Four guys want to row across the Atlantic from New York to England - why?

“Champagne is a dignified drink, for dignified people, and dignified events.”
ANATOMY OF A ROWER
BY DANIEL LEVISOHN

On the south side of Seattle’s Lake Union, I’m standing with a gaggle of reporters armed with video cameras, tripods, and microphones. A bottle of champagne is perched on the edge of the cement dock where we have congregated, and one cameraman from a local television station is literally bending over with his camera to capture a close-up of the bottle. The other reporters, including myself, are interviewing the four men responsible for bringing us here today.

These four men, Jordan Hanssen, Dylan LeValley, Greg Spooner, and Brad Vickers, will embark on what, by most judgments, is a profoundly ill-advised endeavor: they will row 3,100 Nautical miles across the North Atlantic Ocean from New York City to Falmouth, England. To up the ante, they will attempt do this as quickly as possible in a race against a handful of international rowing teams. Did I mention that only 12 boats have ever successfully rowed across the North Atlantic? Did I mention that not a single American was on board any of them?

Flanked by his teammates, Greg is now holding the bottle of champagne by its neck and is admiring it with a look of fatherly affection. “Champagne is a dignified drink, for dignified people, and dignified events,” says Greg, which makes everyone laugh, because “dignified” isn’t exactly the word that comes to mind when you imagine four men rowing vigorously in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean for 40, 50, or 60 days straight without a change of clothes.

After a few words from a representative of the American Lung Association, one of the team’s most important partners, Jordan peels away the foil from the top of the bottle and untwists the metal mesh around the cork. Pointing it towards the water, he fires the cork into the air as a geyser of bubbly pours over the nose of the rowers’ now-christened boat, the James Robert Hanssen, after Jordan’s father who died of asthma when Jordan was just three years old. Three years after his father died, Jordan himself was diagnosed with asthma.

Most of the reporters came to film what will happen next. The four rowers will purposely capsize their rowboat in the middle of Lake Union. If all goes according to plan, the boat will correct itself by immediately flipping back into an upright position. If this wasn’t just a test, and the boat were actually at sea, the four rowers would be strapped into a tiny cabin in the rear, praying to god and waiting-out the huge ocean storm tossing their boat about like a piece of bark.

But the “roll over” exercise, as they call it, is only part of the reason why I’m here. In truth I’ve come to answer a question: why would four young men just out of college decide to dedicate almost two years of their lives for the opportunity to row a boat across the Atlantic Ocean? Why would they shell out $300,000; create their own non-profit, OAR Northwest, to raise the money; and train for hundreds of hours in the basement of their Seattle house to suffer salt boils and all kinds of putrid exhaustion? Because they are much cooler than I am, while true, is not an answer I’m prepared to accept.

POSTERITY:
The modern history of rowing began on the River Thames in London in the 18th century. The competitors were made up of “watermen,” experts who would ferry passengers across the Thames before bridges made their profession obsolete. One of the first competitive races, known as the Doggett's Coat and Badge, has been held every summer since 1715 and was created by Thomas Doggett to commemorate the coronation of George I and to thank the watermen who once saved Doggett from drowning.

The first ocean row was completed in 1896 by two Norwegian brothers, Frank Samuelson and George Harbo. As the story goes, the two men filled their 18-foot skiff with eggs, water, and wine and pushed off from New York Harbor. Fifty-five days later they docked at Le Harvey, France, setting a speed record that has held to this day. It wasn’t until 1966 that anyone successfully completed another ocean row.

Today, the sport is overseen by the Ocean Rowing Society, which formally writes its guidelines, standardizes routes, and tracks competition. At the time of this writing, 167 boats had successfully crossed an ocean. Four others were at sea. One woman is currently trying to windsurf from West Australia to Africa. True, she’s not actually rowing, but it’s still pretty awesome anyway.

In international competition, Great Britain dominates the sport of ocean rowing, claiming more than half of the successfully completed rows, followed by France and the United States. But 22 other countries including Turkey, China, and even Zimbabwe can each claim nationals who have successfully navigated from one continent to another.

For a sport that traverses such great distances and throws up such formidable barriers to success, it seems almost comical to increase its difficulty by adding the challenge of timed competition. No teams, after all, compete in real-time to see who can first summit Mount Everest, and more people have climbed Everest than have crossed the Atlantic Ocean by rowboat. Isn’t it enough to simply finish?

