[Applause]
[Music]
I’m an adventurer granted this is a
self-proclaimed title as there is no
adventurer certificate diploma or even a
box to mark on your driver’s license
application now I seriously doubt that I
am your stereotypical image of an
adventurer big strong physically
intimidating to polar bears quite the
contrary
I’m only physically intimidating to a
few skittish cats and maybe some
Labrador puppies nor do I buy into the
macho bravado of I’m fearless oddly
enough my fears of being struck by
lightning while flying or eaten by
sharks while swimming are completely
counter to the story that I’ve come to
share with you today now my adventure
began on New Year’s Day 2015
as I boarded a plane for Japan with a
one-way airline ticket I intended to
come back to the United States but by a
less conventional method now a typical
return from Tokyo to Los Angeles in the
comfort of a Airbus 380 requires about
12 hours of flight time for my mode of
aerial transportation it was going to
take a lot longer be less predictable
and added levels of danger one would not
experience seated in row 56 seat D my my
return across the ocean would be
achieved by floating through the sky in
a helium-filled balloon think of the
movie up this is the stuff of children’s
dreams and jules verne novels it is a
very simple aircraft drop ballast
overboard typically in the form of sand
and you go higher open a valve in the
top of the balloon to let a little
helium out and you go lower the idea is
to use these two finite resources helium
and sand in order to navigate to a
suitable landing site prior to depleting
one or either of them completely now
because of the simplicity of this
aircraft
there’s the complexity of
do you get it to go where you want it to
go well there is no engine on a balloon
so our only means the propulsion is the
wind and the wind will vary in direction
and speed at various altitudes through
the atmosphere so our job was being able
to go up or down is to find a wind that
meets our needs on track and speed to
meet our goal so the large helium filled
balloon is what gave us our lift the
wind is what propelled us along and this
small lightweight capsule would provide
our housing for the entire journey now
the forklift is there to give you an
ideas for the relative size of this
capsule the interior dimensions of this
capsule were about half the size of this
red carpet that I’m standing on right
now so imagine living in this space for
an entire week with someone else so it
definitely redefines the term close
friends well my close friend and
co-pilot for this Odyssey was Leonid to
Kiev from Russia now inside the capsule
you can see the interior dimensions
don’t give a lot of privacy however it
did protect us from the elements and it
housed everything that would be required
for our week-long camping trip in the
air we had food water heater satellite
phones navigation equipment and so you
don’t lose track on this talk we also
so this project took years of planning
and a lot of patience on waiting for the
right weather but once mother nature
finally provided the right weather
pattern for a trans-pacific attempt
Leonid and I were ready we inflated our
balloon with helium we loaded our
equipment and we launched from the south
of Japan in a town called saga now the
first 12 hours or so we flew along the
mainland of Japan going from saga up
towards Tokyo and from the very
beginning the bird’s eye views with this
aerial perch were absolutely stunning
and the map absolutely amazing flight
throughout by sunset we were passing
Ashley by Mount Fuji and a few hours
later we were 20,000 feet above the
ground looking down on the lights of
Tokyo as we left secured the security of
land that night with North America
thousands of miles downwind there was a
sense of the daunting task that was in
front of us because in a balloon the
only way to travel is downwind so unlike
a mountain climbing expedition that runs
into bad weather there is no returning
to base camp or waiting for the weather
to improve we have one shot with no
turning back
and failure truly was not an option now
we didn’t set out to conquer the Pacific
by balloon we set out to work in harmony
with Mother Nature hoping she would
allow us to cross this massive expanse
of beauty but as beautiful as it is it
is also a hostile and unforgiving
environment from our flight altitudes
the required supplemental oxygen to the
churning ocean below as a matter of fact
our search and rescue specialists said
that if we were to go down in the North
Pacific it could potentially take days
to get a ship to our last-known position
and even then it wouldn’t be finding a
needle in a haystack
it would be finding a needle in a field
full of haystacks so this definitely put
the dangers and possible consequences of
our flight into perspective but as we
continued to move eastward we weren’t
guided by a blind faith we actually had
a command center set up here in
Albuquerque man 20
hours a day it was like a NASA mission
so these guys are doing everything to
give us all the information that we
could possibly need with flight data and
changes in the weather to help us get
across so as we were propelled on this
invisible conveyor of wind the trick was
to move fast enough to not allow bad
weather to catch us but to move slow
enough to not catch bad weather in front
of us and the window in between these
two was very tiny it required a lot of
