March 6, 2000 | THE NEW YORK TIMES

OFF THE COAST OF MARINA DEL REY, Calif., March 4 -- Remy Bricka is a pleasant man who brings to mind a cheerful uncle who would drop $5 where a kid could find it. "He seems like such a normal guy" is how Alice Leahey, a vice commodore at the California Yacht Club, put it.

Mr. Bricka's unassuming disposition makes his current endeavor seem all the more audacious. He is walking across the Pacific Ocean, from Los Angeles to Sydney, Australia, with nothing more than a pair of canoelike skis, a double-sided paddle and a catamaran tied to his waist and towed behind him, where he stores provisions and sleeps at night. That is a distance of about 7,800 miles, and he expects his journey to take about six months, provided he walks 14 hours a day.

"In this life I have flesh and bone," he said today by way of explanation when asked why he was doing this. "I know our time goes very quickly. In eternity, our time is one second. In this one second, I will use my time to realize my dream."

Mr. Bricka arrived in Los Angeles with no notice or fanfare about two weeks ago from the Alsace region of France, where he has a wife and daughter and works as an entertainer -- actually an "homme orchestre," or one-man band. A few people, including Mr. Bricka himself, see his plan as a testament to human determination, while others see it as quixotic at best, foolhardy and dangerous at worst. Some see it as a mixture of all three, and in the crowd of about 40 well-wishers who came to the California Yacht Club to see him off today, it was uttered more than once in a baffled, astonished tone: "He's crazy."

This is Mr. Bricka's second adventure across the high seas. For 40 days in 1988, he walked across the Atlantic Ocean from the Canary Islands to Trinidad. That feat landed him in the Guinness Book of World Records for longest distance walked across water, 3,502 miles.

Mr. Bricka, 50, wrote a book about the experience, "L'Homme Qui Marche sur L'Eau" -- the man who walks on water -- which was published by a French company in 1990. This time, his trip will be documented on the Web site of the Alsatian sauerkraut company that is sponsoring it, www.stoeffler.com, with Webcam pictures updated each day and satellite transmissions of his location. Mr. Bricka took 22 pounds of kraut with him.

Conditions in the Pacific will be far more challenging than they were in the Atlantic, especially at this time of year. Storms will make conditions extremely rough, with heavy currents, winds of up to 60 miles an hour and swells commonly reaching 12 feet and higher.

"A number of people are lost at sea every year because of this foolishness," said Roger Lukas, an oceanographer at the University of Hawaii. "This guy sounds like an excellent candidate."

Mr. Bricka said goodbye to his wife and daughter in France, he said, because it was less emotional than bringing them with him and saying goodbye here.

So he spent this morning preparing for his trip, packing tomatoes, crackers, oranges and energy bars and readying his gear. He offered a "merci beaucoup" to those gathered around him at the dock, lowered his skis into the water, stepped into them and set off. Working against the wind, he first towed his rig behind him, then had friends on a boat tow it until he got out of the harbor.

Eventually he reclaimed it and set off paddling for the horizon, looking very, very small against the pitching vastness of the Pacific.