How solo rower beat agony, exhaustion, loneliness – and the Atlantic
WHEN Andrew Brown set out to row the Atlantic alone, he looked like a pale, shy fellow.
Now he’s got a tan, a nautical beard and the piercing gaze of a pirate. His legs are still wobbly after 40 days and nights on a wild sea, but he walks taller, with the confidence of a man who has risked his life many times over and come out alive.
“He is extraordinary,” says one of his rivals, Toby Iles, who won the toughest rowing race in the world — the Talisker Atlantic Challenge — just ahead of him with a partner last week. “I’m very proud of what we achieved, but to row this ocean on your own, with nobody to turn to for help, and to break the record for doing so — that is bordering on the unbelievable.”
The pair battled the solo rower all the way to the finishing line in Barbados, and after nearly 3,000 miles he was only one nautical mile behind them at the end.
And while Brown may have come second, he crossed the Atlantic faster than any solo rower had done before, smashing the record by more than two days. So when he finally staggered on to the quayside at Port St Charles, his two closest rivals were waiting there to hug him and say in admiration: “Mate, you are a superhero.”
Brown smiles at the memory, a few days later, and shifts in his chair.
“That was nice of them but I don’t feel like one just now. Everything hurts. We have put our bodies through a lot, and it’s only now starting to kick in, as the muscles ease.
“My ribs took a hell of a bashing from the oars. My back is really painful today. My fingers are still quite fat, and I can’t move them much or grip anything.”
He offers his hands, which are bloated and locked in the shape they call rower’s claw.
“I’ve lost about three stone, too. It will take a long time to get back to normal.”
Brown wasn’t even a serious rower before this, just a 26year-old from Limpsfield, Surrey, who spent his days at a desk as a manager at a toy distributor.
His eyes are bloodshot, from being whipped and sanded by the wind and salty sea, but the life in them now is startling.
“This race has changed me, but I’m only just finding out how,” he says as we sit in the Port St Charles yacht club.
“There were moments out there when I thought I just could not go on. The worst was on New Year’s Day. I was knackered and dehydrated and thought, ‘I really wish this would just end now.’”
Others have been broken by this race. There were 42 entries but only 17 boats left La Gomera in the Canary Islands. Six withdrew because of equipment failure, capsize or chronic seasickness.
Five are still a very long way from home, including the wounded soldiers on board the boat Row 2 recovery, who had to drift for days when they ran out of water, until the support ship reached them with fresh supplies. They are due home on Thursday.
Brown was determined he would make it without calling for help. “My heroes are the old-fashioned sailors like Chay Blyth and Robin Knox-Johnston, who thought that if someone had to come and rescue you, then you would be putting them in danger,” said Brown. “So if you get yourself into trouble, then you’ve got to get yourself out of it.”
It was a book about one of those heroes that planted the seed of his adventure a dozen years ago. “When I was 14 I read a book by Pete Goss, who sailed around the world solo. He had a problem with his elbow and had to perform doit-yourself surgery. I remember reading about him sticking a mirror on his knee, holding the elbow above the mirror and cutting into it.
“The mirror was full of blood. I thought, ‘What an incredible thing to do, to be out there all alone on the ocean and reliant on yourself. One day I would love to go off and do something like that.’”
He smiles. “Obviously it was the adventure I wanted, not necessarily the surgery.”
Brown rowed naked most of the way to avoid the chafing of fabric and sea salt on skin, but still finished with sores in intimate places and lesions under his armpits. Dressed in a T- shirt and shorts now, he sits down gingerly but otherwise looks deceptively well. “Don’t be fooled. I’m a mess.”
The first major crisis came when the solar batteries that powered the water pump failed, which meant he had to bail the cockpit out by hand — but the sea got in anyway.
“I sat with my head in my hands, crying, not understanding what was going on.”
He called his girlfriend, Lucy Ryan, on the satellite phone and cried again, but she told him to calm down and think logically.
“Then I noticed that these little bits of plastic along the side of the boat, called scuppers, which let water out instead of letting it in, had disappeared. I unscrewed a little noteboard in the cabin, chopped it into four pieces, drilled two holes in and put some elastic around it before putting it in. Things go wrong. You have to find the answer.”
He was doing DIY on a rolling sea.
“It was relentless. There was no half-time — let’s stop now and have some oranges.”
Did he ever ask himself why he was doing this?
