It was a scene that could have come straight from a Pixar movie: On Saturday, a South African man and floated for an hour a thousand feet above sea level. The only downer was the shark-infested patch of Atlantic Ocean below.
Matt Silver-Vallance, a 37-year-old office manager, pulled the stunt to raise money for the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, which is trying to build a children’s hospital in Johannesburg. He launched at Robben Island, where Mandela had been imprisoned for 18 years during apartheid. Silver-Vallance then traveled four miles strapped to the balloons and wearing only a wetsuit, according to the British publication ѱٰ.
Nelson Mandela has just completed a 10-day stay at a hospital after a bout of pneumonia. “We all hope, if he sees this story, that it will ,” Silver-Vallance said.