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Solo Ocean Rower

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WINTER 2013

24 COUNTY & QUINTE LIVING WINTER 2013

NumbersBy the The Loneliness of

the Solo Ocean Rower

BY J O H N M A R T I N E L L OP H O T O G R A P H Y BY DA N I E L VAU G H A N

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556 Clif Bar energy bars720 PowerBar energy bars270 dehydrated meals270 packs of flapjacks20 packs of liquid fuel energy drink4 cans of peaches0 pairs of underwear1 pair of pants, 6 long sleeve shirts1 windbreaker jacket3 hats, 2 toques6 bottles of sunscreen1 small pharmacy2 pairs of sunglasses, 2 pairs of prescription eyeglasses2 toothbrushes, 3 tubes of toothpaste3 bottles of Listerine2 cameras18 flares3 pairs of carbon fibre oars1 life jacket, 1 survival suit, 1 safety lanyard, 1 life raft1 sea anchor1 emergency position indicating radio beacon (EPIRB) 1 personal locator beacon (PLB)2 global positioning systems (GPS)1 automatic identification system (AIS)2 compasses1 manual freshwater maker, 1 electric freshwater maker2 gas cooker stoves, 2 satellite phones2,600 nautical miles of open ocean 1,000,000 oar strokes and 1 rowboat.

One man.

Rowing 10 to 12 hours per day, from 6 in the morning to 11 at night, at 20 strokes per minute. Two hours on, one hour off. Slow across the Atlantic Ocean. In a rowboat 6.3 metres long and 1.67 metres wide packed with everything needed to survive a solo ocean voyage.

If all goes well, Jean-Guy Sauriol will spend his 60th birthday somewhere midway between Puerto de Mogan on Gran Canaria (one of the Canary Islands) and Port Saint Charles, Barbados.

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Sitting face to face with this man in his beautiful waterfront home, a man who in less than two months will row by himself across the Atlantic, floods the mind with many questions. How will he do it? Does he fear dying? What will he miss when he is all alone, in a very big out there, surrounded by nothing but water and the sound of wind and waves?

But the biggest question is why? Why would this son of Lachine, Quebec, this career actuary and founder of the successful

Toronto Internet financial management services provider seclonLogic inc. risk his life rowing solo across the Atlantic? It all boils down to a book he read at age 50 - a book called Alone at Sea by a German physician and Second World War veteran, Hannes Lindemann.

Dr. Lindemann had just finished working as a contract plantation doctor for the Firestone Rubber Company in Liberia when he paddled and sailed, solo and unassisted, a 7.8-metre long mahogany dugout canoe from Las Palmas, Canary Islands to St. Croix, Virgin Islands. He

completed the voyage in 65 days. One year later, Dr. Lindemann paddled and sailed, solo and unassisted, a 5.2 metre long folding kayak (made of rubberized canvas stretched over a plywood frame) from Las Palmas to St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. He completed that trip in 76 days.

Jean-Guy makes it clear he is rowing across the Atlantic, “Because it is doable. It looks like it is absolutely impossible, but it is doable. I have never questioned my desire to do it.” Alone at Sea triggered

his fascination with crossing an ocean in a human powered vessel. It was the 2010 story of 23-year-old Katie Spotz who rowed from Senegal to Guyana in 70 days, and became the youngest woman to ever row solo across the Atlantic, that told Jean-Guy how it could be done.

Two more answers to the question why fall from Jean-Guy’s realization that rowing across the Atlantic was doable. First, he wants to do it before he is too old, but this will not be a swansong for his working life. As Jean-Guy puts it, “I am not living a dream; I am just living

my life.” As the founder and owner of seclonLogic, he will return to his clients when he finishes his transatlantic voyage. Second, at 60, he will be the oldest Canadian, and the third or fourth oldest person in the world to complete a solo rowboat crossing of the Atlantic.

How does he prepare to cross the Atlantic in a rowboat? Train, read, and spend money.

Jean-Guy could not have known it, but his training might have started in 1988 when he braved the blistering lava barrens of the island of Hawaii to complete the Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon in 14 hours and 45 minutes.

