"I hated and feared and loathed the North Atlantic with all my guts"

Everyone has, I'm sure, heard some variation on the terribly cliched joke about the old man telling people about how tough life was as a kid. The most popular beginning the the "ten miles through snow, uphill each way, every day for school" bit.

While reading the paper today, I found a guy who's life actually reads a bit like that. And he's only 35 years old. This guy is named Dom Mee, and he is a former Royal Marines Commando who is now a full-time adventurer.

And when I say "full-time adventurer", I should actually qualify that to read "semi-successful full-time adventurer." His planned adventures are awe-inspiring in scope, and awesomely funny when they fail. Four years he planned to row a boat from Japan to California. With just one other person. Huh? Have you ever tried to actually row a boat? It is hard as hell just trying to cross a lake, let alone the ocean. I can't imagine the sort of effort it would take to handle a craft large enough to handle oceanic swells, let alone the work it would take just to keep yourself from being pushed well of course by the waves. But he went for it. And he seemed to be doing well. Until a trawler rammed his boat and sank it.

His other adventures have equally disastrous results. He was hiking in the Arctic wilderness and was gored by a wild ox. He broke four ribs while kayaking and had to paddle the next 400 miles with a piercing pain in his side.

But his latest undertaking is the one that really took the prize for dubious planning. He planned on crossing the North Atlantic sea, by himself, in a 14 foot boat. Sounds kind of scary, but not too crazy, huh? Oh, I failed to mention that he had no engine, and instead planned on crossing the North Atlantic, from Newfoundland to England, entirely on kite-power. That is correct. He tied a big kite to his boat and planned to have it pull him all the way across the ocean.

Hey, what could possibly go wrong?

Well, part of the problem was that he planned to do it all in thirty days, and after 39 days he was barely a quarter of the way there, so food was starting to run low. Hey, you can survive for another 70 days without food in the middle of the ocean, right? Oh, and then there was the issue of the after-effects of four different freaking hurricanes that hit him. Whoops.

As he so calmly says, "This was the first attempt to conquer the ocean wth kite power." Hmm, I wonder why that is? That's like having someone in WWII saying, "This was the first attempt to conquer the Nazi war machine with paper swords." Good luck with that goofball.

The money quote is this: "I believe in God, but I don't believe God can help those who don't show their faith through their actions." Hey, I think God is trying to tell you something through his actions: Stop trying to cross the goddamn ocean in a glorified life raft tied to kite you fucking idiot!