“I don’t know what I was trying to prove, to be honest. I wasn’t trying to prove anything to anyone except myself. I don’t know what was missing in my life. I just know that I needed a challenge.”
Brown was raised in Surrey, a long way from the sea, but started sailing when he was about seven years old, in a dinghy called an Optimist. As a teenager he drifted, unsure of what to do with his life.
“I didn’t know what the plan was. I did enjoy reading eco- nomics at Exeter, but more for the sailing than the academic side of things. I had no idea what I was going to do afterwards.”
His first job was in recruitment. “I hated it and left. Then I was at a loss for what to do again. I figured that if I went skiing, that would help. So I worked for a ski holiday firm, and in the summers I taught sailing in Menorca and delivered yachts. Two years later, I hadn’t really progressed.”
In desperation, his father offered him a job at his toy company, Flair.
“I like the toy industry, it’s fun, but it’s just nine to five. When I heard about this race, and I thought about the heroes I had as a child, I thought I’d give it a go. There seemed to be no reason I couldn’t do it. Unless I couldn’t, of course.”
He had just started dating Lucy but she suddenly had to cope with the growing obsession with the challenge.
“It is a lot to ask, to be with someone who is barely there. The preparation took up more and more time, with the planning and the training and the fund raising.”
The first thing to prove was his physical fitness. Brown did this by setting up a rowing machine near Liverpool Street station and setting a world record by keeping going for 25 hours without stopping.
“I was so tired at the end of it, but I had the knowledge that I could do it.”
At the start of the transatlantic race he would build up a commanding lead by rowing for 12 hours straight, resting for three then rowing for 24 more. “It was hard on Lucy. I tried to keep it all separate from our relationship, but in the end she said, ‘Look, can’t I just help?’ So when the dried food arrived, we spent hours packing it up together. She has been fantastic.”
Brown chose to support the Toy Trust and Help A London Child, and has raised £88,080 so far.
Was he lonely on the ocean? “I shouted at myself a lot. I would get really down and start shouting, ‘Come on Brown!’ That was a bit weird.”
He also talked to the 23ft boat, called JJ. “She was security and protection. It was just me and her.”
What will happen to her now? “She’s going to an American guy, to do the Pacific. I’m going to follow it online to see how she gets on.” To see if he treats her right? “Exactly.”
The first time I saw Andrew Brown was out at sea, close to the finishing line at North Point. He looked lost and desolate, an impression that turns out to be true.
“I just wanted it to be over. I got terribly confused, I didn’t know where I was. I hadn’t slept for 40 hours. People were shouting out directions as I came into the marina, but I was in such a state, I couldn’t tell my right from my left.”
There were cheers and tears as his mother and father, Penny and Peter, willed the light on the bow of the tiny vessel towards them, reaching out and calling, “This way, this way!” He got up, stepped on to the pontoon and fell over.
“I was alarmed. I thought, ‘I can’t walk.’ But then I hadn’t really tried for 40 days.”
Flash guns went off and microphones were thrust under his nose. “It was overwhelming. I thought, ‘Who are these people and why are they all here?’ I didn’t know what to do, how to behave. And having to talk, after so long alone, was a struggle. Suddenly, I was being asked questions and had to think.”
The wooden planks seemed to shift beneath him like the sea. “I have never been so pleased to get into bed, ever. The bed at the hotel here was soft and clean and felt enormous. I slept like a log, only disturbed by the fact I was rowing in my sleep. Apparently, my hands were twitching.”
Is he ready for the quiet life now?
“Honestly, I don’t think I could put people through that again. These are really selfish things to do. Dad has been pretty worried the whole time. I still want to push and challenge myself but on smaller events. There were times out there when I was thinking, ‘I can’t wait to be back at my desk, thinking about toys.’
“But there were times I felt nervous about going back to real life, thinking, ‘This is amazing, I don’t want to go back to commuting.’” So he’s already conflicted. Steve Redgrave famously once said after a victory that if anyone ever saw him in a boat again, they should shoot him — then he went on to win more Olympic medals.
Lucy and his parents know Andrew Brown is not the same young man who left La Gomera on December 5.
He’s bruised and battered, but much stronger mentally and emotionally.
And there’s that look in his eyes. Can he really promise them he will never take on a big adventure like this again? “Well,” he says, a smile spreading across his face, “maybe in a couple of years.”