Atlantic challenge: rowers arrive in Antigua after 39 days at sea, encountering their own ‘Armageddon’
- Ewan Bell thinks ‘this is what we signed up for’ as lightning blinds him and waves come out of the darkness knocking them sideways
“I went into this to test myself,” Bell, 33, said. “My favourite bit was when we rowed through a storm. There was thunder and lightning all around us. The lightning was so close that it would light everything and blind us. The rain was coming in sideways.
“It was 4am, there was no moon. When there’s a moon you can see, but we couldn’t see anything. We couldn’t see the waves until they’d broken over us. We called it Armageddon. As we rowed through the other side, I thought ‘this is what I signed up for’.”
“It was just relentless,” Bell said. “I am a pretty light sleeper so I didn’t sleep during the day. So the night shifts were so hard. We were rowing through a wind farm and I thought ‘I don’t remember that on the map?’ Then about an hour later I saw a dragon fly over the moon and thought, ‘Ah, I am hallucinating’.”
One night, Merotra began to panic. A ship was bearing down on them, he said. Bell entered the cabin and tried to radio the ship, but he could not see it on the automatic identification system screen, which shows nearby vessels. Bell was frantically trying to contact the ship as Merotra became increasingly animated about an imminent crash.
“It’s getting closer,” Merotra shouted.
Then he realised he was hallucinating. The ship was the moon.
“You spend so long facing backwards, you start to think you’re moving backwards with no point of reference,” Bell said.
Since getting back to land, Bell has struggled to find his land legs. He spent all of Tuesday tripping over himself.
“The day after, your body thinks ‘finally, we’ve stopped rowing, time to heal’,” Bell said. “It’s seized up. I’ve got claw hands and I can’t close my fist. I have to ask my mum to open bottles for me.
“The arrival was a whirlwind. We hadn’t seen anyone for so long, then suddenly, there’s people and boats everywhere, and the super yachts are letting off their horns,” Bell said.