The Atlantic Challenge: Come Hell or High Water The Atlantic Challenge: Come Hell or High Water

Rob Hamilton loves adventure. A keen traveller who has visited 48 countries, he’s also a technical diver, powerlifter and climber who has completed two ultra-mountain marathons. But in 2016, his lifelong dreams of joining the army were crushed just eight days into training thanks to avascular necrosis resulting in a partially dead knee. Facing medical discharge and a permanent ban on long-distance running, Rob’s next challenge was adapting to his soul-destroying new situation, relying on his trademark positivity and sense of humour to get him through. Rob first heard of the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge back in 2008, after seeing one of the four-man boats at the Southampton Boat Show. Determined to take on the task himself, after working with the Collateral Repair project in Jordan and completing an MA, Rob knew it was time to take the plunge and begin his two-year campaign. From one life-changing event, to another...

I don’t think I got my head around starting the race because I couldn’t quantify it. You’re rowing across an ocean. I’ve only ever flown across an ocean before so how do I get my head around starting this thing? I never really did until a few days in, until you get over the difficulty of it all and you settle into your routine. Funnily enough, I couldn’t get my head around finishing either because you’re so used to your life at sea, you actually forget that it’s this big epic thing. It just becomes the daily grind. The row is everything an adventure should be. It’s difficult, exhausting, sometimes painful and there were several days when I didn’t want to be there, but it’s also stunningly beautiful and incredibly rewarding as I was overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles that I never thought I’d be able to overcome. I initially wanted to do this as a four because I didn’t think I could do it solo. I was throwing myself into the unknown and had no idea how I would respond to the challenges that lay ahead. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't stop, you don't have a choice but to keep going, but towards the end I kinda got used to that way of life. There’s a beauty and a simplicity to it. You are rowing a lot, you are eating a lot and you’re not sleeping very much - and that’s all you’re doing.

Music was a huge thing. I had the finest curated Spotify playlist in the fleet. My morning playlist, Get Up & Go, had all kinds of loud, hype music whether it was pop or rock or whatever. I’d wake up, blast that stuff out and think, ‘Ok, let’s do this.’ I had every style of music for every conceivable mood, from hip hop to rock to metal to jazz to acoustic stuff to movie and tv show soundtracks, blues, glam rock, classic rock. When you’re falling asleep on the oars, you put that on and start screaming away and then you’re awake again. Then you picture yourself and what you’re doing. You think, ‘I’m in the middle of nowhere, the nearest person to me is in space and I’m blasting out Born in The USA.’ It’s great.

I had two satphones. One for the race, for the safety officers, the other one for family. Now, much to my parents’ slight annoyance, I never actually called home, not even on Christmas. You can still text and message people, which I did, but Christmas Day was a particularly rough day and I thought calling home would not have been healthy. I lost an oar and I was sat on parachute anchor, which is when you have a big headwind trying to push you backwards, so you set an underwater parachute up to act as a sea anchor to stop you drifting too far. That wasn’t a good time to be me and I thought, ‘If I call home now, I’m going to have some crippling emotional breakdown and I don’t want to do that.’ So I didn’t call home. It’s just a distraction. That sounds really harsh... People at home wouldn’t necessarily understand what I was going through. I had some great chats with the head safety officer, who calls you up every other day to check on safety things and to check how you are and I spoke to another solo rower called Gareth, team name Atlantic Dragon. I was on the phone to the safety officer and he was like, ‘Gareth’s having a bit of a hard time, he said he just misses talking to people.’ So every Saturday we’d call each other and have a bit of a natter. We were both experiencing the same things, so we could relate in a way that people back home couldn’t.

Combating Isolation

Sleep is probably the single biggest factor. Between 5am and midnight, I’d row for two hours, take a 40 minute break and get back on the oars. That doesn’t mean that I was getting five hours of sleep between midnight and 5am, there’s other things to do on the boat. I was probably getting about three hours of sleep a night and then a couple of 20 minute naps during the day. At most, four and a half hours sleep a day, but not all at once. That really messes with you because there’s a huge amount of physical exertion, there’s not a lot of sleep and there’s a constant underlying stress. Even when you’re resting, there’s always something that you’re thinking about, whether it’s your course, changing your autopilot, what the wind’s doing, your direction, when you’re going to eat next or what’s hurting. There were a couple of points where I got into the cabin and before I’d set an alarm or done any of the jobs I was supposed to do, I crashed. I just fell asleep and I woke up later, to this day I don’t know how many hours I was asleep for or how many rowing shifts I missed.

