KEY POINTS:
An English adventurer banned from launching a bid to row solo around Antarctica from New Zealand now plans to start from southern Tasmania.
Oliver Hicks, 27, plans to row 24,000km around Antarctica in his fibreglass boat, The Flying Carrot.
Click here for Mr Hicks' blog
Maritime New Zealand's general manager of strategy and communications, Lindsay Sturt, said Hicks' plan posed an extreme risk to his safety and jeopardised people involved in any rescue attempt.
"The risks inherent in Mr Hicks' proposed voyage are substantial and the likelihood of rescue being required is significant," he told the Sydney Morning Herald.
Mr Sturt said Maritime New Zealand had the power to detain Hicks if he persisted in starting his voyage from here.
Tasmanian police and the state's Marine and Safety Tasmania (MAST) said they did not think they could stop him, although they strongly advised him against going.
"We recommend a rethink because it is inherently dangerous," MAST spokesman Trevor Faust said.
The Hobart Mercury reported the Briton put his boat into the water at Franklin Wharf last Thursday and Hicks hoped to set off by the end of the month.
It said a support vessel, Blizzard, would tow the Flying Carrot south to the planned launch site at Cockle Creek, on Recherche Bay, near Tasmania's southern tip.
Hicks, who has had his appendix removed as a precaution, said in his internet blog that the Flying Carrot had a cabin for electronic equipment and sleeping, and two other sections were for storage and food preparation.
He planned to survive on a diet of dehydrated food and multivitamin pills.
"The global row filled all the criteria I was looking for," he wrote.
"Extraordinarily difficult, long duration like the old-fashioned explorers, solo - to raise the bar as high as possible, a first - never been done before, an ocean adventure, exciting, exhilarating, frightening and at times mind-numbing!"
Hicks said he aimed to paddle for nine hours each day, covering 48km, for 500 days from south of New Zealand, across the Pacific, through the perilous Drake Passage past Cape Horn, then down into the Southern Ocean.
He planned to spend the winter on the British island of South Georgia, in the southern Atlantic Ocean.
Four years ago Hicks became the first person to row solo eastbound across the North Atlantic - a 124-day trip in a secondhand boat - and remains the youngest to have rowed across any ocean.
- NZPA
