It is an unsolved problem to decide if it is possible to "walk to infinity" from the origin with bounded-length steps, each touching a Gaussian prime as a stepping stone. The paper by Ellen Gethner, Stan Wagon, and Brian Wick, "A Stroll through the Gaussian Primes" (American Mathematical Monthly, 105: 327-337 (1998)) discusses this Gaussian moat problem and proves that steps of length $< \sqrt{26}$ are insufficient. Their result was improved to $\sqrt{36}$ in 2005.
My question is:
Is the analogous question easier for the prime spiral (a.k.a. Ulam spiral)—Can one walk to infinity using bounded-length steps touching only the spiral coordinates of primes?
What little I know of prime gaps suggest that should be easier to walk to infinity. For example, the first gap of 500 does not occur until about $10^{12}$ (more precisely, 499 and 303,371,455,241).
I ask this primarily out of curiosity, and have tagged it 'recreational.'
Edit1. In light of Gjergji's remarks below, I have tagged this as an open problem.
Edit2.
Just for fun, I computed which primes are reachable on a small portion of the spiral,
for step distances $d \le 3$ (left below) and $d \le 4$ (right below);
red=reached, blue=not reached.
The former does not reach 83, the 23rd prime blue dot barely discernable at spiral coordinates (5,-3);
the latter does not reach 5087, the 680th prime blue dot at
spiral coordinates (36,10).