Alternative History

Here is a little bit of information about the lady rower and by the way her life was save once so far by the Coast Guard off the California coast at the beginning of her trip.

Second her marine GPS stop working at one point and she needed to fall back on her truck tom tom GPS she took along on a whim.

Interesting story that well worth googling.


http://sailboats.wordpress.com/2008/09/08/first-woman-to-row-alone-from-california-to-hawaii-roz-savage/

Roz Savage, the first woman ever to row from California to Hawaii solo. Roz Savage rowed across the Pacific, nearly running out of water on her historic journey. Then Roz Savage met up with the junk raft in the middle of the Pacific, when then exchanged a water-maker for food.
About Roz Savage
Roz Savage was born on December 23, 1967 in Cheshire UK and attended school in Durham. She took up rowing at University College, Oxford, and went on to gain two half-blues for representing Oxford against Cambridge, and to win blades with the Univ Women’s 1st VIII in 1988 and 1989.
In 2003 Roz Savage became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and took part in an Anglo-American expedition that discovered Inca ruins in the Andean cloudforests near Machu Picchu. She then spent a further three months in Peru, travelling solo and researching her first book, Three Peaks in Peru.
She ran in the London and New York marathons, finishing in the top 2% for women in each, and has run a personal best of 3 hours 19 minutes.
Roz Savage was previously a management consultant (Accenture and CHP) and investment banker (UBS), before realizing at the age of 34 that there might be more to life than a steady income and a house in the suburbs. Roz estimates that the race cost about £70,000 and that she got approximately £10,000 in cash sponsorship but says, her attempt was mostly funded from her divorce settlement.

Roz Savage in San Francico
On September 1, 2008 at 5:55am local time, Roz Savage crossed the finish line of the first leg of her trans-Pacific row, becoming the first woman to row solo from California to Hawaii. She completed the crossing from San Francisco to Waikiki in a time of 99 days 8 hours and 55 minutes. The total distance covered was 2,598 nautical miles and took approximately one million oar strokes. On September 3, 2008 Roz’s rowboat and the JUNK’s raft were transported to the Waikiki Aquarium in Honolulu, where they gave a talk about the environment.
Check out the interview with Roz Savage with rowing photos, and a video of Roz Savage pulling into Hawaii: Roz Savage Interview
Read more about Roz Savage

You apparently dont know how the Polys and the Melies sailed their trimarans and collected water , and did ocean voyages. Remember Aku Aku ? Tell Thor Heyeredahl that the trips were impossible.

Collected water as in rain water?

Kind of a interesting bet hoping you get enough rain..................

Sorry farmerman with a great deal of luck maybe one of those ships could had reach California with someone still alive on them however such technology would not allow setting up colonies as to do that you need ships able to cross time after time in both directions not some one time lucky fluke event.

See the problems of the Europeans have making such voyages with technology far ahead of what you are talking about.

Thors first expedition, The Kon Tiki, was done using a straw double hulled cat with a big lateen sail . The cat was sailed from Peru to Vanawhatu (I believe the spelling is wrong but hey) or about 5K miles. They busted the canoe on a reef and stopped the expedition there. They packed their victuals like the polynesian craft where they would carry livestock and living plants on the center platforms and the sails would be used to catch drinking water.

These guys werent rookies like you and as far as the Chinese, we really dont even know the full story bout their sailing prowess. As far as vitamin c, that was mostly a european problem since many tropical and chinese fruits are loaded with it and you can dry fruits and not lose the vitamin c. Fish are also a source of most needed nutrients and the double hulled "junks" and polynesian trimarans ere great for luring fish into the amidships area. This is a neat feature of tris , they are great fishing platfroms

Im building a curragh and Im probably gonna sail it using a CRC ama and aka kit and well sail it in the ocean. The seagoing canoe is usually a really long boat to improve the mechanical advantage based on the wetted hull formula. The cats and trimarans of the island folk were very seaworthy and live-on-able.

