NEW YORK - The first leg of his trans-Atlantic journey has just begun. After two years of preparations and set-backs, the 24-foot boat was loaded into a container to be taken out to sea. Victor Mooney watches as the handmade, 3,000 pound rowboat is loaded out of his drafty Brooklyn work shed.
For six months he has been sawing, hammering, and painting—using shop skills dating back to 7th grade. For years he has been on a daily regime of doing yoga and using a rowing machine, interspersed with formal training in rowing and maritime safety. It started, innocently enough, with rowing trips around Long Island four years ago to raise awareness for AIDS. "During my last circumvention of Long Island and Manhattan a police captain came and said, 'If you get a larger boat you can go a few knots faster and go a little further.'"
It is not the first time a man has rowed across the Atlantic Ocean. If he succeeds, he will be the thirty-first. Many people have rowed to raise money for charity, and most have done it in less time.
Victor Mooney, however, would be the first on record to leave from Africa.
"I want to leave from Africa because that's the epicenter of this disease," said Mooney.
He plans to take the 3,000 mile journey in three legs, each lasting 60 days. He will spend the first 60 days on open seas to northern South America. From there he heads up to Miami and finally back to New York. The trip ends under the Brooklyn Bridge. "It is a historic trip," he said. "It is the route of the Middle Passage."
Mooney starts his trip on Goree Island in Senegal, once the holding place for captured Africans before they were taken to the United States as slaves. For Mooney, himself an African American, there is a connection between the concentration of AIDS in Africa today and the suffering Africans experienced hundreds of years ago when they were takes as slaves.
"When my ancestors came they didn't have a choice. We do, we have a choice," he said. This is a personal voyage for Mooney, one that started when his brother died of AIDS in the early 1980s. It took another death, that of the New York City Cardinal John O'Connor, who helped those with the disease, to solidify his plans for the trip.
A devout Roman Catholic, Mooney encourages abstinence as the best cure for AIDS. Named John Paul the Great, the boat honors the late Pope John Paul II who blessed Mooney during a visit he took to the Vatican in 2004.
Mooney also encourages people everywhere to get tested and governments to increase their funding efforts. "I believe it's preventable," he said.
His trip is largely educational. He has raised only about a tenth of the $30,000 he needs to take the trip in March. Most of the money will go to support his family—wife and child—who he will be leaving behind. Any money he raises above $30,000 will go to charities.
The little money Mooney has raised is largely from individual $10 donations—all it takes to get your name printed on the side of his boat. The largest money donation was $5,000 from Snapple, but many companies have donated materials and services—vital in Mooney's work on building and equipping his boat.
Mooney originally borrowed a boat from the Ocean Rowing Society but had to give it back when he couldn't afford the security deposit—days before he was set to leave last year. He then bought a do-it-your-self kit in Illinois, with the hope that someone else would put it together. When no one would, Mooney had no choice but to put his personal training on hold and start sawing.
The boat is a quirky combination of the homemade and the technologically equipped. Red paint hangs in large, frozen drops on the bottom of the hull and a single rope hanging from the side is there to support him when he has to hang off to clean the barnacles from the hull. Through donations, Mooney's boat is equipped with three satellite phones, a GES system, email, and solar panels.
Mooney insists he will not leave in March without the money he needs, but he does not seem worried. Starting with nothing Mooney has built, over the past two years, a legacy. However small, he has gotten donations from Dougie Fresh and Condoleezza Rice and received support from governments as far away as Brazil and England and as close as the Bronx.
With the trip now imminent Mooney shrugs off the dangers. "I'm praying God will give me calm seas. If the seas are too rough I will go inside and put down my anchors." If is gets really bad, Mooney adds, "I don't have a problem calling for help if that's what I need."
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