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A California teenager sails alone across the Atlantic Ocean after picking up sailing earlier this year. Last summer, Cal Currier and his three brothers started a summer camp together and afterward, he began thinking about what he was going to do this summer. In January, he made a list of 15 ideas of what he might want to do and one item on the list was sailing solo across the Atlantic Ocean.
Cal comes from a long line of sailors; his father and grandfather are both transatlantic sailors. And while his father was immediately on-board with the idea, his mother needed some convincing. So after a couple of long conversations, it was decided: he was going to become the youngest person to solo sail across the Atlantic from west to east at 16-years-old. But first he was going to need to find a boat and then he would have to learn how to sail it.
The teen was fortunate to find a man in Connecticut who had been preparing his boat, The Argo, for a solo Atlantic crossing, but grew too old to make the journey and was happy to sell it to an adventurous young man wanting to make the trip. On June 27th, just a few months after first learning to sail, Cal set off from Massachusetts headed for western Europe. And 28 days and 4-thousand miles later, he arrived in Lagos, Portugal. The teen says that the trip wasn’t all that difficult physically, but it did test his mental strength. And the experience has taught him that he actually enjoys sailing more with other people and he may be up for another long sail, but next time he’ll have some company.