Former England rugby sevens captain Ollie Phillips is contemplating his New Year’s resolution. Nothing unusual in that, except he is in a rowing boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
“We’re closer to space than we are to land,” he says. “Literally in the middle of nowhere. It’s mind-blowing, absolutely nuts.”
For 17 days, he and three friends have been at sea. They have covered 1,174 nautical miles and have not yet reached the halfway point. The sun by day is blisteringly hot, and the seasickness has been brutal.
“You want to know my New Year’s resolution? I’ll tell you,” he adds. “Never to get in another f***ing rowing boat. What was it Steve Redgrave said: ‘Shoot me if you see me in one.’”
World’s Toughest Row race across the Atlantic
Phillips is taking part in the World’s Toughest Row race across the Atlantic to raise funds for charities, including the My Name’5 Doddie and Matt Hampson foundations which are so well known to the rugby community.
He took to the sea despite the misgivings of his wife, Lucy. “She’s worried we’re going to die, to be blunt,” he told Planet Rugby before leaving the Canary Islands for Antigua before Christmas. “She wants her husband and the dad of our three young kids to come home.”
The start was postponed because the organisers of this most extreme of challenges thought conditions were too dangerous. Then, when it did get underway, seasickness struck.
For three days, as team Seas Life rode three-metre waves, the chundering continued. “I felt awful, absolutely disgusting,” says Phillips. “Every 20 minutes, one of the lads would be over the side of the boat.
“They still got on the oars, still did their shift, but what made it worse was we had a waning moon, basically a brand new moon. There was no light, no horizon. No nothing. Just cloud, everywhere.
“You’re totally disoriented and discombobulated. Yet you’ve got to keep eating because of the workload. Two hours on the oars, two hours off. You have to get food inside you, but you’ve no appetite, you’re just not hungry. You just want to rest.
“One lady on another boat had to be medevacked off because she stopped eating, then stopped passing urine and found herself in all sorts of trouble.”
The ordeal has been made more taxing by an injury suffered by one of the four-man team, Julian Evans, which, for a week, has left him unable to row.
“I’m getting nowhere near enough food down me, I haven’t from day one,” Phillips adds. “I’m meant to be eating four of these freeze-dried meals a day, I’m just about up to three, but all you think about when you get off the oars is hydration, because you’re baking in 35-degree heat.
“You need to eat because otherwise you’re f***ed. You feel it in the evenings. That’s when it comes and hits you.”
Physically and Emotionally Draining
Phillips, 43, has sailed around the world, swum the channel and cycled across America. None of which, he says, compares with the physically and emotionally draining relentlessness of rowing 3,000 miles in a 28-foot by five-foot, seven-inch boat.
“You get in the rhythm of it, like everything, right?” he says. “You learn to suffer and adapt to the pain. But there’s no respite. Every two hours, bosh, up again, right, bosh up again.
“If you stop the boat doesn’t move, or you go backwards. You’re just prolonging the agony. Your mind starts playing games with you. It takes you to weird places. We’ve all been hallucinating.
“I have on multiple occasions woken up convinced there’s been a conversation about something and we need to go in a certain direction or do a certain something. The boys have looked at me like, ‘What the hell are you on about?’
“One of them genuinely believed there was a goblin out there. Another, that there was a cafe on the horizon. It’s all very weird.”
Phillips is speaking via the Starlink satellite communication system, his voice so clear he could be next door. He is anything but. For the next 1,500 miles, his only company will be crewmates: Evans, Tom Clowes and Stu Kershaw… and the dolphins which regularly surface alongside them.
The fear is an attack from the deep. In last year’s race, a 12-foot marlin pierced a hole in one of the boats, its spike penetrating the fibreglass hull and causing panic as the vessel took in water.
To that end, the quartet dived beneath the hull the day before this interview to clean it and ensure there is nothing for tuna and other fish to congregate around, which, in turn, might attract bigger predators.
So far, the biggest dramas involving the fleet have been a whale brushing up alongside one boat and another crew stopping to save a giant sea turtle trussed up in an old piece of fishing net.
With no one to speak to but each other for an estimated 40 days, Phillips says he expects to find normal life overwhelming when they finally make landfall.
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“Sublime uneventfulness”
His testimony brings to mind the novel Moby Dick, in which the author, Herman Melville, describes the isolation at sea as a “sublime uneventfulness”.
“There you stand,” he wrote, “lost in the infinite series of the sea, with nothing ruffled but the waves.. Everything resolves you into languor.
“You hear no news… are never troubled with the thought of what you shall have for dinner; for all your meals for three years and more are singly stowed in casks, and your bill of fare is immutable.”
Phillips sincerely hopes dry land is closer than that. His next shift on the oars is fast approaching, his time in the relative shade of the one metre by one metre cabin coming to an end.
“The sun has been beating down since 7am, there’s no ventilation and with the hatch closed, I’m sweating my a**e off,” he says. “Opening it now, I see just this huge, vast abyss of blue, both top and bottom, with the odd cloud in the sky.
“There is a magical side to it. After dark, the temperature drops, and the view of the sky is like nothing you could possibly imagine. With no light pollution, you see everything. Thousands of stars, the Milky Way. Just incredible.”
It is at night that Phillips reminds himself why he is out there, at the mercy of the sea, unaware which of the five time zones the race passes through their boat is in now.
“I think of those with motor neurone disease, friends like Lewis (Moody) and Ed (Slater),” he says. “I think of Hambo [Matt Hampson, the England U21 prop left paralysed when a scrum collapsed]. Genuinely, that is the motivation.
“Ed and Hambo can’t do this, through no choice of their own. So whilst it is brutal, whilst it is painful, exhausting, disgusting, feral and all those things, we’re actually the fortunate ones.”
If you would like to support Ollie Phillips and his Seas Life crew, you can donate here.
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