European ships were often giant ocean going pigs. It took the Americans to first design decent sailing frigates. The polynesian theory was to sail in small fast boats and do the trips many times. They settled outpost islands in distance equivalents that rivaled the journey of Columbus .

distance equivalents that rivaled the journey of Columbus .
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Columbus was not dealing with the pacific ocean where distances is far greater to start with.

Second the DNA record show that not even one way fluke trips happen enough to show up in the native DNA on the west coast.

Once more to set up colonies you need ships able to do such journeys back and forth with a fairly small failure rate.

The technology was not there to do so.

There's a difference between deep-ocean sailing and coasting. Most seafaring people were coasters over most of recorded history. They usually didn't get far out of sight of land, and not for more than a few days, from the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Indians, the Chinese, until the Spaniards and Portugese on the one hand and the Polynesians on the other (the Polynesians were first). You need specialized ships for long ocean voyages, and most people didn't develop them.

It's my impression that the Chinese were pretty much coastal sailors too--they may have made some big junks, but they weren't particularly open ocean seaworthy, as far as I can recall--their fleets kept getting destroyed when they tried to invade Japan. On theo other hand, looking at a globe, they're already fairly far north and they could have simply sailed along the coast, up Siberia, across the Bering Straits, and down the coast of Alaska to the Golden Gate--ample food, no water problems--the NW Coast Indians were probably in touch with Siberia anyway, and Eskimos had Siberian Eskimo relatives, so it's not a great stretch.

Betty Meggers, a prominent and generally well-regarded 50s and 60s Mesoamerican archaeologist, was convinced the Chinese had reached the Americas in preclassic (pre 200AD) times, based on some fairly complex cosmological similarities and iconographic similarities in pottery, design, and monuments. For example, Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, the sky god and rain bringer, goes back well into the Classic and before (much earlier than someone suggested above), and is analogous to the sky serpent/dragon, rain bringer in Chinese cosmology, as are the sttributes of the four (or five) directions. Pretty much no one else, though, has agreed with Meggers' analysis.

could have simply sailed along the coast, up Siberia, across the Bering Straits, and down the coast of Alaska to the Golden Gate--ample food, no water problems--the NW Coast Indians were probably in touch with Siberia anyway, and Eskimos had Siberian Eskimo relatives, so it's not a great stretch.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
You do know the kind of weather the bering straits is known for?

You would need a very very seaworthy ship design to deal with those straits.

I know you think you're being sarcastic, but -- ironically -- you're not too far from the truth. Those island people certainly wren't "superhuman", but just as certainly their maritime navigation abilities were light years ahead of what was happening in Europe. The Polynesians were (still are) probably the best sailors the world has ever known. They could navigate in waters where a European such as ole Kit Columbus would be frantically searching for his sextant and compass rose.

I don't know where you get the idea that Europeans were in any sense superior to the people that they eventually conquered. They had guns, that made a big difference. They also had tools of steel. That made a tremendous difference. And they brought with them on their rat-infested ships and their lice-ridden bodies all the diseases to which they had become immune but which helped lay low the natives. Cortez and Coronado were flabbergasted when they saw the cities of Meso-America. There was nothing in Europe that could even approach the magnificence and splendor of places like Tiochtitlan [help me with the spelling here, fbaezer! ] Not even Rome could compare to what they found here.

Don't forget also that the Chinese had discovered the secret of magnetic north long before Europeans twigged to the idea of a compass. Had Marco Polo not been welcomed to the court of Kublai Khan, there's no telling how long before anyone in Europe would have invented a compass for use on ships. Those Vikings would have to stick to sailing within sight of land, as they generally did except for the known roads to Iceland and, later, Greenland.

You're talking through your hat, Bill.

ma: Tenochtitlan (present-day Mexico City)

Lord and I mean lord the Europeans had higher mathematics and the skill to combine that ability into their navigation and navigation is not some magic art form it need to be develop over centuries.

Europeans of that time had also a far better understanding of the universe in general then your island people and unlike the nonsense story that Columbus have to convince people that the world was round it was then understood for many centuries that the world was indeed round and the size was known since the Greek times.

