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Hi Denis, thank you for asking. We are not doing experimental archeology. When it comes to Xu Fu, there have been two experimental archeology voyages, Kuno Knöbl's in 1974 and Tim Severin's in 1993. They tries to head directly across the Pacific, but neither made it to all the way to America and had to be rescued. Kuno made a best guess junk in Hong Kong and Tim a best guess bamboo raft in Vietnam. Very little archeological and historical evidence exists that can help understand what Xu Fu's vessel would have looked like in 210BC. So we don't try and go there. Instead we use a modern ocean rowing boat as a proxy, as it has the same performance charecteristics as an ancient vessel; slow, drifts a lot, difficult or impossible to row to windward, and for these reasons precarious to operate close to shore. We can use the ocean rowing boat to estimate how difficult Xu Fu's voyage would have been and better understand what challenges he would have faced navigating the East China Sea and the Korushio Current. The New Xu Fu Voyage East is the first leg of a 4 leg project, where we aim to find and story tell a Chinese "bread crumb" trail of hard archelogical facts that the Chinese have been there pre-Columbus along the North Pacific Rim all the way to America, if possible. The rowing expedition(s) are purely to story tell our findings in order to reach a wider audience. Not that many people would be interested in learning that, say, a piece of Chinese Tang dynasty pottery has been found in Kamchatka, but if the pottery is tied an exciting human powered expedition then it suddenly becomes more interesting for a bigger audience. Our research goal is see whether we can prove that the Chinese visited America pre-Columbus via the North Pacific Rim by following Chinese archeological breadcrumbs from Japan via the Kyrils to Kamchatka and then to Alaska either via the Aleutians of the Bering Strait. However, we will not move forward towards America if we cannot find hard proof "bread crumbs". So we don't know how close we can get to America. Time will tell... We just know that the North Pacific Route makes more sense than a direct Trans-pacific voyage over 10,000km of open ocean. Via the North Pacific Rim you can in most cases see the next island you will get to and the route can be followed diretly in reverse, which a Trans-Pacific Voyage cannot (the ourward voyage is in the north Pacific Japan to Oregon / California and the return down by Mexico to the Phillipines, due to the ocean currents). In the 499AD Fusang story there are pretty clear directions (of similar quality to those Helge and Anne-Stine Ingstad followed when they found the Viking settlement in New Foundland in 1960 using the directions in the Islandic Sagas to the Vinland) of how to get to Fusang from Japan. So far no-one has tried to follow the Fusang story directions to try and locate Fusang. That is what we will be doing, but if we cannot find "bread crumbs" along the way we won't press on because it then becomes too speculative and proves nothing - like Gavin Menzies "1421, the year China discovered the World". Does this answer your question? Also see this video, which explains the four stage project: yantu.com/current-expedition/

Of course, reaching America on a rowing boat along this route will be an exciting adventure and a serious sporting achievement. But what new knowledge will this voyage add from the point of view of experimental archeology? We know of many examples of successful passages on Chinese traditional junks, large and small, across the Pacific Ocean from China to America in the 20th and 21st centuries, starting with the voyage of Whang Ho In 1908, and ending with Princess Taiping in 2008.