When John Fairfax rowed the oceans

Of British and Bulgarian descent, Fairfax had already lived an adventurous life before his ocean row. He had lived “like Tarzan” in the Amazon jungle on leaving home when he was 13 years old. At 20 he made his living as a pirate and smuggler and in the process learned useful sea skills. At 32 he rowed the Atlantic Ocean solo, going from the Canary Islands to Florida in 182 days. Three years later he became the first man to row the Pacific Ocean along with girlfriend Sylvia Cook. It took them just a couple of days short of a year to complete the crossing from San Francisco to Australia.

Much has changed in ocean rowing in the last 40-plus years since Fairfax was forging the way. The record for rowing the Atlantic solo is now 40 days, 9 hours and 41 minutes. The crossing is rowed as a race with many boats starting at the same time and a support yacht following the rowers. The start is in the Canary Islands and the finish in Barbados.

The technology is also very different. All boats carry a satellite phone, have access to a number of communication options, listen to music and books on their iPods and eat specially prepared food that is light to carry and easy to prepare. The Atlantic is also a major freighting path so that if anything goes wrong a cargo ship, ocean liner or the like will not be too far away.

Fairfax realised that navigation was a large part of the journey. For that he called on his pirate education. Today, competitors in the ocean race are required to have a VHF license, personal insurance and suitable navigation equipment on board. They also pay about USD17,000 and “waive any moral rights…”

Rower of three oceans, Roz Savage intimately knows the differences between Fairfax’s day and what she has experienced on her crossings. Savage, who uses her ocean rows as a way of bringing awareness to environmental degradation of the Earth’s oceans noted a number of changes in her most recent blog.

“When Fairfax was rowing the oceans 40 years ago, shark populations were around five times what they are now. Shark-finning, by-catch, and the demolition of the ocean food pyramid have devastated populations of sharks. Fairfax happily describes how he lassoed and killed a dusky shark. Now he would be lucky to see one.

“The first container ship launched just over a decade before Fairfax’s voyage, in 1956. Today there are over 50,000 container ships plying the world’s oceans, transporting everything from cars to kiwifruit. It has been estimated that one container ship pollutes as much as 50 million cars due to their enormous weight and the low quality of their fuel.”

“When John Fairfax rowed across the Pacific with Sylvia Cook, the plastics industry was still in its infancy. Now there are an estimated 3.5 million tons of plastic floating in the North Pacific Gyre, just one of five oceanic gyres around the world where plastic pollution accumulates, leaching toxic chemicals such as BPA into seawater and killing marine life.”

After Fairfax’s two ocean rows he moved to the United States ending up in Las Vegas where it is understood that he made his living from gambling. Fairfax is seen as an adventurer in a very different mould to today’s models. Already his name is associated with an ocean rowing race with the John Fairfax trophy awarded to the winning boat.