Peter Lukursky
Australian native educated in Mechanical Engineering (BE Sydney University) and Law (QUT). I believe I have what it takes to see this project through.
I think we all must ask ourselves a very simple question. How much do we really need? When I bought my first boat Long Reef, the boat with which I started this big adventure in 2010, it had a lot of stuff in it that I just did not need. I needed a safe home, a place to sleep, a place to prepare food and eat and that’s about it. With Freedom, my boat now, the principle is still the same but now it’s in a tighter space. KISS. KEEP IT SIMPLE SAILOR.
Our Motivation
With climate change as an ever-increasing threat, we owe it to the planet and to our children’s future to undertake ventures such as this. To challenge boundaries and to show it can be done and to get these ideas mainstream.
What is the Elcano Challenge
In a nutshell; to sail the world carbon free.
Background
The Elcano Challenge was conceived by the famous Jimmy Cornell, a man that has been pivotal in the sailing community for more than 40 years. It was named after Juan Sebastion Elcanco, the navigator of the Magellan Voyage who completed the world’s first circumnavigation in 1522, 500 years ago.
Of course, for any hundreds of years, people have sailed the world carbon free but in order for the general sailing public to wholly embrace the concept in the present, it needs to be done in reasonable comfort and at reasonable cost. To prove this, Jimmy set sail in a fully electric modern boat with modern conveniences in 2021. Unfortunately, after careful monitoring of the boat’s systems, and only after 3 weeks, he believed they would not succeed with their current design, and he abandoned the project. This should not be taken as proof that it cannot be done. There were many reasons for the abandonment of their project. We believe we can do it better. The time is ripe for another challenge!
Our Project
Essentially the project has 4 parts. These are:
- To build a lightweight aluminum sailing catamaran.
- I have the necessary qualifications and experience on the practical side to build the catamaran.
- Incorporate Green Technology from the ground up.
- Researching the green technology and separating the marketing hype from the facts is going to be a big part of the project. Indeed, this is where I believe one of Jimmy Cornell’s suppliers let him down which was the primary reason that he abandoned his challenge.
- To sail successfully around the world with the use of this Green Technology alone.
- Sailing is simply going to be the enjoyable part of the project which is what I have been doing for the past 14 years.
- Document this as a web series showing all the trials and tribulations of the crew and the equipment along the way.
- My YouTube channel “Sailing into Freedom” has 120,000 subscribers which is enough to get the message out there.
But this project is too big for one person. There must be a team.