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.
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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.
“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, th
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