Greg Collins, 62, of Monroe, Conn., his son, Elliot, 29, and teammates, Chris Betts and Will Towning, were about a third of the way to completing The World’s Toughest Row, a 3,000 mile international race west from San Sebastian de la Gomera in the Canary Islands, to English Harbour in Antigua and Barbuda, last December when a whale and its calf swam toward their little rowboat.
Weary from a three-hour-shift of rowing, Collins rested inside the small cabin in front of the boat.
“They started shouting, ‘come out,'” he said of his fellow crew members. “The calf came toward us. The mother pushed it up. It was so close, I felt like I could touch it.”
A video they took shows the baby whale coming toward the side of the boat, before submerging itself under water, its enormous tail rising high up into the air.
“I saw the large tail and I thought it was cool. I said, ‘oh, my goodness,’ and Elliot was like ‘Aaaahhhh!'” Collins said with a laugh during an interview at the Village Coffee Bar on Monroe Turnpike Monday. “It was bigger than the boat,” he added with a smile, before saying a famous quote from the movie, “Jaws,” “you’re definitely gonna need a bigger boat.”
“It was just a curiosity,” Collins said of the whale coming up to their boat. “You could see the grins on our faces. It was cool.”
Their team, Get Busy Rowing, completed the race in 45 days, nine hours and 23 minutes, coming in 30th out of 43 boats. But winning was never the goal, it was completing the journey.
“We were never racing,” Collins said. “We were proud that we finished. It was such a close grouping.”
He planned to board a flight to London on Tuesday, so he could attend a presentation dinner and spend his Friday evening with all the boaters who participated in the race.
Collins’ team, Get Busy Rowing, raised money for the Matt Hampson Foundation, named after an ex-England and Leicester Tigers rugby player, who experienced a life-changing injury in 2005, leaving him paralyzed from the neck down at age 20.
Hampson’s foundation draws upon the experience and knowledge of people who have been on the same journey and helps patients develop the tools and skills they need to move on as they start to rebuild their lives.
The foundation has the Get Busy Living Centre in Leicestershire, where patients and caregivers “can feel normal again and be part of an active social scene as they retrain themselves to focus on what they can do – not what they can’t.”
The reason the Collins duo embarked on the potentially treacherous journey was to honor the adventurous spirit of Greg Collins’ mother and Elliot’s grandmother, Pamela, who they named their boat after.
Collins said his mother “did crazy things” like cycling across Kenya and climbing Machu Picchu in her 60s. He lost his mother three years ago, and he and his siblings have taken on challenges in her honor ever since.
“Halfway-ish we did something to remember her,” Collins said of the boat race. “She would have loved it! My wife thinks she would have done it when she was in her 80s.”
Starting too fast
Stormy weather delayed the start of The World’s Toughest Row, so the race got underway one day later on Dec. 14.
“The first day or two is a pure adrenaline rush,” Collins said. “We went out too fast. It’s unsustainable. Then you get into a rhythm.”
There are two small cabins, one in the front and the other in back of the boat. Two men rowed together at three hour intervals, while the other two slept in the cabins. Collins said they set it up, so one would start his shift with someone halfway through his, so he would spend time with two teammates each shift.
There was a 10 minutes delay in each shift change, so all four men could socialize together at once.
Collins shared the front cabin with his son. “You’re always banged around, but you’re so exhausted, you pass out,” he said.
“There was no reference point,” Collins said of the terrain. “All we saw was the sea, so every day was similar.”
Nights with heavy cloud cover left the crew rowing in complete darkness, but Collins said the night sky was illuminated when it was clear.
“You could see the Milky Way and everything,” he said. “The night skies were the highlights. The moon was spectacular. It was so bright.”
Collins said they saw moon rises, brilliant sun rises and sunsets, and the rainbows they saw during their journey were “huge.”
“There’s a lot of flying fish, fish flying onto the boat all the time,” Collins said, adding they tossed ones they could find back into the ocean. “The big ones were flapping about, so they’re easy to find.”
“Nights with a storm, we had 50 foot swales,” he said, adding their boat came nowhere near capsizing. However, that didn’t mean Get Busy Rowing’s 3,000 mile journey was drama free.
The crew had a water maker to convert salt water into freshwater, but it was broken. If they couldn’t fix it, they would have had to heat up water every day to prepare it manually.
“We diagnosed the issues,” Collins said.
The men placed a boxcutter blade over a hole, left it for 24 hours to set — and it worked. Collins said he harkened back to his days as a telephone engineer, using his problem-solving skills.
“We broke an oar in half,” he said of another obstacle his team had to overcome. “We were surfing down a wave at 14 knots. That’s fast, usually it’s three knots.”
The oars were resting at the sides of the boat and one broke off, but the team had an extra oar to replace it.
“We bent the rowing gates,” Collins said. “We had to bend it back as best we could.”
A physical toll
“I’ll never do it again,” Collins said of The World’s Toughest Row. “The biggest thing is the estrangement from your family for weeks, being in a little boat in the middle of the ocean. You’re definitely a little different than when you left.”
One thing Collins said nobody in his crew knew before the race was the fact they could never completely stand up in the boat, which constantly rocked back and forth.
“Sitting on a rowing seat is not comfortable,” he said. “Your backside gets pretty numb. Your hands get numb and the calluses happen pretty quick. But you want that, because we don’t want blisters, which can get infected.”
“My back’s really stiff and my hands are still a bit stiff, and these fingers are still numb,” Collins added, holding up his right thumb and index finger. “When I got out of the boat it was an effort to close my hands.”
Finger stiffness could be a challenge for Collins, who plays in a band called The Trophy Husbands.
“It took weeks to play the guitar again, but The Trophy Husbands will be playing this summer,” he said with a smile.
“My hip was really bad. The younger guys are doing better, but everyone suffered,” Collins said. “That’s what I didn’t appreciate. I thought I’d get off the boat feeling fit and like a god.”
Collins and his son docked at English Harbour at the end of the race to a cheering crowd that included Greg’s wife, Angie, and other son, Oscar.
“We stayed at Antigua for a week to celebrate,” Collins said. “I just wanted to go home, because I was completely broken, more broken than I was expecting.”
The first time walking on land again, there was an uneven feeling for a while, according to Collins. Aside from the physical toll on his body, Collins said he lost 35 pounds.
“I just couldn’t eat enough,” he said. “It should be four meals a day. I had one high calorie meal a day and a lot of trail mix.”
Meals ready to eat (MREs) included options like spaghetti, chili and macaroni and cheese.
“You’re craving fresh fruit and stuff like that,” Collins said. “I couldn’t eat when I got off the boat. I was looking forward to that for a week and just couldn’t face it. I was also looking forward to a beer and that went down fine.”
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