CHAPTER ONE

The Idea

Your fate is delivered your moments at hand
It’s the chance of a lifetime in a lifetime of chance

Run for The Roses – Dan Fogelberg

“Are they having you for dinner? Or having you for dinner?”

That’s what my wife Stacia asked me over the telephone, when I called her and told her the King and Queen of the Marshall Islands are doing a special ceremony for my arrival and having me for dinner. I cracked up and told her, “If they throw salt and pepper on me as part of the ceremony, don’t worry, I’ll take off running!”

I had just arrived a few hours earlier into the Marshall Islands harbor, 2,600 miles west of Hawaii, aboard my rowboat Reach, on my 2nd leg of my attempt to be the first person to solo row around the world. I was on Day 142 and had just rowed 5,234 miles.

The idea had come to me 7 years earlier while on a solo sea kayaking trip from Key West, Florida to Nova Scotia, Canada. During that 4,000+ mile / 145 day trip, I was off the coast of South Carolina paddling along and thought, if I had a bigger boat that could carry more supplies, I could just keep going past Nova Scotia and on around the world.

That was it. One simple, random, goofy thought entered my head and it was all over. I still had another couple of thousand miles to go on this trip, but that idea wasn’t going away. I even stopped in North Carolina, not only to satisfy my obsession with the Wright Brothers, but to go to the local library and pull out some world maps, so I could start planning a route around the world. To cross the oceans, I knew I couldn’t do it in a kayak (or at least didn’t want to), so I figured a bigger heavier boat, big enough to sleep in comfortably, carry months of supplies, and handle the seas – a custom rowboat. OK. That’ll do. Did I know anything about rowing? Nope. Had I ever rowed before? Not a stroke.

But, that didn’t matter to me. Knowing how to pull the oars, the best route, the gear and supplies needed, the training, the building of the boat, navigation…none of that stuff mattered to me. That was all learnable and doable. It was the bucks. The funding. Where is the money going to come from? Sponsorships? I hope so. All I had was $316 cash stashed in a bag behind my kayak seat.

I paddled north out of North Carolina with about 2,000 miles to kayak still, and a 25,000 mile rowing expedition buzzing around in my head. Ah…the luxury of being single, no commitments, no timeframes, no job. No money.