It might have started in 2008 when he paddled a solo kayak in the Yukon River Quest - the entire 715-kilometre length of the Yukon River, from Whitehorse to Dawson City, in 68 hours and 40 minutes. The name of Jean-Guy’s team is something you might expect from an actuary: 1234.

There is no doubt training for the Atlantic crossing became serious in 2012 when Jean-Guy converted a 16-foot Kevlar canoe into a rowing shell and started rowing on Presqu’ile Bay. It would be reasonable to think Jean-Guy would row as long as he could in the worst storms he could find on Lake Ontario, but that is not the case. Instead, he rows twice a day, one session of 1.5 hours, the other of one hour, five or six days per week. When ice covers Presqu’ile Bay he rows on a rowing machine. This speaks to one of the misconceptions of an ocean crossing such as Jean-Guy`s. Rowing will not be the primary propulsion for his rowboat. Jean-Guy will use his oars to guide his boat into

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have accidentally or intentionally drifted or paddled across oceans. Books such as Across the Savage Sea by Maud Fontenoy; Rowing the Atlantic: Lessons Learned on the Open Ocean by Roz Savage, and A Pearl in the Storm by Tori Murden.

How else does he prepare to row solo across the Atlantic? Spend money. Spend money having a brand new rowboat built by one of the best boat builders in the world - Jamie Fabrizio of Global Boat Works in England. Spend money travelling, to England to test row the new boat; to the Canary Islands to get an idea of what the launch site will look like; to Pennsylvania to learn how to row and to England again to trailer the rowboat across France to Cadiz, Spain to take a ferry to the Canary Islands. Spend money to buy equipment and food. Jean-Guy doesn’t say how much money he will spend, but for him it is worth every penny. “I would rather tell my grandkid sitting in my lap that I had rowed across the Atlantic than tell him I had owned a Porsche.”

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positions to best use the ocean winds and waves that will propel him to Barbados.

Jean-Guy follows a light weight-training regimen, but does not run. Instead he frequently, but irregularly, does elliptical machine sessions in front of the television.

In 2010, Jean Guy took rowing lessons at the River Breeze Rowing Camp on the Susquehanna River in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. This speaks to another misconception; he has to be a waterman to row across an ocean. Until he was 50 years old and training for the Yukon River Quest, Jean-Guy had no particular interest in boats.

In addition to his physical training, in January 2013 at Teignmouth, England, Jean-Guy took ocean-rowing courses consisting of one week of ocean navigation training, one day of first aid training, one day of sea survival training, and one day of very high frequency radio training.

Jean-Guy estimates he has read 15 books in preparation for his crossing - mostly books about the experiences of others who

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Interviewing a person who is about to cross the Atlantic, by himself, in a very small boat brings to mind all kinds of horrific images. Images of the 6.3-metre-long fibreglass speck that is a rowboat suspended on the top of a water column as deep as 8.5 kilometres; a water column lurking with sharks and jellyfish, drifting sea containers, and other hazards. Images of hearing, but not seeing, the roaring swoosh of water as the bow of a large ocean freighter bears down on the fibreglass speck. Images of the fibreglass speck tumbling down the face of waves that can reach 20 metres high.

Jean-Guy has imagined himself, thrown into the water, clinging desperately to the side of his rowboat, and this points to an anomalous circumstance. From amongst all the high-tech construction and unsinkableness of his rowboat and all the electronic wizardry of the GPSs, satellite phones, PLB, EPIRBs, and AIS he carries, his survival could come down to a very low-tech, three-metre-long nylon mesh safety lanyard that keeps Jean-Guy attached to his rowboat. Jean-Guy knows if he ever became separated from his rowboat, he would be in trouble - big trouble. He knows the wind and waves propelling him across the Atlantic would push his rowboat faster than he could swim and he would watch his rowboat drift away.

Almost inevitably, these images lead to questions about dying. Jean-Guy does think about it, “Not in a dramatic way. I know there could be a huge price to pay to do this but despite appearances, this is not a dangerous sport, certainly less so than going up Everest. I would rather regret having gone than regret not having tried.” Even though rowing solo across the Atlantic would raise any number of fears in

most people, it is not the ocean Jean-Guy most fears. His biggest fear is, “Being afraid to the point where I lose myself. That is when things will start to unravel.”

