Mick Dawson - Battling the Oceans in a Rowboat: Crossing the Atlantic and North Pacific on Oars and Grit

AUGUST 22, 2004. That morning, I was having the time of my life. By the end of the day, I was fighting to save it.

Id been at sea, alone, unsupported, and without regular communications for 109 days in a rowing boat. Just to clarify, this was not the familiar type of rowboat that might be used on a lake or pond. This was a specially designed, totally self-sufficient ocean rowing boat. It was twenty-one and a half feet long and six feet across at its broadest point. A sealed bow section and a cabin at the back where I could sleep and shelter from the big storms sandwiched an open rowing deck in the middle. On the rowing deck there was the same sliding-seat assembly youd find on a flat-water rowing boat, toughened up considerably to cope with the demands of an extended ocean rowing passage. I had rowed more than four and a half thousand miles across the North Pacific in that boat, departing Japan early in May. My goal was to become the first person to row across the North Pacific, finishing beneath the span of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.

That morning, with little more than fourteen hundred nautical miles between me and the finish line, I allowed myself to believe that success was within my grasp. But not for the first time, nor for the last, the North Pacific had other ideas.

Although it was the most challenging of my ocean rowing adventures, the North Pacific wasnt the first of them. That had been three years earlier, in 2001, with a three-thousand-mile voyage across the Atlantic with my brother, Steve.

We were both former Royal Marine commandos (the Royal Navys elite amphibious soldiers), and both of us were desperate for a challenge. Rowing the Atlantic seemed to fit the bill. We built a boat, learned the basics of rowing, and along with another thirty-one boats pushed off from Tenerife in the Canary Islands in a race to Barbados. We arrived seventy days later.

It was a life-changing experience for the pair of us and a pivotal one for me. I thirsted for ever greater challenges. Few people had successfully rowed any ocean at that time, but none had successfully rowed from Japan to San Francisco.

I wanted to be the first.

Two years later, in April 2003, I put together a solo challenge to the North Pacific route. It came to grief less than a thousand miles off the coast of Japan. Dreadful weather had forced a delayed departure that had put me directly into the path of three major storms. The third had left my boat crippled with a smashed rudder. With no prospect of reaching North America, let alone San Francisco, I returned to Japan. My introduction to the brutal realities of the North Pacific was over.

As harsh as that introduction had been, though, there was nothing that persuaded me that my goal was impossible. My boat would have to be refitted to cope better with the severe conditions of the North Pacific. I would have to make sure I escaped the Japanese coast earlier in the spring. But I knew it could be done. My return to Japan the following year and my subsequent rapid progress toward San Francisco had justified that belief.

But now that progress was about to come to a halt.

The previous two days, I had been rowing in mountainous seas. As I would learn much laterbut suspected at the timetwo massive storm systems had collided a couple of hundred miles to the south of me. That collision in the middle of such a vast ocean had in turn created an enormous swell, which radiated out from the epicenter of the battling storm systems for hundreds of miles in every direction, like angry ripples racing away from two huge rocks dropped into the center of a pond.

The ocean around me became a watery version of the rolling countryside of the Sussex downs on the south coast of England, which was now my home. But this was a vast, roaring and much wetter version.

Though it is awe-inspiring to view from the deck of a twenty-one-foot boat, a huge rolling ocean isnt necessarily a threat to such a vessel. Id rowed through similar conditions before as Id skirted typhoons, and Id learned how to cope with them. Once Id come to terms with the intimidating scale of these seas, I had developed and mastered a technique that kept me safe while still allowing me to make forward progress. The added problem on this occasion was that because of the relatively close proximity of the two storm systems, I was also being hit by large, flat breaking waves. Those waves were almost independent of the huge swells roaring toward me.

Large breaking waves capsize small boats, especially small rowboats. To make matters worse, the waves were coming at me from a chaotic variety of directions. In sailing terms its whats known as a confused sea, but this was confused on an epic scale. Still, there was a discernible trend in the direction of the swell toward the east, where I was headed.