precision flying at this point Leonid
and I were very far removed from the
rest of the world but we quickly adapted
to our new surroundings and actually
began to form daily routines and one of
our rituals was for every 10 degrees of
longitude that we traveled we’d split a
chocolate bar now to give you an idea on
our track the Pacific is about 1/3 the
circumference of the earth or 10 to 12
chocolate bars across so so so as our
chocolate bar supply dwindled our
success hopes our hopes success rose so
it is hard to imagine how small you feel
as day after day you know that you’re
moving towards land but the horizon of
water is seemingly endless in all
directions
the GPS lets you know that you’re moving
forward by the numbers but you don’t
feel it because you’re part of the wind
so hour after hour day after day as we
were trekking forward across the Pacific
in a beautiful flight there was no
engine to disrupt the silence and the
solitude so if Heaven is standing on a
cloud we had arrived as we peacefully
floated along day after day eating a
chocolate bar or two we our
meteorologist was tasked with looking at
the weather models updating his forecast
and then relaying that information to us
so his job was to develop a strategy to
find the best winds to get us towards
our target of getting across the ocean
and a typical text from him might say
something like for the
six hours you need to be at 16,000 feet
in order to achieve being in this
location later
if not we’ll need to adjust your
altitude so it was kind of like playing
a game of three-dimensional chess with
mother nature and as we went into our
seventh day of flying it was her move
and she began to stir it up a little bit
here about that time relatively close to
our position on the Baja Mexico in a
small surfing village there was a
tourist that blogged on his website that
said the night before there had been a
heavy rainstorm with a lot of thunder
and lightning and he had nightmares
through the night of the ocean rising
and his RV actually floating away so now
I’m sure it was a very unsettling night
for him however as he was having a
restless night sleeping I was watching
the same intense storm from my vantage
point north of the storm 18,000 feet
above the Pacific dangling from a
balloon now one of my worst fears is
thunderstorms and here I was close
enough to see the contour of every cloud
when the Lightning illuminated the sky
our target was the Mexican Baja and the
target of the storm that we paralleled
was the same it was like coincidentally
running into your worst enemy in the
it’s a terrible situation
very uncomfortable you know it won’t
last forever but still not not a fun
deal to go through so fortunately
through that night we never got close
enough to the storm to create any Wizard
of Oz flying house moments but it still
was a very long stressful sleepless
night but in the morning just before the
daybreak
the Sun the storm began to dissipate off
in the distance so we began to valve off
copious amounts of helium in order to
decrease our lift and initiate our
descent towards the Mexican coastline
all the wetter weather models were
indicating that we should be continuing
in an easterly direction as we got lower
however as we continue to drop lower and
lower the winds began to shift 90
degrees to the south and actually
paralleling us along the coast so we
need a ballast we didn’t have the
opportunity to be able to go to a higher
altitude to correct for this but as we
got lower we noticed that the sea was
relatively calm and our capsule was
built to float so we chose to make a
water landing four miles off of the
coast of Mexico now there is a reason
namely I have a strong propensity for
seasickness so as we Bob drowned in the
sea with our capsule on its side
awaiting rescue I was turning pale paler
and and reliving my last few meals on
board but thankfully not long after we
had landed we were rescued by a group of
very entertained Mexican fishermen they
were looking for shrimp and instead they
caught an American a Russian and a
balloon so who’s gonna believe their
fishing story right well I was seasick
sleep-deprived and seven days no showers
smelly I was also the happiest I had
ever been in my life our remarkable
journey across the world’s largest body
of water had taken us nearly 6700 miles
in a hundred and sixty hours breaking
the distance records and their duration
records for gas balloons now very few
people can identify with a transoceanic
balloon flight but we can all identify
with fear and our flight incorporated
some of the most widely held and obvious
fears there are fear of death flying
Heights lightning falling drowning the
dark enclosed spaces the unknown failure
almost everyone can identify with one or
many of the fears that we had to address
however once we put aside the perceived
dangers and figured out how to deal with
the real dangers we knew we were ready
for our adventure because you see fear
can paralyze or prompt you it doesn’t
decide you do and by a by taking a very
calculated risk mitigating approach we
actually had an enjoyable journey and a
successful adventure now we all have
personal and maybe professional bucket
lists of things that we hope to achieve
and I hope that when you start checking
off those bucket list items that you
take the self-proclaimed title of
adventure use your fears to prompt
action and enjoy the journey isn’t that
what life is all about [Applause]