Patagonia NZ

Where does the human mind go once it’s given time and space to turn in on itself?

For Jess, it was a fixation on what to do next. “All the bucket list things that grew and grew. Career paths… I thought I’d have some answers, but I don’t. You think about family and friends, especially as we had so much support from them. We’d neglected them for a while leading up to it because we were so short of time – we didn’t get a lot of time to reflect.” The thinking time was similar for Mims. “Like Jess said, you expect to have a big epiphany, but it’s never going to solve all your problems, doing an ocean crossing. To come up with really cool business ideas, or whatever, it just wasn’t happening. I kind of knew that because we’d done the Atlantic. You’ve got to live in the moment.”

The seriousness abates when they both admit they spent “a lot of the day thinking about food.” Mims lives on a farm, so she found herself dwelling on her animals and her dog, on friends she wanted to see when she got back. But Jess has already circled back around to food. “We were planning our party for when we get back, weren’t we? A big hog roast at Mims’ farm…”

Stepping back from the scale of the feat, these are two young people living in a hyperactive time in history: a world full of noise and distraction. How must it feel to be removed from that, plunged into isolation for months? According to Jess, it was welcome. “We were so excited not to talk to anyone for a while. We had so many obstacles just getting to the start line, to get out there and live the adventure. I really enjoyed being out of it all.” Mims agrees. “It was a massive relief.”

Both women were surprised they never ran out of things to chat about. Having interviewed them, I’m less surprised – they’re great conversationalists. If they did come up short, they’d entertain themselves by singing along to Mama Mia or discuss the podcasts they’d been listening to. “I don’t think we talked about anything very exciting really,” Mims laughs. “It was probably a load of rubbish. We had the same conversations a million times over.”

They used both a speaker and headphones (the bone-conduction type so they could still hear the boat), alternating depending on whether they wanted quiet time. Internet signal was limited (“We had Starlink, but obviously you’re not going to sit on that all day”) and constant power issues imposed further restrictions on both downloading and uploading. “So, you sit with what you’ve got. We got so bored with our music by the end.”

The power issues began only a couple of days into the second attempt.

“It was really cloudy those first few hundred miles,” Mims explains. “We were like, ‘The power’s not right,’ and I think everybody at home thought it was just the clouds, it’ll get better.” But it didn’t. “We had to start switching things off and hand-steer and just use the compass and flags.” Compared to the complexity of the equipment on the Velocity, the flags are incredibly simple, a feature that evokes the methods of the earliest Polynesian sailors to cross these huge distances. The method relies on the sailor’s familiarity with the wind direction – studying where the boat is in relation to the wind in the flags. “We’d get our weather sent to us by satellite every day,” says Jess. “And we’d be like, ‘Right, the flags are pointing at nine o’clock and we need to keep it that way.”

Over the entire crossing, Jess and Mims experienced only four or five days of headwind – testament, perhaps to the consistency of the tradewinds that blow east to west across the Pacific for months on end, tilting southeasterly in the Southern Hemisphere. “It was mostly just beam-on, sideways,” Mims explains, “which is uncomfortable, but it does make it possible to go towards Australia.” Perhaps it’s counter-intuitive, but an absence of wind is not helpful. Without wind and swell, the great weight of the boat becomes a hindrance.

Running just south of the equator, they were never cold but were often too hot. Back before they left, Mims had shown Jess photos of her Atlantic crossing, in which she experienced millpond days, the lifeless ocean reflecting the blue sky. To Jess, it looked heavenly. “And then we had so many days like that in the Pacific and they were absolutely horrific because we were so hot – no wind, scorching, couldn’t get any sleep because the cabin’s absolutely roasting.” Mims recalls soaking towels and draping them over themselves. “As we got closer to Australia and the ozone layer got thinner, you could feel your skin frying.”

That connection between the flags and the Polynesian navigators seems a cryptic gift: an unexpected blessing from the patchy power supply that necessitated ‘ghost ship’ mode. Over long nights, Jess and Mims pondered the ancient humans who’d gone before them. “We were convinced they mustn’t have navigated by the stars,” says Mims. “They must have navigated by cloud, because we had so many nights we couldn’t see the stars – weeks and weeks of cloud cover, and we’re like, ‘How on earth did they navigate, other than using the sunshine?’ It was quite baffling.” 

“I’ve thought about it quite a lot,” adds Jess. Another element, she points out, is that a rower faces backwards to the direction of travel: “You kind of wish you could look where you’re going.” 

Mims has a degree in astrophysics, and unsurprisingly, a thing about the night sky. “There were some nights I was like, ‘Okay, if we did have to hand-steer, let’s see what I can learn in this shift and just keep course by the stars and learn it all.’ You can see how they learned over so many years and developed the skill, and if they were out at sea all the time, they’d know the stars and what was where. It’s so cool – I want to learn more about it all now.” 

One thing that’s clear from the night-time videos is the toll the rowing shifts took on both women’s sleep patterns. They look variously stunned, amused and catatonic as they try to make sense for the camera after two hours’ rest. “A lot of people hallucinate,” says Jess. “I fall asleep before that starts. But sometimes you’d see things out of the corner of your eye – you might think part of the boat is a bird. We had a Paddington Bear tied up on the satellite, and” – she shoots a wry glance at Mims – “didn’t you think it was a bird?” 

“Yeah, it was the shadows,” Mims admits. “I hallucinated a tree, very briefly. You hear some stories of ocean rowers having these wild visions, but we were always passed out before that point.” 

Signs of humanity were rare and fleeting away from land. Occasional litter appeared as the rowers left Peru, and as they passed populations – Fiji and Vanuatu and nearing Australia. Plastic bottles, random chunks of polystyrene. Crossing a shipping lane outside the Barrier Reef, a few container ships passed within a mile of the tiny Velocity, but shipping generally was sparse.  

