12.27.2007

the amazing junk boat journey

This is a crazy story looking back at the six men who sailed 6,000 miles across the Pacific from Taiwan to San Francisco in 1955: A Junk's journey: Family wants to save craft that sailed across Pacific in 1955. Five Chinese fishermen and an American consular officer—Paul Chuan-Chun Chow, Reno Chia-Lin Chen, Marco Yu-Lin Chung, Benny Chia-Cheng Hsu, Loo-Chi Hu and Calvin E. Mehlert—sailed for 112 days, surviving a typhoon and a gale on a crazy quest to enter an international yacht race, and, in effect, obtain passage from Taiwan. Today, fifty-two years later, one of the junk-mate's daughters is working to commemorate that triumphant voyage and jump-start a restoration effort bring the boat they sailed on back to life. It's a pretty incredible story—somebody should make a movie about these guys...

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