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Monday, March 9, 2015

Amphibious car longest sea crossings

After the journey I have been asked several times "Among different amphibious cars, where stands Amphibear with its Senegal - Cape Verde crossing?" Obviously car can drive on the roads and nothing to measure there. As I found out, it is not easy to answer question at all. Amphiclopedia is the most comprehensive online database of all amphibious vehicles thanks to Hans Rosloot hard work. However, there is no list of longest amphibious sea crossings.  No matter, the gold medalist we know without it. Gold medal belongs to Ben Carlin, Half Safe. Their first Atlantic leg Halifax - Flores Island (Azores) was 2720 km long. Atlantic third leg Faial Island - Madeira Island was 1208 km long and they survived hurricane. For sure, their Pacific crossing legs were long also.

Amphibious auto with second longest crossing after Half Safe is Amphibear. First leg in Atlantic was 760 km St Louis, Senegal - Praia, Santiago Island, Cape Verde. So Amphibear gets honorable silver medal by available information today.
In one category it is even gold medal. Sailors have different categories for solo crossings and crossings with crew. Amphibear did solo crossing.

Third place is difficult to determine. We all know adventures of La Tortuga and La Tortuga II from Frank and Helen Schreider in America and Indonesia.  Or we can learn about russian expedition over Artic Ocean with amphibious vehicles on ice (this is more polar ice expedition than sea voyage)

You can also learn about amphibious Land Rover crossings  over Irish Sea and Bering Strait. Naturally, as Amphibear crossed Gibraltar Strait, there are a lot of strait crossings with different amphibians and even more attempts.

Dobbertin Surface Orbiter did drive on Caribbean Sea and in other places during the journey in North and South America 5000 km on water. Detailed leg information however can not be found online. By map it seems that most of it were shorter legs from island to island. We must not forget one time projects also, like Cuban emigrants setting their trucks afloat with bunch of barrels and crossing from Cuba to Florida over 200km. So the bronze medal belongs to Dobbertin Surface Orbiter or La Tortuga or anonymous group of Cuban emigrants, hard to say.

Browsing through Amphiclopedia you can find huge variety of different vehicles. Big part of which are military, big part are boat based. The last should measure longest road trip for competition, I suppose.  Military vehicles are mostly meant for short missions. So it seems that even modest 760 kilometers with car on Ocean means high ranking among amphibious car sea crossings.

All distances measured in Google Earth directly from point to point.