Row, Row, Row…And Keep Rowing For A Really Long Time: One last note from the wild and wacky world of ocean rowing. Englishman Jim Shekhdar, 57, is about to set off on a voyage from New Zealand to South Africa via Cape Horn. This is Southern Ocean rowing, folks, and that means winds up to 80 mph and seas of 60 feet or more. Oh yeah, it will also be really, really cold. No one has successfully rowed the Southern Ocean before and Shekhdar will have to propel himself more than 8,000 miles through some of the world’s most inhospitable seas. If he’s lucky, he’ll be out there about 5 months. If he’s unlucky it could be more like a year. And if he’s really unlucky, well, he may never get home. In short, the voyage will be wildly unpredictable, and Shekhdar says that if storms prevent him from getting north to Cape Town toward the end of his little jaunt, he’ll just keep on plugging away until he hits Australia, which would add a few thousand miles to the stunt. The good news is that Shekhdar may pull this thing off (it’s mostly downwind) in fewer than the 273 days it took him to row 10,600 miles from Peru to Australia a few years ago. The bad news is that the last guy who tried to row the Southern Ocean–a Frenchman, of course–had to be rescued by the Chilean Navy after his foot turned green and started to smell really bad. You can follow Shekhdar’s progress here. Wish him luck. He’s going to need it.

Shekhdar’s 2001 arrival in Australia: “Damn, I wish I had learned how to Eskimo roll this thing……”

(Photo: Ocean Rowing Society)