Deep Water

To Roz Savage, rowing across an ocean is all about conquering the sea inside.

Who among us hasn't woken up one morning and realized that career, mortgage and two weeks’ vacation don’t add up to fulfillment?  Back in 2000, Roz Savage arrived at that  conclusion. But it’s what she did next that  stands out. “I wrote two obituaries for myself: the one I was headed for, and the one I wanted,” says the 39-year-old Briton. Then she quit her London job as an IT project manager, amicably divorced her husband and set out looking for what she calls “a big adventure.”

Five years later, she rowed solo across the Atlantic Ocean. On August 1, she set out through the Golden Gate to row the Pacific. As you read this, Savage is most likely nearing Hawaii, having spent some 60 days aboard her 24-foot boat, The Brocade, with a satellite phone, a GPS system and an iPod for company. She sleeps in a watertight compartment and rows 12 hours a day. 

She hopes to land in Hawaii by late September or early October, wait out cyclone season and then move on to the second and third legs of the journey—to Tuvalu and, finally, Australia. If she makes it, she’ll be the only woman in the world to have rowed the 7,268-mile route alone and unsupported. “Unsupported means I don’t receive supplies, food, water or replacement oars,” explains Savage, who trains in  the Bay Area (though she doesn’t exactly live anywhere at the moment, her sole possessions being The Brocade and a pickup truck). Savage brings all her food with her—dried fruit, oat bars, jerky, protein powder—and filters salt water into drinking water.

It’s hard to imagine which poses a bigger threat: the physical hurdles (seasickness, tendonitis, sharks, large ships, 20-foot waves) or the mental challenge of 200 days of solitude on a seemingly endless ocean. “You pass a point of no return, because you can’t row back into a headwind,” she says. “At some point on the Atlantic, I stopped asking myself whether I could do it. I realized I was doing it.”

Savage plans to conquer the Pacific the same way she did the Atlantic: by focusing on the moment and solving problems as they arise.  When her oars broke on the Atlantic, she used duct tape and a boat hook to make splints. When her satellite phone failed, she kept her  mind occupied with affirmations, rowing in time to such mantras as “Tougher than most.”

This time, though, her fears aren’t of capsizing or encountering great whites. “I fear going back to work in an office,” she says. “If that  happens, something’s gone badly wrong with the plan.”

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