Oakland man, teammates complete ‘Impossible Row’
600-mile Drake Passage voyage ended Christmas Day
OAKLAND >> They knew they would finally make it when Antarctica appeared on Christmas Eve, a smudge on the horizon so distant it vanished whenever the bow of their boat dipped below a wave.
Twelve days earlier, Oakland school principal John Petersen and his five teammates set out to accomplish what no one else had dared: row from South America to Antarctica across Drake Passage, the waterway seafarers dread for its pounding waves, whipping winds and piercing cold.
Frostbite had darkened his toes and fingertips. His body ached from seasickness and the strain of pulling oars.
But the end was in sight, literally.
Christmas Day brought landfall, and exhaustion gave way to exhilaration as Earth’s southernmost continent inched closer.
The men pulled past glaciers as big as buildings. Penguins scampered over ice and leopard seals slipped into the water. Seabirds wheeled and whooped as if shouting a welcome.
“You go from the vastness of the ocean to seeing land,” Pe
tersen said in a recent interview, just a few weeks after returning home from the historic odyssey. “It’s a huge lift. There’s no other way to describe it.”
The crew set off from Chile’s Cape Horn on Dec. 13 in the 29-foot open hull boat for their approximately 600-mile “Impossible Row,” as the journey was called. They arrived at Primavera Base on San Martin Land in the Antarctic Peninsula after rowing for 12 days, 1 hour and 45 minutes.
No other rowers in history had conquered the perilous crossing, according to Guinness World Records.
The six men worked in shifts: Three would row for 90 minutes, while three slept for 90 minutes. Then they would switch places, maintaining the pace for the entire trip.
Their toilet was a bucket emptied over the side.
Iceland’s Fiann Paul, the expedition’s co-skipper, became the first to complete the “Ocean Explorers Grand Slam,” successfully rowing five oceans.
Drake Passage is notorious because it’s where the Atlantic, Pacific and Southern seas converge. Swells reach 50 feet as currents crash. Rain and snow are common.
“I thought, if there’s a time in my life that I might want to do something like this, maybe it’s now,” Petersen said as he sat in his school office on Market Street, sporting a tie and sweater.
Down the hall teachers were busy locking their classrooms for the end of the day. Parents were picking up their kids from afterschool programs.
For Petersen, an Oakland resident who grew up in Los Gatos, rowing was an early passion. He was captain of the Yale University crew team, captured a silver medal at the Intercollegiate Rowing Association’s national regatta and raced the prestigious Henley Royal Regatta on the River Thames in England.
Now age 35, married with a 20-month-old daughter, and working long hours, Petersen said rowing dropped out of his life for years after college.
But in December 2018 he learned about Colin O’Brady, a Yale alumnus and an American endurance athlete, who had just completed a solo and unsupported 932-mile trek across Antarctica in 54 days.
“I was like, that’s an adventure,” Petersen said.
Around the same time, Petersen heard from Andrew Towne, a fellow Yale crew member, who told him he was in touch with Fiann Paul, who was floating the idea of tackling Drake Passage.
Paul connected with O’Brady, who would end up the expedition’s co-skipper.
“It came together from there,” Petersen said. “I thought I’d like to get a seat on that boat.”
The others who joined up were endurance swimmer and ocean rower Cameron Bellamy and Jamie Douglas-Hamilton, a Scotsman and rower whose grandfather in 1933 was the first to fly an open cockpit biplane over Mount Everest.
Petersen trained at Crossfit Oakland Uptown on 41st Street, lifting weights and using ergometers, or indoor rowing machines.
“There was ambient stress about the trip coming up and it was hanging over my head,” Petersen said, describing his feelings about juggling work and raising an infant daughter with knowing the danger that lay ahead.
In November, the rowers met in Scotland to test the boat, named Ohana, or “family” in Hawaiian, before they gathered for the expedition’s launch in December in Punta Arenas, Chile.
“I believe that there is something we all have inside of us, which is there are reservoirs of untapped potential to achieve extraordinary things,” O’Brady said in an online video posted by the Discovery Channel, which sponsored and documented the journey.
Petersen was resting in a compartment the men used for sleep and storage when winds reached 40 knots, or just under 50 mph. The boat was lurching like an amusement park ride.
“I was terrified,” Petersen said, the light beyond his school windows now dark with the arrival of night. “I thought I could die. There was no way I wanted to go back out there.”
But he did climb out and saw Douglas-Hamilton, who shouted above the storm: “This is awesome.”
The man’s bravery inspired him, Petersen said.
Another time, as he struggled to keep rowing, Petersen whispered his daughter’s name, Marianna, every oar stroke.
Other days were calm and the men were “in swing,” as rowers put it, sweeping like dancers across a polished floor.
A cruise ship arrived on day six, blasting a horn, its passengers huddling on the upper deck beneath a gloomy sky and lining the ship’s windows to snap photos and cheer the crew.
The next day the rowers crossed the 60th parallel, roughly halfway between South America and Antarctica.
“It felt like a really special moment and something I don’t think I will ever forget,” Petersen said.
A support vessel from Discovery, the Braveheart, shadowed Ohana during the voyage. Sometimes it was close. Other times it was gone, hidden beyond the horizon.
Petersen’s weight dropped from 200 to 178 pounds during the 13-day row.
The hardest challenge, he said, was remaining mentally focused. Knowing his family was worried, and that he missed them, was hard.
While Petersen was away, students at KIPP Bridge Academy monitored their principal’s progress online via the Discovery Channel. Tracking Petersen gave them a geography lesson, plus they learned about someone from their school who took on a challenge and faced it down.
“This school has been awesome,” Petersen said, adding with a laugh, “I came back and a second grader said to me, ‘I am glad you are still alive.’ ”
So is Petersen.