Kevin Biggar - The Oarsome Adventures Of A Fat Boy Rower: How I Went From Couch Potato To Atlantic Rowing Race Winner

I have been pulling at the oars for most of the last three and a half hours. The digital clock on the bulkhead tells me that I have another ten minutes to go. This has been a long shift but not a boring one.

Behind the boat enormous waves are advancing in ranks, their crests a football field apart. Any one of them is large enough to topple a slab of Atlantic onto our little boat and drive us under. They never do, of course.

I need a wave that is a bit steeper than the rest. Here comes one now, a blue-green, undulating, watery hillock with a foot of grumpy white water on its crest. Just as it seems it is going to dump onto the boat, we start to rise up and surge forward. I give six quick strokes and then lean back with the oars out of the water and tucked in to the side of the boat. The boat starts to accelerate and I twitch the foot-steering mechanism to keep us square onto the wave. The GPS says 6 7 knots, the boat careers down the tumbling, rushing wave, and water starts to hose in through the scuppers.

After a few thrilling seconds the boat slows as the swell passes underneath. There is a brief pause, then a second powerful surge as the boil of passing white water sucks the boat along. Now the wave is gone and the boat, like large cow slapped into an uncharacteristic gallop, gratefully slows back to a plod. I start prodding the water again and wait for my heart-rate to return to normal, while around me the white water fizzes and hisses like a freshly poured Coke.

For most of the day the clear sky has been a great blue lens, taking the light and heat of the tropical sun and magnifying it to a laser. Now the sizzling red disc finally starts to quench itself into the western horizon. The air cools, the glare fades and I can take off my sunglasses and hat, wipe my forehead with the back of my wrinkled hand and enjoy the view, at least for a few minutes, while the brief tropical twilight still lingers. The relief of being out of the furnace of the day has not yet been outweighed by the fear of spending another long inky-black night in a small boat in these big seas.

As the boat rises up on the shoulders of another wave, I am treated to a brief glimpse of the vast, heaving seascape lit up green by the setting sun. There is a flash of white on the horizon. Is it a whitecap or the hull of a rowboat? The next boat in the race, CRC, is somewhere behind us, but we cant be sure exactly where. After chasing them for most of the last five weeks we finally muscled our noses in front only a couple of days ago. They arent likely to be happy about that. They will be throwing everything they have at us. We have to get to the finish line in Barbados, two days away, before they catch us.

With just a few minutes left on my shift, my arms feel like overcooked spaghetti. My head bobbles on my neck like those toy dogs in the back windows of cars. My brain, tired of being alternately rinsed in adrenaline and lactic acid, decides to abandon ship, and I start to feel a warm, disembodied floating. I dont know what it means but it is very pleasant to disconnect from the aches from my poor battered body. I probably need some sugar, and I definitely need some sleep. I havent had my eyes closed for longer than two hours at a time in more than five weeks.

Six and a half minutes before the end of my shift I call out Six minutes! to the cabin hatch in front of me. Half a minute later I call out Still six minutes! The hatch springs open an inch, Jamies signal that he is awake and that I can stop yelling. A few minutes later it opens a bit more and I can see inside. Jamie is taking a break from getting ready, pausing with his bum in the air and his face down on the mattress, trying to get a last few seconds of sleep.

Two minutes!

Jamie sighs and levers himself out of the hatch.

Hows it been? he asks.

Yeah, not too bad. Mostly above 3 knots. Theres 30 seconds to go, by the way.

A few days ago the steering broke on the other rowing position in the bow, so now we must swap places. I pull my feet out of the shoes bolted onto the foot-stretcher and roll away while Jamie quickly sits down in my seat and picks up the oars.

I step into the footwell in front of the hatch, the only place in our little rowboat that you can stand upright. I straighten up slowly, because here it comes ow! A strange, wrenching ache in my gut as some cramped muscles get pulled back into position and blood flows into long-compressed internal organs. Now I can stretch properly, arching my back to coax the synovial fluid back into my spinal discs.

I look out over the nodding bow to the rapidly darkening horizon. Somewhere out there lies the finish line at Barbados. Early in the morning of the day after tomorrow, that piece of horizon, which for the last six weeks has been nothing but ocean, should start to sprout solid hills, green leafy trees and white sand beaches. There, under a palm tree, I will wallow in a spa pool filled with clean, cold rum punch and chunks of fresh, crisp watermelon, while calypso music wafts from the nearby bar.

Until then I open one of the deck hatches and slop some white powder into a special large cup to make a warm, gooey, fatty milkshake. Then I pull out one of our last remaining freeze-dried meals and empty it into the thin aluminium pot. Only Thai chicken curry left not the mushy delights of fish pie or the Willy Wonka extravaganza of roast lamb and vegetables but its still remarkably tasty. Now I add some water from the hand pump. Very carefully. Too much water and it turns into soup. I put the pot on the gas burner on the bulkhead.

I cant afford to muck around I have to be back on the oars in half an hour but this is such a pleasant time of day, and it is such a treat to be not rowing.

I reach into the cabin to pull out one of the head-lamps. The previous night it had stopped working. In my last break I had spent a few seconds scraping off the weeks of corrosion on the switch contacts. I show it to Jamie.