So far, the five Swiss sailors aboard the sun21 have not run into trouble the way Giovanni da Verrazano did.He sailed through the narrows between Brooklyn and Staten Island without guidance from computers, cellphones or a sophisticated navigation system. The latter-day adventurers glided through on Saturday without fear of Indians like the ones who, according to some accounts, wound up eating Verrazano. But that was on a later voyage.
Adventurers have tried many ways to cross the Atlantic. The Swiss sailors rode on a specially built solar-powered catamaran, a 45.9-foot-long craft with 3,600 pounds of batteries to store power drawn from the sun. The claim they staked is to pilot the first motorized vessel to cross the Atlantic without oil or steam power.
They say they drove their 11-ton boat on the energy needed to light 10 100-watt light bulbs. Their typical speed was 3.5 knots.
The crew — a historian, a doctor-turned-environmentalist, a biologist, a shipbuilder and a professional skipper — followed what they said was Columbus’s route to Martinique, with a stopover in Morocco. They left Chipiona, Spain, on Dec. 3.
Unlike Columbus, they did not depend on the wind. Their vessel has two engines that can go up to 107 nautical miles a day in good weather.
“We did it,” Beat von Scarpatetti, the historian of the group, declared yesterday, sounding more like Lindbergh than, say, Columbus.
They docked at the Nichols Great Kills Park Marina, in Gateway National Park on Staten Island, on Saturday. The sun21 spent yesterday rocking gently in the water and soaking up the sun. Today the crew will lift anchor and depart for Manhattan, where the sun21 will be met by the consul general of Switzerland, Christoph Bubb, among others.
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