Interviewing someone who is about to row across the Atlantic by himself also brings to mind images of loneliness, of being surrounded by nothing but the sounds of the wind and ocean and his own thoughts. Although loneliness will be there, Jean-Guy’s life will be very busy.

A typical day will start at daybreak with an energy bar and a two-hour rowing session. Then he will check his messages; possibly get a weather and navigation update from Tony Humphreys, his land-based technical advisor. Shortly thereafter, he will fire up his gas stove to boil water for a rehydrated breakfast of 500 calories of high protein oatmeal. After breakfast Jean-Guy will brush his teeth and then go back to rowing for another two hours, followed by a one-hour break. He will repeat this cycle five times a day. Throughout the day, he will nibble continuously on snacks and energy bars taking in 200 to 300 calories every hour. For supper, he will fire up the cooker once more to rehydrate an expedition ration of 800 calories. After each meal, he will rinse his mouth out with Listerine to break away all the fat that accumulates in his mouth from eating rehydrated meals.

During his one-hour breaks Jean-Guy might nap or tend to blistered hands or broken equipment. At one point during the crossing, he will jump over the side of his rowboat to scrape off all the barnacles on the bottom of the hull. Hopefully, he won’t have to do this more than once or twice. Every day Jean-Guy will also call his wife Lucie by satellite phone.

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If the winds and current are favourable he will crawl through the hatch of his shelter at the stern of the rowboat, seal the hatch, and sleep on a 0.6 metre by two-metre sleeping pad. Surrounded by the AIS to notify him of passing ships, the VHF to call passing ships in case of emergency, and the GPS to check his progress over the ocean, Jean-Guy will fall asleep listening to stand-up comics on his iPod or iPad. If the winds and currents are carrying him east instead of west, Jean-Guy will deploy the sea anchor, a kind of underwater parachute, to slow his backward motion. That is on a good day.

There could be days when the ocean is so rough and the winds so strong Jean-Guy stays sealed inside his shelter, staring at the sky through the 50-centimetre-square hatch directly above his head, at the mercy of waves and wind, hoping for the best, maybe remembering what he said during the interview for this story. “You have to be patient. You have to take what the ocean gives you.” Thinking about what he misses most - his wife and son.

To much fanfare, on December 19, 2012, Chris Hadfield and two other astronauts blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to dock with the International Space Station; an almost unimaginable feat of engineering and scientific wizardry in an unimaginably hostile environment. For the next 145 days, Colonel Hadfield lived and worked with five other astronauts in a space the equivalent area of a five-bedroom house, whizzing 200 nautical miles above the surface of the earth at a mind-boggling speed of 14,950 nautical miles per hour.

Sometime after November 23, 2013, when ocean winds and waves allow it, Jean-Guy Sauriol will depart the shores of Gran Canaria in a very modern adaptation of a very ancient craft - a rowboat. There might be a crowd of one or two people to witness his departure. His wife Lucie and son will not be there, having said goodbye in Toronto on November 14.

If all goes well, Jean-Guy will spend the following 75 days in an unimaginably hostile environment living and working, by himself, in a space approximately the size of two large kitchen tables. At the middle of his voyage he will be 1,300 nautical miles from the nearest dry earth crawling along at about 1.7 nautical miles per hour.

There is a large distance between Colonel Hadfield and his high-speed voyage on the International Space Station and Jean-Guy’s low-speed ocean voyage on a rowboat, but when Jean-Guy looks out of that small hatch in his shelter on the fibreglass speck, he will see the same billions of stars Chris Hadfield gazed upon from the International Space Station.

On a calm night, sitting on the open deck and watching those stars, Jean-Guy will listen to Rachmaninoff’s Symphony Number 2. At that point, the numbers won’t matter. It will be all about the overwhelming feeling of being born free. In silence, he will thank his wife Lucie for having the strength to let him go and giving him the will to want to come back. C QL

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