Indian River County - Saturday March 18, 2023: On Saturday March 4, Canadian adventurer and sailor Markus Pukonen stepped ashore on North American soil at Youth Sailing Foundation’s waterfront marine park in Vero Beach for the first time since embarking on an around the world odyssey on July 15, 2015.
Markus received a rousing welcome from seventy YSF sailors, parents, volunteers and donors on-hand to listen to his fascinating talk about the trip. In the crowd where a sister and two nieces from British Columbia who had not seen Markus for seven years. What made this triumphal return even more remarkable is that Markus walked, biked, paddled, pogo-stick and sailed around the world unassisted by any machine-driven conveyance. Markus covered about 60,000 miles, or more than two times the circumference of the earth at the Equator.
Starting from his home in Toronto Markus walked, biked paddled and pogo-stick across Canada to Vancouver and then south to San Francisco. He crossed the Pacific via Hawaii on a sailboat, walked across Southeast Asia to the Himalayan Mountains in Nepal, then walked and biked to a port on the Southwest coast of India before embarking on his newly purchased 27-foot 1978 sailboat “Samudra” to sail to Vero Beach via the Cape of Good Hope, Ascension Island in the South Atlantic and the Bahamas.