“Going into a competition like this, you should believe at a minimum that you can win,” says Jordan when I ask him about this. In part, this is a sentiment of a man who loves to compete. In another way, this is a simple necessity of the venture. “The safest crossing is the fastest crossing,” Jordan explains. “If you’re out [on the ocean] for two months instead of three, then you’ve missed a whole month of storms.”

Which is why the rowers aren’t just rowing to finish. They aren’t even rowing just to beat the other teams. At their most ambitious, success for the team means beating the speed record of 55 days set by the Norwegian brothers over a century ago. Success means going down in history.

PEDIGREE:
In a crowd of television news reporters and scrawny magazine editors, the rowers aren’t hard to spot. With the exception of Dylan, each rower is a head taller than everyone else at the dock. Each of them has strong, broad shoulders and rugged shadows of hair across their faces. Jordan, Brad, and Greg have blonde hair. Greg’s hair is so blond that even his eyebrows disappear in front of his white forehead. “No wonder they are rowing across the Atlantic Ocean,” I thought. “They’re Vikings. They’ve probably just docked here to pillage our small seaside community.” If they had been dressed in animal pelts instead of matching orange waterproof jackets and gray pants, I wouldn’t have been more convinced of their Nordic patrimony.

Looks aside, the rowers do share one common trait with the Vikings: they possess the best maritime technology available for their age. While the Vikings used the longship (called a drakkar in the original Norse), a ship far superior in speed and agility to anything else available at the time, the four rowers have a rowboat designed to withstand any temper tantrums Mother Nature might throw its way. It resembles an ordinary rowboat in the same way that the Bat Mobile resembles a Model T Ford.

The boat is 29 feet long with two cabins at each end, one to hold food, water and other supplies, the other to hold the rowers themselves. Solar panels are attached to the top of the front and back. Once at sea, the sun will provide the electricity to power the crews’ GPS system, computers connected to satellite antennas so they can email and (of course) blog, and an auto-tiller that will automatically pilot the boat according to precise coordinates. In the middle of the boat is a space for two rowers to each grab hold of two long oars. During the race, the two rowers who aren’t rowing at any given moment will be resting or taking care of logistical life-support, such as desalinating ocean water for the crew to drink.

All this specially designed equipment offers any number of advantages to a crew rowing across the ocean. But in a fundamental way, it offers no advantage at all. At its most elemental level, the challenge posed by rowing is to use human arms, legs, and energy to propel a floating vehicle through water. Most rowers attempt this feat on a river or lake against other rowing teams. A small breed decides to cross oceans. And in that, the boat has one important disadvantage. Though designed to be as light as possible, packed with food and supplies, the James Robert Hanssen weighs nearly 3,500 lbs. And rowing 3,500 lbs of boat across an ocean doesn’t make the task any easier.

Then again, easy isn’t really the point. “Pulling yourself across the ocean, there is something carnal in that,” Jordan explains with wide, excited eyes. After pausing, he adds, as a kind of punctuation mark, “It’s painful joy.”

“Rowing is not a fun sport,” Dylan chimes in. “You can’t just go out with your friends and scrimmage.”

Then what’s the draw, I ask?

Dylan describes the first time he went out to row as a freshman at the University of Puget Sound, where the four rowers met. Standing on the shore, Dylan heard his veteran teammates paddling from around a corner. The sound was beautiful to him. Only later did the rowers come into view, dipping their oars into the water in a fluid choreography. It was the beginning of an addiction.

“When things go right,” he says, “everything goes right. You can go ten days from just three perfect strokes.”

PATERNITY:
“I’ve become closer to my father now than I ever have before,” says Jordan one afternoon over beers as we sit on the edge of the James Robert Hanssen. It was in the living room of his childhood home over twenty years ago that Jordan saw his father collapse. In the minutes that followed, Jordan watched as his father “drowned on land.”

Jordan’s choice of words to describe his father’s death is unsettling, particularly in the context of what he is trying to do with his teammates. Although the team is well trained and equipped to deal with any emergencies they may encounter at sea, the risks are still very real. In the Gulf Stream, which they will follow all the way to England, they will dodge everything from icebergs to barges, which heavily traffic the route. They will withstand 30-foot waves.

