Rowers’ historic feat at sea an epic tale of risk

minutes while the other three rested, still cold and wet.

“You’re rowing inside an open hold, 40-foot sea waves are splashing in your face, near-freezing water is splashing over the bow,” said 34-year-old Colin O’Brady, of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, one of the six men on the boat.

“It was quite harrowing,” O’Brady said Thursday in his first interview after the journey. “By the end, we all lost a good amount of weight and were delirious from the sleep deprivation.”

The men had to use a bucket to go to the bathroom. To rest, two men needed to lie shoulder to shoulder in a tiny space while a third would lay in a fetal position in an even smaller area.

The toughest part for O’Brady’s fellow rower, Jamie Douglas-Hamilton, of Edinburgh, Scotland, was the constant bombardment from the elements.

The other men on the expedition were Fiann Paul, of Reykjavik, Iceland; Cameron Bellamy, of Cape Town, South Africa; Andrew Towne, of Grand Forks, North Dakota; and John Petersen, of Oakland, California.

Discovery documented the journey while following the men in a larger, motorized boat.

O’Brady’s wife, Jenna Besaw, was on the Discovery boat running logistics and watching her husband’s death-defying adventure.

“There have been some frightening, intense moments when our boat, a 120-foot-long boat, was lurching forward and up and over these massive waves. To see the rowboat hidden for minutes at a time was rather unnerving,” Besaw said.

The row across the Drake Passage is just the latest adventure for O’Brady, who became the first person to traverse Antarctica alone without help last year.

A book about that journey is coming out Jan. 14, 12 years to the day since O’Brady was severely burned in a fire in Thailand. He said that after the fire, he was told he would never walk again.

He said that prognosis has helped fuel each new adventure.

For Douglas-Hamilton, the journey across the Drake Passage might be his last time setting a record.

“I would rank this as the toughest challenge any of us has ever done,” he said. “This was such a good one I’d be happy leaving it at this. The memories from this one will last forever.”

Discovery Channel Fiann Paul blows a horn in a scene from “The Impossible Row,” which documents a six-man team’s crossing of the infamous Drake Passage by rowboat.