Columbia problem was that he was under the impression that the world was far smaller then the true value found by the Greeks and therefore you could sail to China by going East and he had a hard time convincing people he was right and the Greeks was wrong.

In any case the Europeans was indeed greatly superior in knowledge to your wonderful and amazing islands people sailors.

You don't know a whole lot about navigation, Bill. Europeans were pretty good at latitude, but pretty ;poor at longitude. It wasn't until the invention of accurate chronometers three centuries after Columbus that European navigation really became a science. Before that, dead reckoning had too much emphasis on the "dead"--it was quite possible for Europeans to be several hundred miles off, if not more, and end up dead. Polynesian navigation was totally differently based, and relied on an intimate--and extensively mapped--kn owledge of winds and currents--they had "maps" of the Pacific, which were not recognized as such by Europeans, which conisisted of networks of flexible sticks and shells, rather than marks on paper. Look at a map of the Pacifric--you're off a dozen miles and you have no hope of hitting the islands you're heading for--or anything else for thousands of miles. The Europeans missed, the Polynesians didn't, from Australia to New Zeaqland to Samoa and Tahiti and Hawaii. Different system. Dikfferent sophistication--and better sophistication, under the conditions they were dealing with.

Sorry I know all about the H1 to H3 and how that did end up solving the longitude problem and I also know of the work done to solve that problem by plotting the moon orbit in detail and taking moon sightings and then using some very very heavy mathematic. There were a number of other attempts to solve this problem one by using not our moon but the moons of the outer planets orbits to get a time check compare to Paris. That method in fact gave great results on land but was excessively hard for the sailors to deal with on shipboard.

I question therefore if you know more on this subject then I do!!!!!!!!!!

Oh, the normal way the "dumb" Europeans found tiny islands was knowing their latitude they plotted a course that would take them without too must question either far east or west of their target and then follow the island latitude line to the island in question

Still think you know more then I do on the subject by the way?

In any case your claims that Polynesian knew their longitude by knowledge of winds and current is on it face is nonsense in my opinion. Side note the dumb Europeans also try plotting the differs in the magnetic field and true north in the same manner you are claiming that the Polynesian used wind and current and it did not work out for then either.

Thx, Jack.

Y'know . . ignorance is one thing. But arrogant ignorance, masquerading as knowledge, can get on a person's nerves after a while.

Bill, latitude and longitude is A system of navigation. It's not THE system of navigation. Polynesians didn't use those terms, nor did they think in those terms. They got where they were going a thousand years before Europeans got there. And, incidentally, it was a Polynesian who guided Capt. Cook across the Pacific, using traditional Polynesian navigation, and took Cook to islands he himself had never been to, using those methods. There's more than one way to skin a cat. Or sail a ship.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polynesian_navigation
http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/1999-05/wayfinders.html

Give me a break there is no magic in navigation and you are talking about nothing but magic with your nonsense of the Polynesian methods.

Oh I read one link you gave and it gave zero hard information on this wonderful claim methods of navigation.

I am surprise at Wikipeda for allowing this level of nonsense. They might had used birds fly ways or they might had used waves or ..............

The writers of this article could not find their way to their own bathroom using the information given.

Polynesian boat building skills were , in most ways measurable, superior to European. boats. and the Innuit would sail into the Bering Sea for their routine hunting.

The European way of boat building invests itself in a large pig of a boat while Polynesian craft are sleek and fast. The Polynesians first dioscovered the mathematical relationship of length and wetted surface = top speed .
European Carracks Caravelles, GAlleons and Hulks were fairly sloppy sailing boats and weve got an ample supply of them on the sea bottom. Bill confuses "bulk" with technology.

I just caught this from Bills yesterday posts
Youd be waay wrong in that Bill. There is evidence from arceological and mDNA that there was contact twixt Polynesians and the AMericas.

Youd be waay wrong in that Bill. There is evidence from arceological and mDNA that there was contact twixt Polynesians and the AMericas
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Give me links on this claim...................