanuel Coindre was expected to make shore in San Francisco on Sunday or Monday, culminating a journey that spanned about 9,000 kilometers (5,600 miles), according to spokeswoman Aviya Landesberg.

Coindre set out from Choshi, Japan, on June 24. Officials will be waiting inside the picturesque Golden Gate of San Francisco to record Coindre's arrival for the record books, Landesberg said.

"San Francisco seems to me so close and so far at the same time," Coindre wrote in an online journal entry on Tuesday. "Or is this simply a general lassitude?" His menu that day consisted of mashed potatoes, cookies and chocolate bars, according to his journal.

Coindre, 32, has averaged 17 to 18 hours of rowing daily during his voyage, which has been sponsored by watch-maker Jaeger-LeCoultre, according to his website. It will be Coindre's sixth solo ocean crossing.

Completion of the trip will make Coindre the first person to row alone across a notoriously stormy strip of the Pacific Ocean, his team said.

Coindre's feat involved roughly four months "of gruelling effort, endurance, solitude and discomfort spent aboard a fragile skiff as it is tossed about at the whim of the raging elements of the northern Pacific," according to Jaeger-LeCoultre.

Coindre wrote in his log late on Tuesday that he was in a hurry to get through some rough waves, back on course, and to "take again my destiny in my hands."

In 2000, Coindre made an unprecedented 99-day water cycle crossing from the Canary Islands to Barbados. A year later he set a world record by rowing from Grand Canary to Guadeloupe in a dinghy named Lady Bird. He repeated the trip to Guadeloupe in a row boat in 2003, setting a record by finishing in 42 days.

Coindre rowed across the Atlantic Ocean in 2002, making the 7,403-kilometer (4,600-mile) voyage in 87 days, according to his team. He made a 62-day crossing from the US to La Baule on the French coast in 2004 that broke a record set by Gerard d'Aboville 24 years earlier, his website reported.

"It is only human to want to push oneself further, to redefine the limits of what is possible," Jaeger-LeCoultre wrote in a website devoted to Coindre's latest voyage.

"It is fortunate, therefore, that some of the world's greatest summits have yet to be conquered: extreme challenges that are undertaken alone, in nature, where one is locked in battle not only against the elements but also against oneself."