I assumed the hallucinations would kick in from around the halfway point, but actually they kick in around day 5-10, as your body struggles to adapt to the new routine. The first one, I was on a night shift. Night shifts are fun when you get used to them but initially they’re kinda creepy because you can’t see anything. I mean nothing. If the moon’s not out, you are blind. You have a navigation light behind you which lights up the rowing deck but other than that, it’s just black. So I was on night shift and I fell into this weird daze and all of a sudden I forgot everything. Where I was, what I was doing, why I was doing it. I asked these three imaginary figures in the cabin if I could stop rowing and then, for some reason, I thought I was on Windermere. I snapped out of it after a couple of minutes and was like, ‘That was weird.’ Subsequently though, I remember having a talk with a gorilla that was sat on my stern cabin. It had the voice of Brian Cox

I had some little niggling injuries going in. I ended up with tendonitis in my elbows and that’s not good because there is no recovery out there. If you get injured in the first week, it will only get worse, it won’t get better. If you get injured in the last week, you can power through that. For ocean rowing, I came through pretty well unscathed, which I’m happy about. Working from the top down, at one point I pulled a muscle in my shoulder. I developed salt sores under my arms. Salt gets trapped in the pores of your skin and you get this horrible rash and because of the sweat and the salt water, the Hawaiian shirt became a bit of an issue because the seams would start to rub on it. Like an idiot I tried to power through it, which just made it worse. I did wash with fresh water, which made a huge difference. The tendons in my fingers seized up. My morning routine went from fifteen minutes, to 45 minutes or even an hour, just as I tried to sit there and sort my life out a bit. Initially, in the first twenty minutes of the first shift, I couldn’t grip the oars so I’d curl my palms around them like a gorilla and after 20 minutes they’d loosen up a bit. I got some blisters on my hands because I was an idiot and gripped the blades too tight because it was at night and it was scary, but they sorted themselves out. There were definitely times where you thought, ‘Maybe I should go into the med kit.’ I think I did crack a rib. Every now and again you have to scrub the bottom of the boat because stuff will grow on it and that’ll slow you down. It was the last time I did it, so I was about a week from the end. I climbed

A lot of people think the race is an extremely physical event that you need to be a genetic machine to do. It’s not true. The race is much more mental than it is physical. You just need to keep going because the scale of it is absolutely huge. It’s 3,000 miles, but you don’t think about it like one 3,000 mile row. You think about it on a smaller scale, day to day and shift to shift. I never looked at my distance to finish. Or well, I did a couple of times and it was a terrible idea. You have to break it down into little bits. It’s about mentally managing that. There are much fitter people than me who have, for various reasons, phoned up the safety officer and been like, ‘I need to get out of here, I can’t do this.’ And there was nothing so wrong that they couldn’t fix it, that they couldn’t keep going if they wanted to. I don’t blame them, it’s tough. I actually have a tally on the inside of the cabin of wildlife seen against crippling emotional breakdowns. I think it’s a net gain. There were days when I didn’t want to be there, but luckily there were never any days where I wanted to quit. The sleep part of it makes it such a mental challenge because lots of people are fit, but are lots of people willing to put in the work when they’re starving, dehydrated, sleep-deprived, hallucinating, sore? That’s what appealed to me about the challenge. That need to keep going when everything’s gone. People get on the safety boat and regret it immediately. It’s such a shame because it’s a huge effort to get there. Sometimes it’s unavoidable. If there’s a legit emergency, they will come get you, but some people think you have a safety boat next to you the whole time. You really don’t. There are two safety boats for the fleet (21 boats). That fleet consists of the fastest 4-man crew and the slowest solo, so the spread is enormous, and different weather systems will push that even further apart. You can have 1,500 miles between first and last. Half the ocean! So, if there’s an emergency, sure, that boat will be on its way, but it may be three or four days - or longer - before they can get to you. That’s why there’s such a big emphasis on scrutineering and inspections and making sure you’ve got the right kit, because you really are out there by yourself.

