PINELLAS COUNTY, Fla. — It was a mission, all in the name of science.
Four women scientists completed the World's Toughest Row—3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean.
There's no engine, no one doing the work for you. It's row by row every single day for thousands of miles. These women aren't professional rowers, but they practiced.. for years.
"Before we started this, we had to learn to row and row well so that we were efficient and didn't hurt ourselves. We did a lot of strength training with her. A lot of it was to make sure that we were very strong and can maintain 12 hours a day and that we didn't injure ourselves along the way," explained Chantale Bégin.
University of South Florida biology professor Chantale Bégin and her all female team, named Salty Science, came in first place among women and 7th overall.
"Very proud. It's pretty awesome. It's not like our number one goal when we came into the race was not to win. We wanted to get across as safe as we could, have a great time and support each other, and be proud of ourselves when we finished. Our third goal was to row fast to get in the best way that we knew that we could. It was really awesome that we were able to do those three things and still and still win the women's class, "explains Lauren Shea.
USF graduates Lauren Shea, Noelle Helder, and Isabelle Côté, Bégin’s doctoral advisor at Simon Fraser University, practiced for years, mainly in Palm Harbor.
In total, it took them 38 days, 18 hours, and 56 minutes to make it to the finish line.
"So it's the four of us on that boat propelled by our oars and our muscles and us carrying everything we needed, all the foods that we needed, all of the equipment, spare parts. We had a Watermaker to desalinate water, solar panels that charge our global batteries and those travel batteries powered things like the Watermaker, the instruments, the navigation instruments, the autopilot, some lights and things like that," said Bégin.
If you followed along on their journey via social media, you saw a highlight was flying fish.
"It was so much fun to have the flying fish come on deck every day. It was really cool, though, because the last two or three weeks of the crossing, every evening, we would just be surrounded by these giant schools of tuna," Helder said. "We would scare out the flying fish, which would jump into the boat, and then we just tossed them back overboard. And then sometimes they would just get attacked by the schools of tuna."
But the journey wasn't without its hiccups.
"So many things broke," joked Côté.
"First 10 days were really, really intense. We had some really extreme conditions, really, really big waves and that led to a lot of gear failures, I would say," said Helder. "We broke a lot of things those first couple weeks, including our Watermaker. Thankfully, Lauren here was able to completely rebuild it while we're underway. That would have made it a much different crossing."
"We had a lot of waves that came from the side. In some of those that pinned our oars under the boat, we ended up bending the metal that holds the oars out, which was quite surprising to us. And we didn't have spares for that," explains Bégin. "The amount of stuff that broke early on felt really unsustainable if things were going to continue breaking at that pace for the whole crossing. So we were really grateful that things calmed down."
The World's Toughest Row may be over for the Salty Science team, but their mission isn't.
Their goal was to raise $500,000 for marine conservation, and they haven't hit their goal yet.
"A big focus of what we're doing is to focus on training the next generation of marine biologists who are going to work on coming up with solutions to the problems that face our oceans," Bégin said. "So we have an organization called the Banfield Marine Sciences Center on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. They offer amazing field courses that are really key for undergraduate students to really get good training in the field of marine science. We're setting up a scholarship fund for students of underrepresented backgrounds.
"We're raising money for Greenway, which is an organization that works on sustainable seafood production and does really great training for farmers that want to adopt these better agricultural techniques," she added. "And also for shellback expeditions, which works in the Eastern Caribbean to work with coastal communities and help collect data on the state of the coastal ecosystems for better evidence-based management decisions of coastal resources."
If you'd like to help them on their mission, click here to donate.