“Compared to the Atlantic there were so few ships,” says Mims. “The guy who rescued us on our first attempt, he came past to say hello on day 20 – that was really cool. We saw the odd sailing boat from a distance as we approached New Caledonia. We’d try and radio them and say, ‘Talk to us! We’ve not spoken to anybody in a hundred days!’ And they were like, ‘Hmmm, nah.’” 

 There’s a little map on the Seas the Day website that indicates a proposed route across the Pacific. Interestingly, it has the Velocity touching land at Sydney, not Cairns. Given its importance to the shore party, the decision to make landfall where they did was a surprisingly late one. “We were always of the mind that it’s a big east coast – we’ll just land where we land, see where the wind takes us,” Jess explains. Those early ideas of a Sydney finish were influenced by the visions that any first-time British visitor to Australia might have – rowing past a sun-lit Opera House and under the Sydney Harbour Bridge. “But that was looking pretty impossible with the winds,” says Mims. “So, by the time we got through the islands in French Polynesia it became clear we weren’t going to be able to get down as far as Brisbane, so then decided, ‘right, we’re going to Cairns.’” 

 The decision came about 2500 miles out, as the support crew crunched the numbers and concluded they’d spend weeks battling winds and dragging a parachute if they pushed too far south. As Mims explains it, “Crossing the Atlantic, the tradewinds work so that you do end up in the Caribbean – you can’t really go the wrong way. Whereas here, oh my gosh – what if we miss Australia completely?” Aiming for Cairns rather than Brisbane added 500 nautical miles to the voyage but probably ended up being quicker. 

For a team who craved beer and pizza, a sunset arrival in Cairns on a Saturday night was ideal. As the Velocity curled into Cairns Harbour, Australian Customs had already been worded up by the support team. But there were still some details that the two women had to do personally – at sea, in a heaving boat. “It’s quite funny,” Jess recalls, “about two weeks before we arrived, we thought, okay, we need to sort out our Australian visas. And they’re asking you all these questions like, ‘Where are you staying just now?’ ‘Um, the Pacific Ocean!’ All these things you can’t quite answer because you’re out there.” 

A gusting wind off Cairns kept them out at sea for an agonising few more hours, pushing the arrival time from 2pm to nearly 7pm while they were within sight of shore. Jess told waiting journalists that there was consideration given to just swimming the last bit, and she might’ve been only half-joking. After averaging 50 nautical miles per day and somehow covering 84 nautical miles in one day, the finish line was tantalisingly close. 

 When they rowed into the marina, surrounded by well-wishers, they stopped off on a little dock to hand over their passports and rubbish, stepping up onto wobbly legs for the first time in 165 days. After that, there were the celebratory flare shots to attend to, then a short row to the waiting arms of their families. 

The pizza and beer were, by all accounts, incredible. “So that’s what we did on our arrival evening. We’ve been given so much chocolate by friends and family. We ran out of chocolate quite a few weeks before finishing (1000 nautical miles out) and of course the last remaining bars were covered in mould, so we were scraping mould off everything.” 

Such a singular form of exercise, over such a long period, comes with its own set of peculiar side-effects. In the days that followed landfall, Jess was having constant problems just walking a straight line. “She kept veering off in odd directions,” says Mims. “Sort of tipping on one leg.” Mims was having her own battles. “The following day, clearing out the boat, I was chatting to some sailor on the dock and almost fell into the drink.” 

Both women are finding themselves insatiably hungry back on land. During the row they were eating 5000 calories a day, and their bodies haven’t adjusted back to a normal diet yet. Despite doing some gentle walking and a few gym sessions, their backs and hip flexors are hurting. “You feel really strong when you finish,” says Mims, “but really weak now. It’ll take a while to get land strength.” 

Jess at 28 is two years older than Mims and they met as adults, but something about their manner in interview suggests the closest of sisters, even twins. The sidelong looks, the bursts of laughter. That bond is to be expected, of course, given what they’ve been through, but it goes back even further according to Jess.  

“It’s been funny because even before the row we were together in Peru for quite a few weeks and on the phone together for an hour-long commute to and from work. It’s been really weird (since the voyage) because we’ve been staying in separate apartments with our families and we both just want to go off and chill out and relax together. There’s so much noise.” 

“We messaged each other that first night when we got to our apartments,” says Mims, “because it’s a bit weird being more than two metres apart. We’re so used to making decisions together, but now we’re on land and there’s so many people having opinions,” Jess finishes, “and we’re trying to get back control.” 

Jess Rowe has crossed the Atlantic, climbed Mt Kenya and ridden a bike across Spain. Mims Payne comes from landlocked Yorkshire, and three years ago she’d never been at sea. Now she’s rowed across two oceans. There’s lots of women doing ocean rowing, they point out. “It’s not a blokey scene at all,” Mims says. “There’s very little misogyny – it’s a really nice community. Special and cool. We get messages from mums who’ve got their girls to follow us on socials.” 

They both want to take on smaller challenges now: ones that don’t take over their whole lives. “Maybe a marathon,” Jess tosses in casually. For now, there’s a seemingly endless round of public engagements, and just the tiniest window in which to be everyday British tourists in Australia. Jess looks back at the blur of it all with something approaching wonder.      

“We had such a good time together. I wouldn’t have done it with anybody else.”  

Jess and Mims are the first all-female pair – and the youngest – to row across the Pacific Ocean, mainland to mainland, non-stop and unsupported, and in doing so raised more than $A179,000 for the Outward Bound Trust. Find out more about the voyage here.