A Slow Boat Around Sri Lanka

I could not sleep. At best I had a disturbed night, given the excitement that was building up for what the morning would bring. Many many months of planning was finally coming together when two slow boats would start out on a journey that had so much time, effort, resources and money invested in it….

It was a heady night on the last day of February. I could not wait long enough to catch my flight to Colombo to start A Slow Boat Around Sri Lanka. I had weird pieces of luggage and gear and I was certain that I was horribly overweight. I had already pre-paid 15 kg of…

Exhilaration. Elation. Animation. Enthusiasm. Eagerness. Anticipation. Delirious. Emotional. Zeal. Zest. Pepped. Zinged. One thing common to all these words is the feeling of intense excitement and anticipation each the clock ticks away at the seconds. There are only three days to go before I embark on the greatest and grandest expedition of my life, paddling…

It is a happy day for me. Today, February 11, 2020 I was presented with two enormously good pieces of news. Two things that are entirely independent of each other and one of them directly connected to the expedition. But first, the first one, one that has nothing to do with A Slow Boat Around…

As you might have gathered from the earlier posts, I have been looking for a way to manage a Shore Support Team. Essentially to hire a vehicle with a driver. All our non-essential gear, not required during the day’s paddle, can be transported in the vehicle, while the driver can act as our local liaison,…

Though it is unknown whether Murphy was the one who actually coined the law that goes by his name, but it essentially states that, “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.” And like all good wives, there is another law attributed to Murphy’s wife, goes by the name Mrs Murphy’s Law and states, “Anything…

It has been famously said, “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. It is so true. In fact on an expedition like A Slow Boat Around Sri Lanka, I look at it like it is not so much a journey of a million paddlestrokes, but a single paddlestroke repeated a million…

I have learnt to pack light. It was not always so. In fact, on the Ganges I had to offload a whole lot of gear progressively. By the time I reached the end of the journey more than 2,000 km downstream, there were still things in my kit that I never even touched. I have…

When people hear about the Sri Lanka circumnavigation expedition, almost always they ask me questions related directly to the effort itself. “How tough is it going to be?”“What about sea conditions?”“How far into the sea will you be?”“Where will you sleep?” “What if you get lost?” “What about food?”Etc. All these are legitimate questions that…

In the previous post I had briefly alluded to the Beaufort Scale. Let us look at what it is in just a little more detail. The Beaufort scale was devised in 1805 by the Francis Beaufort, a hydrographer and Royal Navy officer. Interestingly, the scale that carries his name was first used aboard HMS Beagle…