I have not had the honour of meeting Jason, although I have met two of the people who accompanied him on various stages of his journey. Stevie Smith (who I will be seeing again, in Devon, tomorrow evening) was Jason’s original partner – the two of them pedalled (yes, pedalled, not paddled – their boat was propelled by a bicycle-type mechanism) across the Atlantic and the first stage of the Pacific. Stevie wrote a very entertaining and inspiring account of their journey in his book, Pedalling to Hawaii.
And Sher Dhillon, who pedalled the same boat, Moksha, across the Indian Ocean with Jason, now lives in San Francisco and helped me pack my provisions into my boat before my aborted Pacific attempt earlier this year.
So we have only one degree of separation, and hopefully I’ll get to meet Jason at some point. It would be surprising if our paths do not cross, as it is one of the perks of my ‘job’ that I get to meet people who have done all kinds of interesting things.
In the meantime, well done Jason, on a magnificent and epic achievement.
P.S. An update on the bean sprouter… thank you very much to all who were frantically Googling to find the mysterious square sprouter. As luck would have it (and what are the odds on this?!) I went to visit my dear friend Romy who has just moved into a property in the wilds of Wales, near the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth. She was showing me around one of her various barns, stacked high with her boxes of possessions, and there, perched on top of one of the boxes, was a seed sprouter – the exact same one I had been looking for. Spooky! That one was the Bergs Bio-Salad Sprouter, made in Germany, but does look very similar to the Being Fare sprouter suggested by a few people. But it was just so surprising and serendipitous to see it sitting there in a barn in Wales…
[photo: Jason Lewis]