But Jordan’s choice of metaphor is also a sign of how much his father has been on his mind. It was Jordan who, two years ago, first saw a flier in a Seattle boat club advertising the race. Since then, the memory of his father has shaped how Jordan prepared for the race, from the team’s partnership with the American Lung Association to the naming of the boat to the hours Jordan practiced rowing and thinking about his father. The past two years, he says, have been like “living with the dead.”

Of his teammates, Jordan is the most romantic. When he speaks about rowing he uses word like “beauty” and “rhythm” and “meditation.” He is the kind of guy who looks through you when describing something, lost in his own imagination. He does the same thing when he thinks about his father. Talking about his dad on the boat, with his arms across his knees and his hands dangling between his legs, his eyes and body are palpably still. His mood spreads across the boat. Dylan, who moments ago admitted he could happily tell rowing stories all day long, has stopped talking altogether and is nursing a beer.

Jordan sits up straight and looks across the boat at Dylan. He asks Dylan about a mutual friend who, while rowing, had found a young woman lying dead on a concrete buttress of a bridge that spans the water of Lake Union. The young woman had jumped headfirst. “When they jump into the cement supports of the bridge instead of the water, you know they really want to die,” Jordan says, with tear in his eyes. Upon discovering the girl, Jordan’s friend stroked her head as a final comforting gesture. Telling the story, Jordan is so upset I have to ask him about it again later to clarify the details.

“I’ve lived an incredibly lucky life,” Jordan says, composing himself. He goes on to explain how he hopes what his team is doing will “inspire” people to live fuller lives. Normally I would dismiss this language as the kind of ready-made phrase spouted by “humble” athletes everywhere trapped without a word to say in front of a reporter’s notepad. And I nearly do this time. After all, what do most of us know about inspiration? The entire concept feels like a vestige of an age when lovers read each other poems on weekend picnics and emotional openness wasn’t yet a mortal sin for urban hipsters. If I’ve ever inspired anyone to do anything, it’s been to throw back another tequila shooter on a Friday night.

But sitting on the boat that exists only because Jordan and his teammates spent all their time hustling for every part of it, I understand how unfathomable it must seem to Jordan for a girl to leap off a bridge after deciding she had no reason left to live. Her death is utterly incompatible with the universe that Jordan and his teammates have inhabited for the last two years. It is utterly incompatible with the force of James Robert Hanssen.

It also occurs to me that Jordan’s mother might not be all that thrilled about what her son is doing. I ask Jordan if she is worried that her asthmatic son is preparing to test his physical limits on the open sea with little support, considering she lost her husband to the same condition.

“My mother used to read me adventure books,” Jordan says. “I’m definitively the child she raised.”

PROPENSITY:
Back on the dock, the rowers are changing into drysuits. Without warning, Jordan dives off the dock and into the water. The drysuit, filled with air, inflates around him like a clown suit. He treads water for a few minutes and then pulls himself back onto the dock.

Brad is now straddling the front of the boat. Behind him, a plastic tyrannosaurus rex is duct-taped to the top of the front cabin. Jordan and Greg climb into the middle of the boat, and with a solid push with his foot, Brad sends the boat out into the water. A photographer in a special drysuit jumps into the water after them, dogpaddling with his camera. One hundred and fifty feet into the lake, the four rowers stand on one edge of the James Robert Hanssen, gripping ropes knotted to the other side. In unison, the rowers pull. The boat slowly rocks back and forth, finally upending on top of the rowers with a splash. After a second it begins to right itself. For a moment, the boat appears unwilling to flip back over, stuck on its side like a lazy whale, but the rowers give the bottom a little push and it finishes the roll.

The team prepare to repeat the exercise, this time with Jordan strapped into a seat in the middle of the boat. After a few strenuous attempts, they finally capsize the boat. Jordan is fully underwater. “One Mississippi, Two Mississippi, Three Mississippi,” I count off in my head. Again, the boat struggles to roll over. “Four Mississippi, Five Mississippi, Six Mississippi.” Teetering on its edge, the boat finally lumbers over, completing it rotation, and returning Jordan fully to the air.

Taking a breath, Jordan swings his long hair around, draining it of water. A wide smile crosses his face.

“Do it again,” he yells. They promptly do.