It didn’t really hit me that I was about to finish until I could see Antigua. You come around that corner and people are cheering for you and there are superyacht sirens going off, it’s a complete sensory overload. You’re so used to being by yourself, so it’s pretty humbling. Getting off the boat is interesting because that’s not just your home, it’s the thing that keeps you alive. it’s been your entire world for, in my case, 53 days. There’s also a slight level of anxiety because you haven’t done solid ground in a while. I was less than steady on my feet. Two of the safety officers were standing there to help me onto dry land and I was going, ‘I’ve got this!’ I didn’t have this. It’s such a rush, there’s all these people, there’s land, there’s a lot to take in. It’s completely overwhelming and a whirlwind of a finish because you have no idea what’s going on. You step onto dry land, get ushered to this podium where the race CEO gives a little interview for the cameras and then you get ushered off to this restaurant where you have your first meal - which was a burger. Amazing, probably my best meal ever.

After being medically discharged from the army after just 8 days, Rob Hamilton had something to prove. Could he take on the challenge of rowing solo 3,000 miles across the Atlantic and live to tell the tale?

3000 miles

53 days

1 man

85 Reese’s peanut butter bars

antigua

la gomera

I lost 16 kilos. You don’t really notice it initially because you’re by yourself but towards the end I started to clock on. My t-shirts became baggier, I had to do my harness up tighter. I was eating so much, so I was thinking, ‘I can’t be losing weight, I’m eating 8,000 calories a day, that’s just not possible.’ Turns out it is. It’s very possible. The race calculation is that you have to carry 60 calories per kilogram of body weight. I weighed about 100-and-something kilos so that was about 6,200 calories, broken down into a couple of things.

The event as a whole is incredible. You feel yourself change as you experience different conditions, that’s part of what you sign up for. People kept telling me it was going to be a life-changing event. That’s not just hyperbole, that’s true. It’s incredible what you can achieve when you don’t have a choice. When you do that and you get to the other side, it’s a huge confidence boost. When I was on the finish line, I felt like I could breathe fire. I couldn’t, I was very much a broken man, but you feel on top of the world. I said on the race day that it was the best day of my life - and it was. But it’s funny how that doesn’t last forever. I’m already thinking about what I want to do next adventure-wise.

There were days when I didn’t want to be there, but luckily there were never any days where I wanted to quit.

Getting off the boat is interesting because that’s not just your home, it’s the thing that keeps you alive.

People kept telling me it was going to be a life-changing event. That’s not just hyperbole, that’s true. It’s incredible what you can achieve when you don’t have a choice.

My goal for the race was to do the best crossing that I could and hopefully that’d be good enough to make myself competitive. If it didn’t, that was fine. I’m very happy with my performance, I came third out of the solos overall. I genuinely don’t think I could have done any better. There’s only about a thousand things that can go wrong with this stunt. The real challenge is rowing across an ocean and dealing with the conditions. You can’t row someone else’s boat, so just control what can be controlled. Ok, so-and-so’s got better weather at the moment, what are you gonna do about it? Nothing. Work hard, rest well - as well as you can - and hopefully that’ll be enough.

Wet & Wild

You try and be strict with your routine, but if there’s a pod of dolphins going past, I’m getting in the water.

It’d been a 12 year dream to do this. It had guided some major life decisions. By the time I got to the start line at La Gomera, it felt like the end of an era and I hadn’t even started the row yet…

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There isn’t a whole lot of space, but part of the beauty of it is that you don’t have a lot of stuff.

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I got tendonitis in my elbows. That’s not good, because there is no recovery out there.

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I was probably getting about three hours of sleep a night and then a couple of 20 minute naps during the day. At most four and a half hours sleep a day, but not all at once.

At night (...) I also saw a hand come out of the water and grab the side of the boat. That was probably the scariest thing.

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Your main, dehydrated meals, like freeze-dried food, which to be fair is not that bad. It’s not great, it’s not like Michelin-star food but it’s not as bad as it sounds. Some of them are actually pretty tasty. You’re meant to add boiling water to it, but after day three or four I couldn’t be bothered, so I just had cold food the whole way across.

