26/08/2026
Amazing!
On a Sunday morning in August 1962, a tiny black plywood sailboat slipped under the Golden Gate Bridge.
Nobody was expecting it.
At the tiller was Kenichi Horie, 23, from Osaka — and he had just sailed alone across the entire Pacific Ocean.
94 days. 5,000 miles. A boat 19 feet long, about the length of a pickup truck.
San Francisco police arrested him on the spot.
Horie had spent his teens obsessively studying winds, navigation, and meteorology, then handed a shipwright his own specifications and had the Mermaid built.
Japan refused him a passport — no one had ever tried to leave the country in a boat that small, so there was no rule for it.
He got no foreign currency either.
He left Nishinomiya harbor anyway on May 12, 1962, with no official clearance.
On board: rice, water, beer, about 200 cans of food, a radio, and some books.
He hid whenever another ship came near, because he had no papers.
He sailed through a typhoon and five separate storms, bailing water out of the hull until he was throwing up from seasickness.
Sharks circled the boat. A pod of whales kept him company for a while.
The loneliness got so bad he began talking to another person he kept seeing on deck — a person who was not there.
He later titled his book "Kodoku," the Japanese word for desperate loneliness.
Then San Francisco locked him up for arriving without a passport or a dollar.
Mayor George Christopher heard the story, had him released, handed him a 30-day visa, and gave him the key to the city.
Back in Japan, the same officials who had refused him a passport suddenly called him a national hero.
In his book, he explained the whole thing in one line: "I crossed it because I wanted to."
The Mermaid still sits in the San Francisco Maritime Museum.
Sixty years later, at 83, he sailed out of that same harbor and did it again in reverse — 69 days, the last three of them fighting a tide that kept pushing him back from Japan.
"I just crossed the finish line. I'm tired," he wrote in his blog on June 4, 2022, now the oldest person ever to cross the Pacific solo and nonstop.
