Suffering a Sea Change (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine May 2002

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The Hard Way
Suffering a Sea Change (Cont.)

DAY 24: It is horrible out here when you get this low and there is no one to pick you up and tell you it will be OK. You know you cannot afford to feel this sorry for yourself and that the highs outweigh the lows. But the lows cut deep and are difficult to bounce back from.

IN THE INAUGURAL Atlantic Rowing Challenge, 30 teams competed and 24 finished. The first-place team, New Zealanders Rob Hamill and Phil Stubbs, crossed the Atlantic in an unbelievably swift 41 days, two hours, and 55 minutes. They traded two-hour rowing shifts 24 hours a day. The last to wallow in, after 101 days at sea, was an indomitable mother-and-son team from London; Jan Meek was 53 at the time, and her son, Daniel Byles, was 23. Four years later, in the second Atlantic Challenge race, 36 teams crossed the starting line on October 7, 2001, and 33 finished; a Kiwi team again took first.

The entry fee is $19,500. The rules say that two people per boat must row nonstop from Los Gigantes Harbour on Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, to Port St. Charles. (Debra Veal was technically disqualified the day her husband was plucked from their boat.) Two official safety yachts monitor the rowers. If you decide to pull the plug, you are rescued, and your boat, in proper Viking fashion, is burned at sea. Assistance of any kind results in disqualification.

Each team must use the same basic boat, purchased from the race organizers as a 500-piece, laser-cut plywood kit for $3,535. Assembled, the vessel measures 23 feet, four inches, bow to stern, with a six-foot, five-inch beam. It's an open rowboat with a miniature, coffinlike cabin in the stern.

"The so-called cabin is too low to sit up inside," says Tom Mailhot, 42, a thick-chested American rower who has come to Barbados to film Debra's arrival for a documentary he's making about the race. Mailhot and his partner, John Zeigler, finished the race in early December, in 11th place. "Fifty-eight days, three hours, 54 minutes," Mailhot recites, smoothing out his blond pirate's mustache.

Mailhot and Zeigler spent a year in man-hours and $35,000 in additional materials to put their boat together. Then they had to rig it: carbon-fiber oars, water-desalinating pump, solar panels to charge the batteries to run the satellite phone and the VHS radio and the stereo and the GPS. Sliding seats, steering system, sea anchor, oarlocks and outriggers, survival equipment, Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon (EPIRB), gas stove, food for many weeks.

"You need $150,000, minimum, just to get to the starting line," Mailhot says. "Then the fun begins."

All ocean rowers suffer. Asses and armpits chafed so raw they're bleeding, blistered palms, dehydration, seasickness, sleep deprivation, depression, mind-cracking boredom.

Would Mailhot do it again?

"Once across the Atlantic is enough."

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