Your snack packs make up the bulk of your food. That’s things like jerky, chocolate, high-energy nut butter, sweets, dried fruit. Towards the end I was doubling up on my snack packs so I was eating about a kilo of straight peanut butter a day. I’m not sure I can eat peanut butter again for a while.

I didn’t feel like eating much initially because your body is in shock at this new way of life, so your appetite gets quite suppressed. But later on, I got into my routine and then I was like, ‘Ok, now I’m eating most of my allocated food.’ Because 6,000 calories is a lot. Even if you’re burning it throughout the day, that’s still a lot of food to get in. So I was like, ‘Ok, now I’m eating most of my food.’ ‘Ok, now I’m eating all of my food.’ ‘Ok, now I’m eating all of my food plus extra food…’ You could tell the effects that the row was having on my body because I went from eating one 100g peanut butter pouch in the morning before I got up, to two. Before I got on the oars at 4.30am, I’d have 1,000 calories. By the time I started my second shift in the morning, when it was still dark, I’d had 2,000 calories, so you really are just pounding away at the food. Some of the meals, you’d think, when are you actually going to eat it? How is it going to affect you? Do you want a really high carb meal before you go onto a night shift, or is that going to make you fall asleep? What I found worked for the night shift was a packet of jelly babies and a peanut butter pouch. That keeps you going. Literally, sugar rush. I had to ration for 85 days so I took 85 Reese’s peanut butter chocolate bars. A few people asked, ‘Don’t you want more variety?’ I said, ‘No, because I’m going to eat Reese's or wish I was eating Reese’s.’ It’s one of the things I did not get sick of at all!

become extremely hot and stuffy. In the afternoon, it’s the last place you wanna be. I plugged this little USB fan into the charging port, velcroed it to the ceiling of the cabin and just had some air circulating, even if it was hot air. I had a dry robe as well, a wearable towel that’s waterproof on the outside. A couple of speakers, music, podcasts, audiobooks. Other than that, there wasn’t much else. There isn’t a whole lot of space, but part of the beauty of it is that you don’t have a lot of stuff. That’s what makes it special. I didn’t actually open my first aid kit at all. What I did have was Sudocrem and Vaseline. That’s what I used on various things.

I had one Hawaiian shirt, which was a very intentional decision. I was like, ‘It’s going to be brand new when I start and I want to see what it looks like when I finish.’ It was bad. There’s some blood on it now. It’s seen too many things! I just thought it would be funny. Man rows across ocean in Hawaiian shirt. Why not. I took my ukulele, initially as a joke but it turned out to be a brilliant move. If I was ever on parachute anchor, I would sit in my cabin and play ukulele and time just vanished. The thing that I took that I really value was a little USB fan. The cabins don’t have a lot of ventilation in them, so they

and was talking to me about the night sky. Probably because I was listening to a podcast by Brian Cox at that time. That was quite funny. The next thing I saw, it was flat calm, it was dusk and I saw a cow standing in the water. And I was like, ‘This is a really bad sign. This is not good, Rob!’ Then I didn’t hallucinate again for a while. Just after halfway, they came back and they got a bit creepier. At night, I was hearing crying or wailing on the wind and I also saw a hand come out of the water and grab the side of the boat. That was probably the scariest thing. It was just a little wave that hit the boat and some water came up on deck. Or it was an actual zombie, who knows. But that really messed with me. I had to tell myself out loud, ‘I know what’s real, I know what’s real, I know what’s real! It’s not real!’ But the solution for the crying and wailing on the wind was to blast ACDC’s Thunderstruck and tell it to F off, basically.

