Have you ever imagined being out at sea, alone, for weeks, months, at a time? As a mountaineer, I’ve passed my fair share of nights suspended in silence on mountainsides. But as punishing as the mountains can be, there’s another arena of human endurance far removed from the vertical world: the open ocean. From the first team in 1896, two Norwegians in an 18-foot boat, to row 3000 miles across the Atlantic, to the determined women who followed a century later, this is a story about why some people willingly embrace the unfathomable. What began as a race for Deborah Veal became a crucible of suffering and solitude, where the only way through the madness was to row, and row again.
Deborah Veal (now Searle) captured her odyssey in a book titled Rowing it Alone.
