Earl de Blonville’s career is characterized by grandiose embellishment of his own achievements. In the last two decades, his career has been characterized by fanciful, grand schemes that have come to nothing. 

arcticexplorer.com is one of Earl’s longstanding projects which morphs from year to year into variations on the theme of Earl, guru-like, leading various people to Greenland to save the world from climate change. 

Here’s the description of the most recent version: https://web.archive.org/web/20140819213855/http://arcticexplorer.com/expeditions.html

Nobody went to Greenland or even got close.

A sparkly new version is underway at the current website arcticexplorer.com where there is just a single dramatic front page, no content. 

But we can find a sneak preview of the content here: https://earldeblonville.net/Earl%20de%20Blonville%20Dec%202015%20greenland%20science%20_%20LinkedIn.pdf

Earl’s grandiosity is evident in the first line of his LinkedIn description of “Desperation Island”: “Australia is launching its first scientific expedition to the Arctic”. No, Australia isn’t doing any such thing. Earl has no government support, no apparent means of support at all for the project. He conflates himself, a single individual, with an entire nation. 

As to the “relative obscurity” of the region Earl proposes to visit, a Google search shows that commercially guided sea kayak trips have been offered in the region for some time: http://www.anotherworldadventures.com/adventures/kayak-hike-east-greenland/, http://www.kayakingreenland.com/trips/

Earl declares: “Our expedition’s core mission will be to support climate scientists worldwide through the collection of data”. No mention of who, on this project, will have actual scientific credentials. And Earl has been here before, claiming to have run previous sailing/leadership/scientific research trips to Greenland two decades ago. There is no evidence of any scientific data collected on those trips (if they even happened), no record of who participated, no written post expedition summary. 

Finally, Earl has proposed using not only his girlfriend’s 100 year old wooden sailboat but another boat, the Carola, which Earl conned a youth sailing organization into giving him for, essentially, nothing. (Earl promised he had investors who would restore the ship). The cost of refitting both of these aging wooden ships to bring them to standards of safety and suitability for the Arctic is unknown but must be considerable. Not to mention paying competent crew to operate the ships. 

It is hard to imagine, with Earl’s uninspiring track record over the last two decades (and his complete inability, over the course of several years, to fund arcticexplorer.net) that Earl is going to convince anyone to entrust him with enough cash to make this “Desperation Island” project fly. 

But, when you are channeling Walter Mitty, anything is possible.