ashmei-sponsored rower Rauri reflects on his ocean-spanning adventure at the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge

It’s been two months since we landed in Antigua after a month or so at sea. The transition back to real life has been slow and it’s hard to know if it’s really complete. Aside from the time at sea, the row has been my main focus for a couple of years. One of the biggest changes has been having a lot more free bandwidth than I’ve had for a while. I’ve tried to resist the temptation to immediately fill that and instead take some time to re-evaluate and reflect on the experience.

The row was an incredible experience but almost seems like it happened in some kind of alternate reality. I work in the NHS, so things were pretty hectic before I left, and got a lot worse while I was away, but I’ve dropped back into a similar world to where I was before and it feels strangely as if I’ve never been away. That said, it took a while to adjust to days that didn’t revolve around two-hour blocks of rowing, and there’s definitely been a shift in what I consider important. 

As for the row itself, where do I start? It was really tough. From a physical perspective, we were ready for that. Still, it was just relentless, and I’d underestimated the emotional side of it. Ultimately, there was one productive thing to do onboard…row…and two things you could do to support that…eat and rest. The row distilled everything down to those three things and time spent doing anything else felt like time taken away from one of them. 

That was difficult to get my head around. For example, I’ve always thought of myself as a social person, but the row taught me how important social interaction is to keeping me going. We knew communication would be difficult. We had limited email and could occasionally use the satellite phone, but even these ate into our rest and eating time. It was a surprise how isolated and lonely I could feel living on top of three other guys on an eight-metre boat. I lived in the bow cabin, which meant the rowers had their backs to me on my off shifts. Going down to the stern where you could get some face time meant interrupting the rowers and upsetting the balance of the boat, so when I wasn’t rowing I felt pretty locked away. 

Things no one tells you about rowing the Atlantic

As a coping mechanism, I developed a strict routine for my day. I knew what I would eat and when. Plus I had shifts I targeted for sleep as the most we ever got was 90 minutes at a time and to get that you needed a plan. I planned times I would try and get to the stern to do things I couldn’t in the cabin, like laundry, making phone calls or seeing somebody’s face. Key to this was my first off shift each day, which was dedicated to lining everything up. I would wake up halfway through that two hours, feeling anxious that I needed to get a load of prep done and worried about throwing my whole day off. Even after 35 days, that feeling didn’t go away but I learnt that going through that process and getting out for my first on shift of the day would sort me out. The emotional volatility of our crossing was a tough thing to adjust to and something we didn’t appreciate in advance. You could go from loving it one hour to not knowing how you were possibly going to get it done the next.

Weirdly the physical side felt like less of a big deal, I think because we expected it. Getting on the oars every two hours meant after the first couple of days you never felt fresh. Overall we had to measure our effort. Despite being the toughest physical thing I’ve ever done, I was only at 60-70% most of the time. Some nights we pushed harder, either because conditions forced us, we thought we could make ground on the field or because we needed to hold our position. However, we noticed it had a massive impact on what we could manage the following days, so we only did so when we absolutely had to. We targeted the nights because the days were relentlessly hot. The boat has no real shade and there was little cloud cover. When we had the wind behind us it would offer some breeze, but those days seemed few and far between.

A stormy start to the year

I particularly remember New Year’s Eve. We’d been warned of a weather front and had pushed hard for four or five days to try and avoid the worst of it. We were told on the 30th of December that we were about to bear the brunt. We prepared ourselves and the boat for a period of three-up rowing and as we went to bed the weather was starting to pick up. My first shift of the night was tough, being both wet and into the wind, so afterwards I got my head down pretty quickly. The next thing I remember is a knock on the door and Mark asking me to prepare the sea-anchor. I must have made it obvious that I wasn’t keen to go out into the cold and wet outside because Mark quickly explained we were facing 40-knots of wind and instead of running south-west were instead pointing almost due north. 

From there we went three-up, trying to increase speed to hold our course in the conditions. After a couple of hours, the wind died and for a brief period, we thought we were through it. Instead, we ended up battling cross and headwinds for the next 14 hours, finishing off with 20-25 knots of wind on the nose. We must have spent two hours trying to fight it, but ultimately just zig-zagging north and south. In the end, we reluctantly deployed our sea-anchor in the early hours of the 1st of January. We were only actually at anchor for about an hour, which in hindsight was insignificant, but it felt massive at the time when we were under pressure and exhausted. 

Nothing but flat, blue sea

These moments stand out, but in truth, the row was fairly repetitive. You see and do the same things day after day. We were a little unlucky with the weather compared to previous years. The fleet was also really competitive. A thousand miles in and we were still within a few miles of our main competitors, HPF Atlantic and Latitude 35, and even after we took the lead and built a bit of a gap we never felt comfortable. Those crews pushed us right to the end. We received updates every four hours telling us how we were doing against them, and we knew that if they got it right and we got it wrong they could close our lead at any time. 

I learnt a lot of new skills throughout the two-year campaign and a whole lot more about myself in the 35 days, 6 hours and 42 minutes we were at sea. There were some amazing times, like being surrounded by whales, rowing into the sunset with the wind and waves behind us, music on full blast with mates I’ll have for life. And some hard times, like missing my wife along with friends and family, being at sea over Christmas, battling through bad weather or even just the monotony of seeing nothing but flat, blue sea. 

Spotting Antigua on the horizon was incredible. We could see a glow on the night of the 15th and when we woke up on the 16th there was a shadow that grew and grew, before slowly coming into focus. We had seen nothing but water, a little wildlife and a total of three other boats on the horizon the whole time, so the sight of land was overwhelming. None of that prepared us for pulling in to English Harbour, our families were on the hillside shouting as we crossed the line. Superyachts honked their horns and we celebrated with flares as a boat of photographers circled us. It was all so surreal and a bit of a sensory overload after the weeks of nothingness. As we stepped on to land the ground felt like it was moving, a feeling that lasted a couple of days. 

Back the other way

Adrenaline got us through the arrival ceremony where we were handed the MacAskill trophy as winners of the Race Class at the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge. COVID-19 meant we weren’t initially able to hug our families. We were walked into a closed restaurant where we were given our first hot meal and allowed one family member each to help complete medical screening and arrival forms before being released into the public. 

Towards the end of the row, I was desperate to get to Antigua but also felt sad that it would soon be over. I’d lived with these guys for over two months at that point and spent countless hours with them in the months before. Staying in the same hotel, even if we hadn’t planned to we’d bump into each other at breakfast or by the pool and that was about to end. After a week we went our separate ways, which was one of the most difficult times of it all. I spent the second week with my wife and my parents, relaxing and watching the other boats arrive. It was an opportunity to reflect on what I have and how great it is to have the stability at home to go on this kind of adventure. From the start, the whole ethos of our ‘On the Shoulders of Giants’ team name was about recognising that success would be founded on the support of others having now completed it this is only more obvious.

Since I’ve been back I’ve tried to avoid rushing into anything. I’ve been surprised at how unfit I’ve felt having been off my feet for so long, but I’m now back training and starting to feel like it’s coming back. I’ve just entered my first triathlon to give myself something to aim for. I’d love to do more in the world of ocean rowing, but more than anything I want to keep my head up and my eyes open to new opportunities. If there’s one thing that going from never having rowed to winning the world’s toughest rowing race in two years has taught me it’s that you can achieve things you wouldn’t have thought possible with hard work and the support of others. Also, that doing new stuff is fun, and there’s a lot of new stuff out there!