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Kon-Tiki Sails Again?

KeyserXSoze

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http://abcnews.go.com/wire/SciTech/reuters20040906_142.html
Kon-Tiki Replica to Sail, Study Pacific in 2005

Sept. 6, 2004 — By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent
OSLO (Reuters) - A replica of the Kon-Tiki balsa raft will sail the Pacific in 2005 to study mounting environmental threats to the oceans since Thor Heyerdahl made his daredevil 1947 voyage, organizers said on Monday.

One of Heyerdahl's grandsons will be among the six-strong crew for the trip from Peru aiming to reach Tahiti, about 310 miles west of the Raroia atoll where the Kon-Tiki ran aground after traveling 4,970 miles in 101 days.

Heyerdahl's original voyage defied many experts' predictions that the flimsy craft would break up and sink. He said it proved that ancient civilizations could have sailed the oceans with Stone Age technology.

"This time we want to highlight the environmental threats," expedition leader Torgeir Saeverud Higraff told a news conference of the trip sponsored in part by the U.N. Environment Program. "There have been many changes since the 1940s."

The forest in Ecuador where Norway's Heyerdahl found the balsa wood for the raft, for instance, has now been cut down by loggers. And global warming may be killing coral reefs and causing more frequent storms in the Pacific.

But not everything has got worse.

"We expect that oil pollution has been reduced because of tighter international laws," said biologist Dag Oppen-Berntsen. He would take water samples to study for traces of pesticides and other human chemicals that can damage marine life.

"People ask 'why don't you do this from a proper research ship?"' he said. "The reason is simply that we wouldn't get the same publicity for the research."

The new raft, called the Tangaroa after a Polynesian sea god, would be made of the same materials as the Kon-Tiki but include solar panels to help transmit pictures to the Internet. The Kon-Tiki was named after an Inca sun god.

The project would have a budget of 9,200 with the yet-to-be-built vessel due to leave the Peruvian port of Callao on April 28 -- the same day as Heyerdahl set out in 1947. Heyerdahl died in 2002 aged 87.

The original crew were five Norwegians and a Swede. So far, the new crew are just five, including a Swede. "We're one short. We still need a good navigator," Saeverud Higraff said.
 
Uhhh, I´d love to be on an expedition like this. But I suppose the fact that I can get lost walking down the street disqualifies me as a good navigator :D But just imagine doing this kind of thing, like Tim Severin has as well.
 
Santiago, Chile -- The Kon-Tiki2's two balsa rafts were adrift off the southern coast of Chile Thursday with 14 people aboard awaiting rescue after the expedition's Norwegian leader decided to end the attempt to reach the South American mainland.

The Chilean navy said it had diverted a merchant ship to the area and dispatched a P-3 maritime surveillance plane to establish the exact location of the rafts.

Like its famed predecessor, explorer Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki, the Kon-Tiki2 set out to show that South America's pre-Columbian inhabitants had the means to reach Polynesia.

The two rafts set sail from the Peruvian port of Callao on November 7 and reached Easter Island 43 days later. ...

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world...iki2-crew-adrift-off-south-america/ar-BBqARKC
 
This will be of interest to some of you: the monograph that preceded the full-length account of the Kon-Tiki.
It was published The Geographical Journal Vol. 115 No. 1/3, January-March 1950.

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When I was in my last year at junior school the Kon-Tiki was all the rage in the newspapers and on TV, maybe because 20 years had gone by, and there was a replica one on display in the school hall. I believe it was built in school but I can't remember helping make it.

It was as big as a car, awesome!
 
When I was in my last year at junior school the Kon-Tiki was all the rage in the newspapers and on TV, maybe because 20 years had gone by, and there was a replica one on display in the school hall. I believe it was built in school but I can't remember helping make it.

It was as big as a car, awesome!
I remember seeing a doco on TV in the 70s about it. They showed old footage and interviewed some people. Then there was some stuff about somebody who tried to recreate the Kon-Tiki voyage.
 
I remember seeing a doco on TV in the 70s about it. They showed old footage and interviewed some people. Then there was some stuff about somebody who tried to recreate the Kon-Tiki voyage.

That might have been Heyerdahl himself, with Tigris in 1979:
BBC Genome helps out

I watched this as a very young kid at my grandparents' house. There was also a film of his Ra expedition in 1972, if you go back that far.
 
A later expedition than Kon Tiki, but I'd never heard of a UFO sighting.
The sighting would have been on 11 June - circa 25 days into the 57-day voyage from Morocco to Barbados.

Unfortunately, the news article doesn't specify whether the morning sighting occurred before or after sunrise. It mentions the moon being visible, which suggests it may well have been before sunrise (i.e., at night).

The helmsman would have been looking westward. This plus the generally north-to-south path described, would be consistent with American launches from Canaveral and the general tendency to track non-intelligence satellites southward over the Atlantic.

The reported sighting duration ("several minutes") is far too long for a meteor descent.

The report also states the final "flash" occurred when the object had descended to the horizon or perhaps even passed beyond the horizon. If the object was a satellite or other orbiting object this flash could well have been a reflection of the rising or imminent sun (akin to an Iridium flare).
 
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