The Atlantic is an ocean that is home to large animals such as sharks or whales. There are also ships or ocean liners that go from America to Europe or vice versa. But a few days ago, the US Coast Guard aboard the ship Valiant was speechless at what they saw and what they could never have imagined before: a man named Reza Baluchi, who sailed through these waters in a giant hamster wheel and wanted to use this “boat” to get from the North American country to London.
An event that took place last Saturday, August 26th. The US Coast Guard was traveling about 110 kilometers east of Tybee Island when they saw the man sailing in these conditions. So they were forced to arrest 44-year-old Baluchi from Florida, not for sailing per se, since it’s not a crime, but for trying to do something “A very unsafe journey that endangered his own health”as per police reports and collected by Iflscience.
The boat itself, a giant hamster wheel that Baluchi had built himself, was in the shape of a sphere, and he had designed it to “cross the Atlantic” and undertake a journey of thousands of kilometers alone, as this “means of transport” was used for this was designed “walk on water” and has compartments for storing Baloch belongings.
Reza Baluchi, the man who attempted to cross the Atlantic from the US to the UK on a giant hamster wheel
“Crews from the U.S. Coast Guard’s Seventh District ended Mr. Reza Baluchi’s apparently unsafe journey and rescued him from his improvised hydropod boat – as he called the hamster wheel he built – about 60 nautical miles off the coast of Georgetown before…Hurricane Idalia.” says the Coast Guard, which confirms that it handed Baluchi over to the police on September 1 and is now jointly pressing charges for “suspected criminal conduct.”
Balochi was no stranger to the Coast Guard. He had tried to make this journey more than once, and on all of them he had been detained by the authorities, and once he even had to be towed ashore by a guard ship. According to the New York Times, he had a similar boat on board in 2021 and had equipped it with a satellite phone, a solar panel, wetsuits, a filtration system and a supply of cereal and pasta.
“I will never give up on my dream,” this man told Fox 35. “I get stopped four or five times, but I never give up. My goal is not only to raise money for the homeless, for the coast guard, for the police and for the fire brigade. They’re in public service, they’re doing it for security reasons, and they’re helping other people.”