In mid-January, Jasmine Harrison, a swim instructor and
bartender, had been alone at sea for nearly 50 days. She had rowed 2574km through
the ill-tempered Atlantic Ocean and was only halfway there.
اضافة اعلان
If she could push forward a day at a time (or some 97km),
Harrison, 21, of North East England, would become the youngest woman to row an
ocean, beating an American, Katie Spotz, who held the title since 2010.
After 70 days, 3 hours, 48 minutes, she rounded the bend
into English Harbour, on the southern coast of the Caribbean island of Antigua,
around 10am local time Saturday morning. This year, because of coronavirus
restrictions, there were few boats there to welcome her after two months of
paddling, 12 hours a day.
Her award for completing the Talisker Whisky Atlantic
Challenge, ocean rowing’s most prestigious challenge? A vinyl banner that read,
“New World Record.” (The winners were given $6,000 Bremont watches.)
The obscure endurance sport has gained traction in recent
years, and Harrison joined a growing number of rowers from diverse backgrounds
and skill levels who attempted the extreme feat.
Since a pair of Norwegians successfully rowed from Manhattan
to France in 1896, there have been about 900 attempts to row an ocean. Only
two-thirds have been successful. To put that in perspective, 955 people
attempted to summit Mount Everest in 2019 alone.
It’s not a sport for the faint of heart. Harrison’s 250kg boat
was twice toppled by rogue waves, sending her into the water. The second time,
she injured an elbow. She had frightening close calls, including nearly
colliding with a drilling ship at four in the morning. She missed her family
and her dogs and cold drinking water. She also missed music. Her speaker, which
had English rock band the Wombats and Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song” on repeat,
had fallen into the water.
Every December, the Atlantic Challenge sends rowers — from
solo rowers to teams of twos through fives — across 4828km of ocean, from the
Canary Islands, off the northwest coast of Africa, to Antigua and Barbuda.
Paddling some 20,000 strokes a day demands a particular
style of determination.
“It’s not a rational or sensible thing to do,” said Roz
Savage, the English rower who in 2006 became the first women’s solo competitor
to enter and finish the race. “It’s something that comes from the heart, not
from the head.”
Savage sits atop ocean rowing’s most elite subset: female
single-handers, or solo rowers. Fewer than 200 women have successfully rowed an
ocean, and only 18 have made it across the Atlantic solo. Savage is the only
one to have successfully crossed three — the Atlantic, the Pacific and the
Indian.
Savage, like Harrison, had little rowing experience when she
entered the event.
Harrison just happened to be in Antigua in 2018, after
traveling to the Caribbean to teach swimming and volunteer with Hurricane Maria
relief efforts. She was at a bar in Nelson’s Dockyard, where the race finished,
and struck up a conversation with a relative of an Atlantic Challenge rower who
was about to finish. “Hearing about the race just took me,” she said.
Some of the earliest ocean rowers have been women, but the
sport remains overwhelmingly male. “When I started, women in exploration was
something that was a little frowned on,” said Tori Murden McClure, who in 1999
became the first woman, and American, to row the Atlantic solo. “I certainly
experienced lots of sexist things.”
Before the arrival of Atlantic Campaigns, which took over
management of the challenge in 2013, the race’s organizers had cultivated
rowers who “tended to be white, British and male,” said the challenge’s head
safety officer, Ian Couch, who has rowed both the Atlantic and Indian oceans.
“It was a bit of a club, a very much closed shop.”
The paradigm is now shifting. In 2016, four women entered
the event; this year, there were 20, almost half of the event’s roster. Next
year’s contingent of 24 women will be the largest the race has had.
Atlantic Campaigns has pushed to expand the race beyond its
British roots, which has been crucial to the sport’s growing inclusivity. But
having women like Savage and McClure shatter the image of the traditional
explorer has mattered the most. “There was a time not long ago when doing an
Ironman was considered crazy,” McClure said. “It’s what we think of as possible
that shifts.”
As Harrison approached her final weeks of the journey, the
weather remained calm and the surface of the water shook out into “the
brightest turquoise you’ve ever seen,” she said over satellite phone on February
12. A pod of Risso’s dolphins followed her for hours. A blue whale rolled
beside her, the white, molar-like edge of its flipper nearly high-fiving her
oar.
Each day, another 97km peeled away. Even a passage through a
thick raft of sargassum that stretched to the horizon — a definitive indication
she had reached the outer edge of the Caribbean — did not slow her down.
Fifteen minutes after entering English Harbour on Saturday
morning, Harrison unclipped from her safety line and took her first steps on
land in 10 weeks. She wobbled, stunned momentarily by both the solid ground and
the sudden presence of other people. Couch and another safety officer were
there to hold her up.
Couch understood the feeling — and those that would soon
follow. “Rowing an ocean is a brutally honest experience,” he said. “When you
step off the boat, when you lie in bed that first night back, you know with
absolute honesty who you are.”
For now, however, Harrison was focused on a cold drink and
her first meal — a burger and fries.
It was only after that she began to contemplate the future.
“I may row again,” she said. “But, actually, I’d like to give
that opportunity to other people, inspire them to do it. Right now, I’m just
excited to see what the rest of my life will be.”
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