Jess Rowe and Miriam Payne met for the first time in late 2022 at the Blue Marlin bar in La Gomera, a small Spanish island in the Atlantic Ocean. Just under three years later, the two British women made history by becoming the first female crew to successfully row non-stop and unsupported across the Pacific Ocean. To grasp the magnitude of their feat, more people have walked in space than successfully rowed across the world’s biggest ocean.
Their journey started in Callao, Peru, in May and finished in Cairns, Australia on October 19: a 6907-nautical mile odyssey from east to west in 165 days, 10 hours and 33 minutes.
“We had a lot of things go wrong,” Payne tells The Athletic from Australia where the celebrations, and recuperation, are continuing. “But it always got better and we just kept going.”
On they rowed, even when one week into the trip, around 350 miles in, a broken rudder (a blade at the rear of a boat used for steering) left them stranded at sea. Repairs were attempted, but even the spare rudder malfunctioned due to what they would later learn was a manufacturing fault.
Faced with having to prematurely end their great adventure, they used the only option they had: they reached out to a friend they had met in Peru, Alec Hughes, who had already set off on a solo sail around the world. When the message came through from Rowe and Payne asking for advice and whether he knew anyone nearby who could help, Hughes plotted out a route and set out on a rescue mission.
“If it hadn’t been for Alec sailing a whole week out of his way and towing us for a whole seven or eight days all the way back to where we started we would have had to abandon our boat,” explains Rowe, who spent a lot of time on the water during her childhood in Hampshire, a county on the English south coast. “We would’ve had to be rescued by the navy in Peru, we would have had to leave our boat and the whole expedition would have been over.”
Jess Rowe (L) and Miriam Payne approaching Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in the Coral Sea (Brian Cassey/AFP via Getty Images)
More anxiety was to come. Drinking water issues were partly fixed using underwear to repair the filter, a lack of power on the boat meant no navigational lights or radio, then there was the sleep deprivation, the impossible task of consuming 5,000 calories a day and trying to finish before the start of the cyclone season. But then there was the final day.
“It was pretty stressful,” 26-year-old Payne concedes. “We were getting pushed outside the channel and we thought we were going to have to run aground and swim to shore. There was a lot of relief when we stepped on land. We were excited and so proud of ourselves because we’d been planning this for so long.”
When Rowe and Payne first met in the Blue Marlin, both were about to set off on a 3,000-mile (4,828km) row across the Atlantic Ocean. Rowe, now 29, was in a team with three other women while Payne, at sea for the first time after growing up on a farm in East Yorkshire in the north of England, was going it alone.
Payne completed her Atlantic row in 59 days, 16 hours and 36 minutes, a then-record for a solo woman, and when she arrived in Antigua, Rowe was still on the Caribbean island. They celebrated their achievements together. And began plotting what was to come next.
For the next two years they planned, fundraised, and saved. They bought a second-hand rowing boat for £60,000 ($78,000). In between working full-time they upgraded Velocity, their nine-metre boat, and readied her for their unique challenge which has raised over £100,000 ($130,000) for The Outward Bound Trust, a charity committed to empowering young people through outdoor learning.
But how did they prepare for days of 15-plus hours of rowing and barely any sleep? Six days a week in the gym, endless hours on rowing machines, weight training to “make the body as robust as possible to prevent injury” and every day off on the water, getting to know the boat and practising shift patterns, which largely involved two hours of rowing followed by two hours of sleep.
“We would only have 24 or 48 hours of rowing on the water at a time because we were both working full-time,” Rowe says. “It’s funny because people think you’ve got to be an ocean rower to do an ocean row, but you can’t be an ocean rower before you’ve done an ocean row. You learn by doing and you’ve just got to wing it, jump into the deep end and you really do learn along the way.”
“It’s amazing how the body adapts,” Payne adds. “We didn’t really have any injuries out there apart from the odd niggle but nothing more than what you’d expect. Your body does adapt to life out there but it’s more of a mental challenge.”
The pair left Peru on May 5 to travel across the Pacific Ocean, raising money for charity (Brian Cassey/AFP via Getty Images)
One of the biggest tests was refuelling. They needed to eat 5,000 calories each per day so packed enough food for 200 days, but on most days they struggled to get past an intake of 3,500. Every 500 miles they would reward themselves by making noodles with radish sprouts and other green vegetables they had been growing on board.
“It was quite a lot to eat, especially when you’re eating dehydrated and freeze-dried food, which doesn’t really have a lot of texture to it,” Rowe says. “It was like mush and we struggled with it.”
What they didn’t struggle with was their 1,500 calorie snack packs made up of chocolate, nuts, biscuits, dried fruit and seeds. With one month to go, Rowe says she ran out of snacks entirely. “I would eat more snack packs and less meals which was a really terrible idea,” she laughs.
Throughout the trip they had to take it in turns to get into the ocean and clear the hull of any barnacles. “When we did get in the water and it was like five kilometres deep it was a really cool feeling because you can just see down forever. We were both really excited to see sharks and we were sad that we only saw the fins of them this time.”
They did catch sight of a sperm whale a few metres away from the boat, Payne thought she was hallucinating as it went by.
Rowing under the Milky Way as meteor showers trickled overhead are images that will live long in the memory, as will the phosphorescence which lit up the water as they heaved through it.
Jess Rowe (L) and Miriam Payne became the first women’s team and the first pair to row across the Pacific Ocean non-stop and unsupported (Brian Cassey/AFP via Getty Images)
They knew very little about what was happening in the real world, and found it liberating.
“We have no idea about what has happened in the last six months,” says Payne, whose father spent a lot of time tracking them and making sure they were OK.
“Mim’s dad was doing the marine traffic for us and probably slept as much as we did,” Rowe says. “Our parents are all quite happy they can finally get some sleep.”
“For most of the crossing we barely saw any boats, probably like half a dozen. But then once we got close to Australia, we crossed through a shipping lane and had a lot of boats,” Payne adds. “We had to radio up and say, ‘Look, we are down here. You need to watch out because you’re getting a bit close’.”
Payne had a saying written on the inside of the cabin. ‘The difference between an ordeal and experience is your attitude,’ it read.
The media interest continues as they acclimate to life on land again and spend time with their families in Australia. But they have had time to dream up another expedition. Admitting it might be a few years away, the history-makers want to row across the Indian Ocean next. And who would put it past them.