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 83: As I approach the three-month milestone I am recognizing that this journey is slowly wearing me down. Week after week of twelve hours a day of hard labour in solitary confinement is taking its toll. My body is screaming for some normality—a rest from rowing, a still bed, a toilet with a seat, regular showers, and some fresh food....

DEBRA VEAL IS relaxing beside the pool in Port St. Charles in a black one-piece swimsuit. The Fleet Street boys are drooling. It is only 24 hours since she came ashore in Barbados, and she has already finished her 15th photo shoot with the tabloids. Sir Chay has been boasting that her picture is on the front page of nearly every British newspaper. The press is fascinated and mystified by this petite woman who is both a gorgeous girl-next-door and a gritty, tenacious, courageous rower.

That night, Veal, her husband, and her friends and family manage to elude the reporters and sneak off to a Barbadian dance bar. After midnight, sweating from all the dancing, she pulls me aside.

We talk about her new celebrity—she welcomes it, but some of the attitudes behind the public fascination chafe. "Underneath, England is still stuck in a Victorian age where the wifey should be at home with her feet pressed against the sink," she whispers.

In part because she didn't quit when her husband left her alone in the Atlantic, and certainly because she is beautiful and mediagenic, this young woman who came in dead last in the Atlantic Rowing race is suddenly (briefly) more famous than the pioneers of the sport who came before her—extraordinary rowers, some of whom set world records. And yet, despite her glamour and bubbly nonchalance, Debra Veal belongs in that distinguished company. She belongs because her hands were permanently crimped into claws for weeks; because she was bashed against the gunwale by a rogue wave, and was almost thrown from her boat—a virtual death sentence—when an errant oar nearly cracked the hull, and still she kept rowing.

She belongs because she fought the real struggle ocean rowers must face—the struggle in the mind. To be out in the unfathomably vast, borderless desert of the ocean, minute after minute, day after day, week after week, facing down the blue horizon vanishing in every direction, and the glancing visitations of insanity coming and going at the edge of your consciousness like a circling shark.

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