When solo racing around the world once isn't enough, you have to take a page out of Bernard Moitessier's book and just keep going. Norbert Sedlacek Koch, is an Austrian sailor who circumnavigated in 1996-98 aboard a 26-foot boat and who raced in the 2004-05 Vendee Globe solo nonstop race. Koch has even bigger sailing plans, however. He will be the solo skipper for an upcoming ambitious 34,000-mile sailing expedition that he and his team are calling the Ant Arctic Lab Challenge. On Sunday, July 29th, Koch will depart Les Sables D'Olonne in France aboard his custom 60-foot boat, Ant Arctic Lab, built by Innovation Yachts, and sail west across the Atlantic, through the Northwest Passage, south through the Pacific, around Cape Horn, all the way around the Southern Ocean, past Cape Horn again and return to his starting point. Koch plans to complete the lengthy passage solo and non stop.
Koch will get a healthy dose of the Arctic when traveling through the Northwest Passage and, though he won't go the Antarctic continent itself, he will experience the full fury of the Southern Ocean. The expected duration of the passage is six months.
