After 17 days at sea, a 15-year old Dutch girl threw down her anchor in the Dutch Island country of Sint Maarten [Saint Martin] after her first long stretch in an attempt to become the youngest person to sail solo around the world.
After sailing 2,200 nautical miles (2,532 miles) from the Cape Verde Islands, Laura Dekker arrived Saturday in Sint Maarten. For Dekker, this distance didn’t seem far, “It is strange, “ she wrote in her blog, ”To see land so soon again, but now that I am so close to it, I really cannot wait any longer to see Sint Maarten again.”
Dekker left in her boat Guppy from Gibraltar on Aug. 21 and waited two months for the end of the hurricane season on the Canary Islands. Now that she has crossed the Atlantic Ocean, the next leg of her voyage will be through the Panama Canal in April or May.
She told AP she had had a very nice trip; but it was not without difficulty. Last Friday, she wrote in her blog she had do a difficult repair job on her rudder. She first suspected a shark had eaten it, “but there were no bite marks so a shark probably was not the culprit. The blade had simply broken off,” she wrote.
After sailing 2,200 nautical miles (2,532 miles) from the Cape Verde Islands, Laura Dekker arrived Saturday in Sint Maarten. For Dekker, this distance didn’t seem far, “It is strange, “ she wrote in her blog, ”To see land so soon again, but now that I am so close to it, I really cannot wait any longer to see Sint Maarten again.”
Dekker left in her boat Guppy from Gibraltar on Aug. 21 and waited two months for the end of the hurricane season on the Canary Islands. Now that she has crossed the Atlantic Ocean, the next leg of her voyage will be through the Panama Canal in April or May.
She told AP she had had a very nice trip; but it was not without difficulty. Last Friday, she wrote in her blog she had do a difficult repair job on her rudder. She first suspected a shark had eaten it, “but there were no bite marks so a shark probably was not the culprit. The blade had simply broken off,” she wrote.