Four teams actually had Marlin strikes this year, which is unheard of. The guy that won the solo race, Wave Warrior, had a Marlin point come through the hold, into one of his food compartments and then through another partition into his cabin. It took him 12 hours to fix it, taking on water. I’m glad that didn’t happen to me, I wouldn’t have any idea what to do! But he managed to fix it and still came out ahead. Quite a guy. I had a pod of dolphins follow me for three days. The first day they blasted past me. Then, the next night, about midnight, I was getting ready to pack up for the day and I saw this grey shape and two or three dolphins were doing laps under my boat. I didn’t get much sleep that night because I was hanging out with dolphins! The following morning, it was dawn, flat calm and the whole pod turned up and they hung around for two hours, jumping in front of the boat and having a great time. I got a lot of footage of that. That was pretty special. I also saw a couple of whales, a minke whale and a humpback whale. Unfortunately I couldn’t get any photos or footage of them, they were just a little too far away but very cool to see. And they turned up when I was having the worst day so I was grateful for that.

I saw turtles, jellyfish and flying fish... I hate flying fish. If I never see another flying fish again, it’ll be too soon. They hit me in the face, all the time. It was 5am, I’d just sat down to do my first shift, I was very tired, I didn’t want to be there and then all of a sudden, slap! A flying fish flying downwind, that’s like being hit with a fish at 15 miles per hour, it hurts man! It landed on deck and I just started ranting threats of genocide against flying fish. I was so tired.

I had a storm petrel, a small ocean-going bird, that kept me company for the whole crossing. I found him on day 4 and he stuck around until I was about 100 miles from Antigua. 49 days. I named him Stuart. I opened the cabin one morning and he crash-landed on the deck and I just said, ‘Morning Stuart, I see you’re having a good morning, too.’

The wildlife is part of the reason why you do this. You don’t see them that often but it makes a huge difference to your day. You try and be strict with your routine, but if there’s a pod of dolphins going past, I’m getting in the water. I don’t care if I’ve just started my shift. Some people say there’s two ways you can do this. You can be really competitive or you can go whale watching. I don’t know if I agree with that but if I’m not going to win a race, but I’m going to go swim with a whale? That’s a no-brainer to me, I’m gonna swim with that whale. That makes it worth it. You have days where you’re hallucinating zombie hands grabbing the side of the boat or you’re cracking a rib and you’re sleep-deprived and everything hurts, but there’s the most incredible wildlife, the sunrises, the sunsets, the night skies, surfing down big waves... that more than makes up for the hardships of the whole thing.

back into the boat but I slipped and I landed on a rowing gate and the ribs took the full force. That was quite unpleasant, there was a lot of blood on the deck. I felt a bit sorry for myself, cleaned it up, and then it was very painful rowing for the rest of the day. Hip flexors and hamstrings on occasion felt incredibly sore and tight and had to be stretched out. I ended up with a couple of blisters on my ankles. My right ankle seemed to crunch for some reason.

Towards the end of the row, my phone actually broke and I was like, ‘Ok, let’s just try and do a shift anyway.’ Because every single shift I’d done to music. I did half an hour without and I was like, ‘This sucks.’ I had a spare phone so I was able to get some back-up music going but a lot of guys don’t have that luxury. They lose their speakers when they capsize, or lose whatever their music is on. One guy lost his speaker on day three and that was that for the next 48 days or something. Savage.

I’m in the middle of nowhere (...) and I’m blasting out Born in The USA.

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I lost an oar and I was sat on parachute anchor, which is when you have a big headwind trying to push you backwards, so you set an underwater parachute up to act as a sea anchor to stop you drifting too far.

I got a few pressure sores on my bum. I’d have to change out what I was sitting on, but that happened later on in the row. I actually had a custom seat made for me, which really helped me out. A lot of other people did not come through so well. I was very lucky. A lot of it was just around muscle stiffness. There were no major injuries that wound up bugging me for the whole trip, so I’ll take that as a tick in the win column. It’s amazing, you spend two days back on land and these things sort themselves out. You’re resting properly, you’re sleeping properly, you’re eating a lot, you’re showering. You’re not jumping in the water covered in salt the whole time.

Creation & Visualisation: Alina Ostapciuc, Karolina Żak, Radek Tomaszewski, Agata Jawor & Marlena Jabłońska Interview & Words: Sally McIlhone Special Thanks: Rob Hamilton

credits

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Get your head in the game

When food becomes fuel

Face The Music

Combating isolation

Packing light

No Sleep Till Antigua

Night Visions

Wet & Wild

Broken, Battered & Bruised

Never give up, never surrender

The End is Nigh

A Hero’s Journey

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