Some have said I take adventure to the extreme. Obstacles like avalanches, sunburn, freezing temperatures, storms and even illness don’t really faze me once I’ve got the idea in my head. In the last two years I’ve both rowed the Atlantic and climbed Everest to raise money for charities the NSPCC and Waterlooville-based ELIFAR, who find and purchase specialist equipment for disabled children and respite care.
When I was a teenager I was a bit of a ‘dork’. I couldn’t speak to women, I had no confidence. I then discovered the gym and at 23 started body building. It gave me a routine and structure and I started setting goals. I then started riding motorbikes and when I hit 25 I started thinking about rowing the Atlantic.
But disaster struck when I had a bike accident; broke my ankle and the doctors told me I wouldn’t be able to do the physical activities I’d been doing up until then. It was them telling me I couldn’t which made me want it more. I thought to myself ‘right, you can sit and feel sorry for yourself or you can do something about it.’
It was when I was recovering in hospital I started planning the row. Soon I started approaching companies for sponsorship and I took a loan out to buy my Roswell and Adkin ocean rowing boat.
On January 5, 2010 I began my solo row across the Atlantic. The 2,700 miles from La Gomera in the Canary Islands to Antigua in the Caribbean took 111 days, four hours and four minutes to complete and, as you can imagine, it wasn’t all plain sailing. I chose the best time of year to go but the weather patterns were all over the place. You rely on the trade winds to help you across and the North Equatorial Current. If you chose a good year, and you were very patient, then you could just sit, read a book, and the currents would take you along. But the winds were against me a lot of the time – the current wasn’t there, I even got caught in a storm for eight days and lost over 200 miles.
Not only that, I had a close call with an oil tanker, suffered from terrible sunburn and got bitten by a fish. And if all that wasn’t enough, I then ran out of food. Because the weather was so poor the row took a lot longer than it should have done. I expected it to take about 70 days so I took 100 days of food thinking I would have more than enough - I was 230 miles from Antigua when I ran out. That equates to about seven or eight days of no food. Luckily I had a satellite phone to call in a resupply, but it still took two days to reach me. That’s when I found out what it was like to be truly starving – all I had was water and no energy to burn for rowing. But it’s all character building. My days had consisted of rising at 7am for breakfast and a much needed cup of tea. From 8am I’d row for four hours, then have an hour’s break, then repeat until I’d done 12 hours. I’d stop around midnight and sleep for six hours and let the boat drift. Once I gained 20 miles overnight, but then sometimes I would turn on the GPS and I wouldn’t have moved at all.
I first caught sight of Antigua 30 miles out. It was night time, so I kept on rowing so I could arrive around midday the next day. Rowing into Antigua was the most amazing feeling – it was like being a celebrity for an hour, there were hundreds of people everywhere. It was Antigua Sailing Week and the rich and famous were onboard their yachts. I was rowing in on my little rowing boat and there were super yachts all around me, beeping their horns. People still ask me if he ever got bored, rowing day after day and it’s really not. Every day the sunset is different, the sky would be a different colour, the water would be a different blue. It was such a magical place.