Jess Rowe and Miriam Payne met for the first time in late 2022 at the Blue Marlin bar in La Gomera, a small Spanish island in the Atlantic Ocean.
Just under three years later, the two British women made history by becoming the first female crew to row nonstop and unsupported across the Pacific Ocean successfully.
To grasp the magnitude of their feat, more people have walked in space than successfully rowed across the world’s most enormous ocean.
Their journey began in Callao, Peru, in May and concluded in Cairns, Australia, on October 19: a 6,907-nautical-mile odyssey from east to west in 165 days.
“We had a lot of things go wrong,” Payne tells The Athletic from Australia, where the celebrations and recuperation are continuing. “But it always got better, and we just kept going.”
On they rowed, even when one week into the trip, around 350 miles in, a broken rudder (a blade at the rear of a boat used for steering) left them stranded at sea. Repairs were attempted, but even the spare rudder malfunctioned due to what they would later learn was a manufacturing fault.
Faced with having to end their great adventure prematurely, they used the only option they had: they reached out to a friend they had met in Peru, Alec Hughes, who had already set off on a solo sail around the world.
When the message came through from Rowe and Payne asking for advice and whether he knew anyone nearby who could help, Hughes plotted out a route and set out on a rescue mission.
“If it hadn’t been for Alec sailing a whole week out of his way and towing us for a whole seven or eight days all the way back to where we started, we would have had to abandon our boat,” explains Rowe, who spent a lot of time on the water during her childhood in Hampshire, a county on the English south coast.
“We would’ve had to be rescued by the navy in Peru, we would have had to leave our boat, and the whole expedition would have been over.”
More anxiety was to come. Drinking water issues were partly resolved by using underwear to repair the filter. However, a lack of power on the boat meant no navigational lights or radio. Additionally, there was sleep deprivation, the impossible task of consuming 5,000 calories a day, and the challenge of finishing before the start of the cyclone season. However, there was one final day.
“It was pretty stressful,” 26-year-old Payne concedes. “We were getting pushed outside the channel, and we thought we were going to have to run aground and swim to shore. There was a great deal of relief when we stepped onto land. We were excited and so proud of ourselves because we’d been planning this for so long.”
When Rowe and Payne first met in the Blue Marlin, both were about to set off on a 3,000-mile (4,828km) row across the Atlantic Ocean. Rowe, now 29, was in a team with three other women while Payne, at sea for the first time after growing up on a farm in East Yorkshire in the north of England, was going it alone.
Payne completed her Atlantic row in 59 days, 16 hours, and 36 minutes, a then-record for a solo woman, and when she arrived in Antigua, Rowe was still on the Caribbean Island. They celebrated their achievements together. And began plotting what was to come next.
For the next two years, they planned, fundraised, and saved. They bought a second-hand rowing boat for £60,000 ($78,000). Between working full-time, they upgraded Velocity, their nine-metre boat. They readied her for their unique challenge, which has raised over £100,000 ($130,000) for The Outward-Bound Trust, a charity dedicated to empowering young people through outdoor learning.
But how did they prepare for days of 15-plus hours of rowing and barely any sleep? Six days a week in the gym, endless hours on rowing machines, weight training to “make the body as robust as possible to prevent injury,” and every day off on the water, getting to know the boat and practising shift patterns, which primarily involved two hours of rowing followed by two hours of sleep.
“We would only have 24 or 48 hours of rowing on the water at a time because we were both working full-time,” Rowe says. “It’s funny because people think you’ve got to be an ocean rower to do an ocean row, but you can’t be an ocean rower before you’ve done an ocean row. You learn by doing, and you’ve just got to wing it, jump into the deep end, and you really do learn along the way.”
“It’s amazing how the body adapts,” Payne adds. “We didn’t really have any injuries out there apart from the odd niggle, but nothing more than what you’d expect. Your body does adapt to life out there, but it’s more of a mental challenge.”
