Two years ago from this coming Monday, I placed a travel bug called, "Sailing like Slocum" into a geocache in the coastal town of Baiona, on the western shore of Galicia, Spain. The Goal of the travel bug was "...to sail around the world just like Captain Joshua Slocum". Little did I know at the time that 2 years later, I too would begin a sailing adventure albeit much later in life than Slocum's. Thankfully my sailing will not be single-handed.
Joshua Slocum (1844-1909) was a Canadian seaman, and adventurer, a noted writer, and the first man to sail single-handedly around the world. He was born in Nova Scotia, where this bug got it's start. I was interested to find out that he was born in the same area of Nova Scotia as my Grant ancestors settled in.
For those of you who don't know, geocaching is a global scavenger hunt using handheld GPS. Travel bugs, are trackable items that are placed in the cache to be discovered, picked up and moved to other geocaches. Bugs are decorated in many different ways, depending on the theme.
Baiona, seemed to be the perfect place to release "Sailing Like Slocum" given the town's historical significance to the "new world". In 1493, the Pinta, one of the ships from Columbus' voyage to discover the New World returned to Europe and arrived in Baiona, making the town's port the first to receive news of the discovery of America.
Sailing Like Slocum, has travelled an estimated 3,600 n.m. Given that most of this time has been spend travelling on land, it might be more appropriate to mark it's progress as 6,600 kilometers.
For the past couple of years, the bug has made it's way from Spain, to Germany and Holland. Two years later, Sailing Like Slocum is located in the tiny village of Jannum, in the Netherlands, population 60.
Like us, this bug is hoping it will be on the water very soon again.
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