To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video There is no one to save you if you run into trouble sailing past Point Nemo. No shipping lanes run through the most isolated place on Earth, roughly 1,700 miles from land. Sure, the southern tip of Chile is to the east, and
New Zealand is west. But at 3,000 miles away, these aren’t even the closest places to make landfall. You’d be drifting for days before seeing one of the three closest spots of land – the frozen Maher Island at the edge of Antarctica , or the uninhabited rocky outcrops of Ducie Island in the Pitcairns, and Motu Nui off Easter Island. It’s so remote it’s closer to the astronauts aboard the
International Space Station orbiting 253 miles above the Earth’s surface than any other human. The space lab is just seven years away from being buried in the depths of this unmarked spot when
NASA retires it in 2031. It will join more than 260 pieces of space debris dumped into the 4,000 metre deep waters around Point Nemo since 1971. You might wonder why anyone would want to visit this space graveyard where all you can see is the seemingly endless miles of waves. But that’s exactly where 62-year-old Chris Brown and his son Mika, 32, have been trying to reach since they departed Puerto Montt, Chile, on March 12. After five years of planning, Chris finally made it just as a
Hurricane was blowing in. The pair from Harrogate, Yorkshire, became ‘the first people to ever swim at Point Nemo’ when they arrived on March 20, Chris said in an
Instagram post. ‘Having stood with a flag at the other Poles, I thought it would be a good idea to get in the water’, he wrote.
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missile strike A video shows Chris holding a Garmin showing the coordinates before throwing himself backwards off a dinghy into the 9°C water for a 20-minute swim. While in the two-metre high waves, he and Mika held up four maritime signal flags spelling N.E.M.O. ‘I didn’t consider this to be as dangerous as my expeditions to Africa or Antarctica’, Chris said. ‘The obvious danger was that you’re miles from anywhere on the sea, and you’re going to be a long way from any of the shipping lanes, so if there was a problem with the boat, help would be a long time coming.’ It took Chris and Mika 10 days to sail there onboard a diverted charter yacht called Hanse Explorer. That’s roughly the same amount of time it took one sailor eight days to reach land again after their boat broke down during the Vendee Globe race in 2016. Although research vessels and ocean sailing races sometimes pass through the vicinity of Point Nemo, ‘it is possible that no human has ever passed through the specific coordinates’, experts have previously said. Chris had already visited five of the eight points of inaccessibility – spots furthest from either land or sea – in Antarctica, Australia, Africa, North America and South America. Now he has just the Artic pole and the Eurasian pole, near China’s border with Kazakhstan, left to visit. ‘I am really chuffed to have visited six of the eight poles of inaccessibility’, Chris said. ‘I think my next trip will be a little less arduous, maybe somewhere that the most difficult task facing me will be choosing which beer to have at the pool bar.’ Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk . For more stories like this, check our news page . Privacy Policy