A 56-year-old American athlete has become the first woman on record to swim the Atlantic.
Jennifer Figge took 24 days to swim from the Cape Verde islands off Africa to Trinidad. The exact distance she covered has yet to be calculated.
She swam inside a cage to protect her from sharks.
Figge, who had originally planned to make landfall in the Bahamas, now plans to finish by swimming from Trinidad to the British Virgin Islands.
She first dreamed of swimming across the Atlantic Ocean as a little girl.
The swimmer finally moved nearer her goal when she left Cape Verde Islands on 12 January, facing waves of up to 9m (30 ft).
Each day she would spend up to eight hours in the water at a stretch before returning to her support boat.
Crew members would throw the athlete energy drinks as she swam along, if it was too stormy divers would deliver them in person.
She saw pilot whales, turtles, and dolphins, but no sharks.
"I was never scared," she told the Associated Press news agency.
"Looking back, I wouldn't have it any other way. I can always swim in a pool."
Jennifer Figge's journey comes 10 years after a French swimmer, Benoit Lecomte, made the first known solo trans-Atlantic swim covering 6,400km (4,000 miles) in 73 days.
Figge had planned to swim 3,380km (2,100 miles), but she was blown off course and reached Trinidad rather than the Bahamas.
Bloody hell.
Only two things are infinite - the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe: Albert Einstein.
"You've all been selected for this mission because you each have a special skill. Professor Hawking, John Leslie, Phil Neville, the Wu-Tang Clan, Usher, the Sugar Puffs Monster and Daniel Day-Lewis! Welcome to Operation MindFuck!"
Meh. Call me when someone jumps the English Channel.
There is only one way of avoiding the war – that is the overthrow of this society. However, as we are too weak for this task, the war is inevitable. -L. Trotsky, 1939
90 minutes from New York to Paris - what a wonderful world it would be.
"You ain't gonna get off down the trail a mile or two, and go missing your wife or something, like our last cook done, are you?"
"My wife is in hell, where I sent her. She could make good biscuits, but her behavior was terrible."
By "for a while" you do mean several days, right?
Although, once you get about halfway up, wouldn't you be able to float?
"You've all been selected for this mission because you each have a special skill. Professor Hawking, John Leslie, Phil Neville, the Wu-Tang Clan, Usher, the Sugar Puffs Monster and Daniel Day-Lewis! Welcome to Operation MindFuck!"
Nothing it will never come. Death before defeat. I don’t bend or break. I end, if I meet a foe capable of it. Victory is in forcing the opponent to back down. I do not. There is no defeat.
Rochey wrote:Although, once you get about halfway up, wouldn't you be able to float?
idk about floating, but the gravity would be significantly less.
Not really. The force of gravity is equal to G(m1 *m2) /r^2
Even though the force of gravity would decrease, it would still be quite significant. Remember that there is still gravity in space (actually every single particle in the universe exerts a gravitational force on every other particle in the universe . . . ) but objects have an apparent weightlessness due to being in freefall.
If there wasn't gravity in space . . . how would the moon orbit the Earth?
Rochey wrote:Although, once you get about halfway up, wouldn't you be able to float?
idk about floating, but the gravity would be significantly less.
Not really. The force of gravity is equal to G(m1 *m2) /r^2
It would be almost insignificant - half way up a space elavator is about 18,000 km from the ground - ie half of the 36,000 km of the distance from the ground to a geostationary orbit. That's a 24,000 km orbital radius and so equivilent to 4r, making gravity 16 times weaker there.
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