Spaniard circling the globe on jet ski reaches Texas
Miami, Apr 1 (EFE).- Spanish entrepreneur and adventurer Alvaro de Marichalar arrived this week in Texas, the latest stop on a voyage around the world aboard his 3 m (11 ft) jet ski, the Numancia.
The Spaniard started in 2019, the 500th anniversary of the Magellan and Juan Sebastian Elcano’s pioneering circumnavigation of the globe, but the Covid-19 pandemic forced him to interrupt his journey for nearly two years.
De Marichalar, who has been riding jet skis for 40 years and holds 14 world speed records, resumed the quest in February from Miami and by the beginning of this week was in New Orleans.
The leg from the Big Easy to Houston ended up taking 31 hours, as the waters of the Gulf of Mexico were roiled by a powerful storm system and the Numancia’s propeller got tangled in a fishing net.
The weather forced him to divert from the Gulf to the intracoastal waterway, a inland channel running parallel to the coast from Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey, to Brownsville, Texas.
“I didn’t see a single house, it was desolate,” he told Efe Friday from Houston.
De Marichalar usually delivers talks at the stops on his voyage and he was set to appear at the Houston Yacht Club and the Casa de España cultural center during his stay in the Texas metropolis.
The next leg will take him to Corpus Christi, Texas, from where he will continue down the Gulf coast of Mexico and then eastward through the Caribbean to Panama.
The plan calls for De Marichalar to transit the Panama Canal and then head north up the Pacific coast of Central and North America to Alaska before crossing the Bering Strait to Asia. EFE
ar/dr
