Victor Mooney prepares his rowboat for a transatlantic voyage from Goree Island near Dakar, Senegal, to New York in this 2006 file photo.NEW YORK – A tenacious New Yorker who has been trying for nearly a decade to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean, but has been plagued by bad luck, shipwreck and maybe a little early naiveté, has embarked on his fourth attempt at the epic journey.
Victor Mooney, 48, of Brooklyn, left Wednesday from the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa for a roughly 3,000-mile row to the British Virgin Islands.
After landing in April or May, he plans to resupply his tiny boat and row another nearly 1,800-plus miles to New York. Along the way, he’ll live on freeze-dried military rations, a variety of herbs and green tea and whatever fish he can yank from the sea.
“I feel very confident,” Mooney said by telephone last week from a marina in Maspolamas, Gran Canaria. “Everything is checked, double-checked. … I’m ready.”
This impossibly long, lonely path is one Mooney has set out on before. But so far, his tale reads less like “The Old Man and the Sea,” and more like the one told in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” about a land-obsessed monarch who stubbornly builds his castle on swampland only to have it repeatedly sink or burn.