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Outside Magazine May 2002

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The Hard Way
Suffering a Sea Change
Who knows best the cost of rowing solo across the Atlantic? She who finishes last.

By Mark Jenkins


	Illustration by Brian Cronin

THE ACHING VASTNESS of the ocean. A million mindless waves crawling up one another's backs like blue crabs. Through a monocular I glass the line where the paper-smooth blue of the sky attaches to the streaming blue of the sea.

She isn't even a speck out there. She's still beyond the curve of the earth, beyond imagination.

Farther down the beach a tall fishing vessel is dry-docked on blocks of wood. Up the rope ladder I go, onto the slanted roof of the forecabin, up the leaning mast to the crow's nest.

There she is.

Still so far out to sea her absurdly small boat is almost unidentifiable. But she is undeniably extant, the palms of her oars flashing in the sunlight, like hands waving. She appears to be rowing strongly, steadily; landfall is still hours away. And yet what are mere hours after all this? She is rowing herself out from unspeakable desolation, like a figure walking out of a desert mirage.

Back at the pier in the Barbados resort of Port St. Charles, watercraft have been mustered for the mostly English press corps: the condescending BBC crew, stiff-necked British tabloid reporters, sunburnt-but-sallow Fleet Street photographers, plus a few excitable Barbadian broadcasters. Our flotilla casts off and cruises out past the breakwater toward the tiny rowboat. After 111 days at sea, ocean rower Debra Veal, 26, should be scorched, stringy, blistered, trembling with exhaustion. Nothing could be further from the truth. An incredulous photographer shouts, "My God, Ms. Veal, you look as if you've just come off an ocean cruise!"

She smiles, teeth white as shells. "I have," she says.

Veal has her sun-blond hair pulled back in a bouncy ponytail. She is exquisitely tanned, with the shapely, corded legs of an Olympic sprinter and the swooping curves of a cover model. She's a Devonshire girl who's been an athlete all her life—tennis, kayaking, mountaineering. Veal is also a businesswoman who owns a London gallery called The Well-Hung Art Company.

A cheer rises from the crowd at the dock as she glides in. She raises an oar in the air and shakes it. Her husband, Andrew Veal, a tall, handsome gent, steps into the rowboat, giving her a kiss and a long hug. They'd set out together in the little vessel but, afflicted by a previously unknown phobia of the sea, he jumped ship after two weeks, and she'd carried on alone for 97 days.

And now Debra Veal is the last-place finisher in what is indubitably the most grueling athletic event in the world: the quadrennial Atlantic Rowing Challenge, a 2,900-mile race across the sea from Spain's Canary Islands to Barbados in the southern Caribbean.

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Mark Jenkin's first collection of Outside columns, The Hard Way, will be published in the summer of 2002 by Simon & Schuster.

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