Travel Grit

Thies Matzen and his wife Kicki Ericson have sailed Wanderer III — the same 30-foot wooden sloop that legendary cruising sailors Eric and Susan Hiscock wrote about — more than 150,000 bluewater miles, much of it in the Southern Ocean. This includes two years overwintering at South Georgia Island under brutal conditions and a voyage to Antarctica aboard the smallest traditionally planked wooden boa...

Sven Yrvind was beaten by his teachers, locked up for desertion and learned the value of books from a psychopath. Then he built a boat in his mother's basement and sailed into legend.  In this Travel Grit episode, the legendary Swedish sailor and boat builder talks about crossing the Atlantic in his self-built twenty-foot Bris, teaching navigation to islanders on Tristan da Cunha, rounding Cape Ho...

Sea G Rhydr bought her horse for a dollar. Then she rode him 5,000 miles across America. Sea started her voyage in Northern California in the fall of 2011 with two imperfect horses, a diamond hitch she'd learned the night before, and a canvas tablecloth painted with fairies and mushrooms for a ground cloth. Twenty-five months later she rode into Minot, Maine — bridle-less, flag in hand, walking pn...

At 62 years old, Hugo Vihlen sailed across the Atlantic Ocean in Father's Day—a boat just 5 feet 4 inches long. He hand-steered through hurricanes, ate quarter rations, and lost a kidney somewhere between Newfoundland and England. His record still stands 30+ years later. This is Hugo's second Atlantic crossing. In 1968, he sailed April Fool, a 6-foot sailboat, from Casablanca to Florida in 85 days...

Long Rider Gin Szagola and her wild Snowy Mountain Brumby, Fable, became the first person and horse to cross Australia coast to coast with no support vehicle or chase crew—4,400 kilometers over eight months. In this conversation, Gin shares the complete story: training a recently wild horse in just 90 days, crossing 1,000 miles of Nullarbor desert with volunteer-organized supply caches, dealing wi...

This is the only audio interview available on the internet with anyone who rode in the 1976 Great American Horse Race—the longest horse race in history. As the 50th anniversary approaches, this conversation preserves Tom Sites' voice and the incredible story of the Great American Horse Race of 1976. In 1976, Tom Sites—a Vietnam veteran haunted by severed heads and searching for peace—walked into a...

Reza Baluchi is attempting the impossible: running 21,000 miles across the world's oceans in a human-powered vessel called a hydropod — a 12-foot wheel he powers by running inside like a hamster wheel. Reza calls in from Taiwan at midnight, making final preparations for his fifth-generation hydropod. He plans to launch in December, heading south through the South China Sea, then west through the R...

Webb Chiles has sailed around the world six times and is the first American to sail alone around Cape Horn — one of the most dangerous stretches of water on earth. He's also completed one of the longest open boat journeys in modern times, sailing a 19-foot open sailboat across the Pacific Ocean and beyond. In this conversation, Webb talks about survival, resilience, and what keeps him going after...