It started with intergalactic sausage day. Now legomen are in space and a small pirate ship has sailed from Scotland to Barbados via Scandinavia. These are just some of the 500 adventures the Ferguson family are making their way through.
Brothers Ollie and Harry, respectively aged nine and six, have forged their own bushcraft knives, mummified a fish, and slept out in the wild. Their most famous expedition has been the HMS Adventure, a toy pirate ship that has sailed halfway around the world. They and father MacNeill joined Jim Mora to discuss their exploits.
“When we were around three, dad asked us if we wanted to do an adventure that day… message in a bottle was one of those,” Harry says.
However, the boys didn’t want to pollute the ocean with a bottle, so they opted to use a little boat. MacNiel said the craft they chose was a “great ship for sailing” but it did need a bit of work to make it seaworthy.
The boys filled it with polystyrene and put a weight on the bottom to keep it balanced and able to right itself. It was fitted with a GPS tracker that would ping the location to the family twice a day.
Harry says the ship made it to Denmark where it travelled onto Sweden and Norway. Along the way it was helped by people who had discovered it on beaches. While in Norway, some sailors in a larger boat decided to give it a helping hand over to Cape Verde. The last time the ship pinged it was off the coast of Barbados. Harry worries it may have sunk, but the others still have optimism.
The boys’ exploits started in 2014, when together with their parents MacNeill and Vicki Ferguson, they made a list of 500 adventures to go on by the time Ollie turned 18. The very first suggestion was intergalactic sausage day which has become a family tradition. They get together every year to cook sausages on the beach every 1 November.
Asked about other epic adventures, the boys say riding in a rally car was up there - along with sending a legoman into space. The family used a large helium balloon to achieve the feat strapped a small camera onto the legoman to watch his progress.
These are just some of the 500 adventures they mapped out and progress has been quick so far, with 279 of the list’s entries already ticked off. But the going is about to get tough. The boys are planning a coast-to-coast crossing of the Scottish mainland this year.
“We’re hoping to turn it into a special adventure by having the boys do it unaided,” MacNeil says. “Obviously they’ll be accompanied, but actually doing it carrying their own gear, cooking their own meals and putting up their own tents.”
They aim to get started in April and will cross a part of the country which spans 48 kilometres through the wilderness.
MacNeil says they aren’t being competitive or giving the boys a childhood they missed out on – they just find it a great way of spending time with the family.
“It became quite clear early on the boys loved doing this, they relished doing adventures. It’s become normal. It’s purely just become what we enjoy doing as a family,” he says.
“If these two turn into kind, caring, compassionate, resilient young boys then we will feel like we’ve done our job very well,” MacNeil says.
