Kenichi Horie is a legend of Japanese sailing. In 1962 he famously sailed alone across the Pacific from Japan to San Francisco. In 1996 he set out to cross the same ocean in the other direction, this time with no wind and no fuel, only the sun.
His boat, Malt’s Mermaid, was a slim, cigar-shaped craft just 8.7 m (9.5 yards) long and weighing only about 370 kg. Its deck was covered with roughly 12 m² (130 ft²) of solar panels driving an electric motor. Much of the hull was built from recycled aluminium, equivalent to more than 20,000 drink cans.
Horie left Salinas, Ecuador on 20 March 1996, passed the Galápagos, Hawaii and Japan’s Ogasawara Islands, and reached Tokyo on 5 August: 16,092 km (10,000 miles) in 138 days. It was not an easy trip. The propeller got tangled in fishing nets, his electric water distiller broke down, and a lone boat in mid-Pacific is a real lightning risk. Guinness World Records lists it as the fastest crossing of the Pacific by solar power.
Horie kept experimenting with clean boats. In 2008, at nearly 70, he crossed from Hawaii to Japan in a wave-powered boat. Malt’s Mermaid is now on display at the Kotohira-gu shrine in Shikoku, a shrine traditionally dedicated to seafarers, where this photo was taken.
Technical data
| Builder / skipper | Kenichi Horie (Japan), sponsored by Suntory |
|---|---|
| Hull | Cigar-shaped, ~8.7 m long, partly recycled aluminium (≈ 20,000 cans) |
| Weight | ~370 kg (813 lb) |
| Solar | ~12 m² (130 ft²) of panels driving an electric motor |
| Voyage | Salinas (Ecuador) → Tokyo, 20 March – 5 August 1996 |
| Distance / time | 16,092 km (10,000 mi) in 138 days, solo |
| Record | Guinness: fastest crossing of the Pacific by solar power |
| Today | On display at Kotohira-gu shrine, Shikoku |
Photo (Kotohira-gu, 2021): Nesnad / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
Sources: Guinness World Records · Kids Web Japan (1996)