Felix Scholz
Having billed last year's North Flag as an intrepid watch, Tudor wasn’t?satisfied with merely talking a good game. To back up their claim, they enlisted modern-day adventurer James Bowthorpe – who made his name circumnavigating the globe in 175 days, on a bicycle – to put it to the test.Preparation for the reconnaissance trip.The expedition saw him strapping a North Flag to his wrist for a 300-mile exploration of the Hudson River late last year, to be documented and released as a film called The Hudson River Project.Bowthorpe spent just over a month kayaking from the head of the river at Lake Tear of the Clouds in the Adirondack Mountains, all the way down to the international shipping lanes of New York, gaining a seldom-seen perspective on the relationship between the waterway and the changing landscape around it.Boat-building in NYC.This alone would be quite a journey, but Bowthorpe did it in the depths of winter, adding snow, ice and freezing temperatures to the equation. And he did it in a boat he made himself from objects found on the streets of New York City. The former furniture designer took eight days to gather the materials for his boat and craft the aluminium-hulled boat.Using the North Flag as a sun compass.Bowthorpe reports that his North Flag performed admirably on the journey emerging unaffected by cold or water, and unscathed from his brushes with the grade-four whitewater rapids. And it does all this while looking good and keeping time to COSC standards.
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