"We went on sailing through the Red Sea, when my friend Ota fell asleep while helming and we got into the path of a tanker, which has a braking distance of about 25 kilometers when moving. Of course they saw us, but they couldn't dodge us, as these ships are incredibly big, so they hit us. The fore wave tossed us away, but it hit the mast, the side of the ship, which was torn away from the berth. The ship became a wreck in a second, no mast, no sails, and the engine flooded with water. We somehow got everything sealed up, but we had no mast and the sails were torn. We had to build the mast out of a spar and then we sailed that wreck 400 km to Sudan, where I sold the ship for $3,000. The locals believed they could fix it, and $3,000 wasn’t much money there. We crossed the desert to Khartoum and then flew to Prague."
"The world changes. It was in a span of about sixteen or eighteen years when I first went to Panama, and then the Galapagos. The first time we were there, with that Argo - which is a boat - there were just deserted fishing villages with no tourism. A few boats in which the native fishermen were going out fishing. The second time we got there, there were five huge boats, the ones with five floors that can take five thousand people, around fifteen to twenty kilometers from the Galapagos. These ships are unbelievable and there were thousands and thousands of tourists coming day and night. Only in those five ships there could have been around twenty-five thousand tourists, motor boats were coming to the island day and night so tourists could take pictures of giant tortoises having sexual intercourse, horrible. That's when I actually realized how twisted the world was getting. I was lucky enough to experience the world at a time when it wasn't so rich, when life was much more modest. From what I see since 2013, if the world continues like this, it has no chance of surviving. When I was in high school, we were taught that there are two billion of us in the world. In one generation, within sixty, sixty-five years, this number has quadrupled. It's growing exponentially. It's not just the fact that there are more people, but there's more waste, more smog, more of everything that is negative or has a negative impact on our lives."
"An avenue of elm trees was being cut down, I don't remember whether it was in Hodonín or in Kyjov. I found out about it, I made an agreement with the mayor to buy a part of the avenue, the wood had a diameter of about one meter. The only sawmill in Czechoslovakia at that time was in Ostrožská Nová Ves, where they cut the wood into ten centimeter thick boards. I let them dry and then cut them into the diameters I needed according to the plan. I started building the boat on the eleventh floor of an apartment building at my friend's flat, where we glued all the ribs for the whole boat together, which is fundamental. Then we used ropes to get the ribs down. I took them to a workshop I rented from a former cabinetmaker and I built the boat there for seven years."
Oldřich Karásek was born on January 22, 1933 in Brno as the older of two children to his mother Anděla, nee Mužíková, a Czech woman from Vienna who had Austrian citizenship, and his father Oldřich Karásek. His father ran a painting company in Brno. His parents got divorced in 1944, and his father was arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo in the same year. After the war his mother was displaced and later she returned to Czechoslovakia. Oldřich Karásek joined the Boy Scouts after 1945. He graduated from a realgymnasium and later from an electrical engineering school. Most of his life he worked as a technical clerk. After the mandatory military service, he dedicated his time to sports, first to top-level mountaineering, later to aviation (he used to fly a hang glider and a glider). In 1968 he became fascinated by yachting. In 1988 he emigrated on a self-built two-masted vessel, which he used to sail to Australia. In 1991 he returned to Czechoslovakia while still devoted to yachting. He summarized his experience in a book called Jak (po)řídit loď (How to get/sail a boat). He went on a five-year journey around the world with doctor Karin Pavlosková, which she later described in her books. In 2007, his yacht collided with a tanker and the crew had to survive for a week sailing on the shipwreck. He had been married three times, and at the time of filming he was living with his last wife Iva in Břestek near Uherské Hradiště. He died on February 17, 2024.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
