I am fascinated by the Volvo Ocean Race. The sailing, certainly, and the people, but also the geography.

What other sports event teaches you about … Point Nemo?

The rest of this post comes from the Volvo race media relations department.

(And … go!)

What’s in a name? The most remote point in the ocean lies in the Southern Ocean and is known as “Point Nemo”, or the “Pole of Inaccessibility”.

(And why are we talking about this at all? Because the Volvo fleet came close to Point Nemo during the current Leg 5 of the round-the-world race, which runs from Auckland, New Zealand, to Itajai, Brazi.)

It’s not named after stripey cartoon fish. In fact, the name Nemo comes from Captain Nemo, a character in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea — not the film Finding Nemo.

Don’t expect to find a gift shop. Point Nemo isn’t an actual “point” because there’s no land there — it’s simply a spot in the ocean that happens to be 2,688 kilometers (or 1,450nm) from the nearest land, the most remote such place on the planet.

And even that land isn’t exactly welcoming. It’s called Ducie Island, part of the Pitcairn Islands to the north, and it’s an uninhabited, C-shaped strip of land with a diameter stretching hardly two kilometers.

Don’t forget to look up! If you pass Point Nemo at the right time of day, you’ll be closer to the astronauts in the International Space Station some 400km up in space, than any other humans on earth.

In Latin, Nemo translates as “no man” – which pretty much sums up how bleak this part of the world is.

Back to the 90s. In 1992, a Croatian-Canadian survey engineer called Hrvoje Lukatela used a geospatial computer program to find Point Nemo. He figured that because the Earth is three-dimensional, its most remote ocean point must sit the same distance away from three nearest coastlines.

Make sure you pack your map. Point Nemo is found at 48°52.6′ south, 123°23.6′ west.

We will be right over.