Issue link: https://bluemagazine.uberflip.com/i/25179
IN FRONT :: SOLO ROW A MAN ON A MISSION PREPARES FOR A SECOND ATTEMPT ACROSS THE PACIFIC OCEAN In a rowboat in the middle of the sea, a man was frothing at the mouth. His head jerked and his arms flailed and his eyes rolled back in their sockets, and the next thing Andrew Halsey remembered was a Coast Guard cut- ter pulling alongside his 27-foot craft, the Brittany Rose. The guardsmen asked if he was all right. "Yes, I'm fine," he said. The guardsmen shrugged, wished him good luck and pulled away. "Good luck at what?" the 42-year-old Englishman asked himself. The attack had passed. It was a gran-mal epilep- tic seizure, which Halsey had been suffering from most of his adult life, and as with all gran-mal epileptic events, the victim comes out of it exhausted, confused and acutely amnesiac. Slowly, Halsey began to remember: The sleepless night of preparations, the television crews at the San Diego dock, the escort ships that towed him past the farewell buoys and clear of land. He was trying to row the Pacific Ocean, from California to Sydney, Australia, and if he succeeded, he would be the first dis- abled person- and only the third man ever-to solo the 7,500-mile crossing. The date was July 17, 1999. Andrew Halsey would spend the next 267 days in hell, and he would never make it to Australia , because luck, most certainly, was not with him. The sea sent seven huge storms in his first seven weeks at sea: black skies, driving rain, 140-mile-an-hour winds, 50-foot waves. For days, he was cabin-bound, soaked, his skin coming off in layers, salt-sores eating at his crotch, the boat tum- bling and capsizing and righting itself. He banged against the hull walls like a shoe in a clothes dryer and prayed for his life. By January 9, 2000, Halsey had run out of food. His supply ships missed their rendezvous, and the rest of his sup- plies were rotting in the wet conditions. For the next 13 weeks, he survived on raw shark, petrel, boobies, flying fish and sea- weed. By early March, his GPS had long since failed, his e-mail was gone and his last emergency beacon was running out of power. He had lost more than a third of his body weight. His lar- ynx muscles had so deteriorated that he was almost incapable of speech. He had lost teeth, busted ribs, lanced his flesh with fishhooks, gone into shock from jellyfish stings. He doesn't know how many epileptic seizures he had. Not a religious man, he had taken to yelling at a malevolent being in the heavens he called the Fucker in the Sky. When the Korean tuna trawler Dae Hae picked him up at 2 AM on April 7, more than 1,500 miles south- east of Hawaii, Halsey fell on the deck like a wet sponge, and a tiny Korean sailor dragged his six-foot-four-inch frame down into the hold. Halsey's row would be known as one of the unlucki- est and toughest in history. He had completed barely a quarter of his journey. He had rowed thousands of miles in circles off the coast of Mexico, battered by wind and surf. He'd push 30 miles west, and storms would shunt him 200 miles east. "It was heart- brea ki ng," he sa id. But later this year he's going to try it all again. He has yet to set a date; he's currently trying to gather sponsors. The mainland existence doesn't offer him much: his epilepsy is utterly disabling. He can't hold a job, survives on welfare, doesn 't even have enough money to own a phone. "When I walk the streets day to day," Halsey said recently, "when I look at people spending their lives in front of a TV, I think to myself, 'What a bloody waste.' Christ, I can't wait to get back out to sea."- Christopher Ketcham 25 W :I: Z o .... i:; :I: ~ « cr: o z ~ « ~ :I: Il.