Flats boat crew in high spirits
A blog post published Monday let slip the first hint of pessimism from behind the facade of unshakable bravado.
"Hopefully we won't get stuck in Greenland."
So wrote Ralph Brown, the 50-year-old Marine veteran who, with his brother, Robert, is attempting to complete the first trans-Atlantic crossing in a flats boat to raise money for wounded soldiers. The pair from Central Florida docked at the Charleston Harbor Marina at Patriots Point before departing July Fourth.
The post on crosstheatlantic.com alluded to the brothers' financial worries, with Ralph Brown admitting that at that point they did not have enough money to cover expenses for the voyage.
On Friday, the swagger was back.
"Failure is not an option," Brown said repeatedly in an interview from Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he and his 51-year-old brother were in port. "If it sounded like failure was an option, I certainly apologize ... to anybody that may have read that (post)."
Yet the financial outlook was no sunnier. Brown estimated the expenses for the trip would amount to $125,000.
To date, Brown said he had raised almost $43,000 from sponsors and "somewhere near three or four thousand dollars — I don't know the figure off the top of my head" from sales of commemorative T-shirts.
Where will the rest of the money come from? Brown expressed faith that people who "have the same love (for military troops) as I have" will donate money to the cause and that corporate sponsors will sign on in the interest of good publicity.
He said his goal was to avoid using money from T-shirt sales to fund the trip, and would not say whether he would draw from personal finances to sustain it. "(I will dip) into whatever I need to dip into," he said.
Of course, the primary difficulties the brothers face are nautical. A flats boat commonly is used for fishing because it can operate in extremely shallow water, but Brown maintains the voyage is going smoothly.
"The boat's taking a beating-and-a-half and doing just beautiful," he said. The oceans have been "not bad at all," although the pair have been caught in three storms and faced swells of 4 to 6 feet, Brown added.
Including an uninterrupted, 440-mile leg from Boston to Halifax, the flats boat already has logged more than 2,600 miles on this voyage, all over ocean waters, Brown said.
The longest leg, from the Faroe Islands to London, will top 800 miles.
Brown said this leg will break his own Guinness World Record for the longest uninterrupted flats-boat ocean voyage, which he and his brother set with a 774-mile cruise in 2007.
The only hiccup has involved the bracket holding the spare motor, which the Browns have replaced twice.
Brown repeated his goal of raising $3 million for eight charities, with a focus on the Special Operations Warrior Foundation and the Wounded Warrior Regiment.
Regardless of the financial straits he's in, Brown argues support for the endeavor will mushroom as people begin to recognize its viability.
"In a couple of days, we'll be in Greenland," he said, "and all the naysayers will go, 'Wait a minute. They're in Greenland. They're not joking about this. This is a for-real deal.' ... And it is for real."
