The craziest Atlantic crossing of all

Battling 17-foot waves, icebergs and 60mph winds on an Atlantic crossing is hard. Doing it on a flat-bottomed fishing skiff, with no cabin, no keel and absolutely no support – well, it’s the thing of legend. Breaking the Guinness record for the smallest powered boat to cross the Atlantic, Bob and Ralph Brown used breaks in the harsh northern weather last summer to hop from Tampa, Florida, up the East coast of the USA to Greenland, then drop back down via Iceland and England to arrive in Frankfurt, Germany – some three months and 8,312 miles later. It was a test of their design as much as their nerves, with a special, buoyant T-top roof to flip the boat back up if it capsized. The voyage was conceived by ex-Marine Bob as a way to honour troops killed or wounded in combat, hoping to raise £2 million for veterans’ organizations. Now, WideWorld reveals the truth behind this amazing story, told in his own words by Bob Brown...

I was asleep on a small kid's air mattress, trying to sleep under our Suzuki banner, when Ralph woke me up screaming. He’d sighted a shark bigger than the boat, a 21-foot fishing skiff. He had just about ran the thing over. Sleep is rather hard to come by onboard, and at this time, I was out for the count and hardly knew what was happening.  

It was a beautiful day with 3-foot waves rocking the boat, floating in sky blue Atlantic waters. As I sat up, I saw the big grey fin just as Ralph wiped the boat around. The wind caught the banner I was under, and poof! It was overboard. We loved our blanket, and at the time, it was even more important than our fear of the shark. After several failed attempts to hook the blanket out with long poles, and with us nearly falling in the water to rescue it, the blanket slowly sank out of sight.

It was another sign that things were not going too well. On our way to Greenland, we had been battling 9-foot waves and powering against the current. The water temperature fell to 35F (1.6C), and combined with the constant bumping of the waves, the spray and wind, we nearly failed to get there at all. We arrived in Greenland with less than a cup of gas left. Our 2-day, 600-mile trip had lasted 6 days, and what was left of Hurricane Bill was always popping up when we didn't need it, giving us seas up to about 17 feet. 

During the first part of the trip across the Atlantic, skirting the East coast of the USA and Canada, we did a lot of driving at night. Most of our legs were about 200 miles. We would stop at a gas station, marina, sometimes a restaurant, so we didn't carry too much on the boat other than water, snack food, and our favourite: Fruit Cocktail with the pop top. We tried to heat up some soup in 12-volt thermoses, but they didn't work very well, getting it lukewarm at best. For the Greenland leg, we bought a second hand hotbox 12-volt cooker from a fisherman in Canada, and then stocked the boat with stews, soups, oatmeal, and all the normal junk food snacks. Even then, it wasn't really all that waterproof and we had to repair it several times.

The thing I’ll really take with me from that part of the journey north was the ice. For hours I watched white specks offshore from Canada, trying to decide if they were yachts or icebergs. The first one that was in our direct path was spectacular: we spent about four hours fooling around it. I even went in the water on my surfboard to take pictures and then wakeboard around it. We were both going nuts. I was hoping to see at least one, but we saw over 3,000.  We even got to see a small one roll, and we heard several others roll during the night. It was exciting, even when we were hit by a small one at night: we were just too cold to stay awake driving, and the berg pulled us off our anchor!

Greenland to Frankfurt

Sleep was always an issue on board. We used the air mattress with the Suzuki banner until we lost it, but when it got cold – at night, and in the day too when we were north of Boston - we took it in turns to climb inside a surfboard bag. One of us drove while the other slept.  Later, I began to dislike the confinement of the surfboard bag and used a deflated air mattress for my blanket instead.   

One night in the Faeroe Islands we had some 15-footers breaking over the whole boat. Our journey from the Shetland Islands was in seas reaching 10 to 12 foot.  We pretty much had bad weather all the way from Iceland to England, with the wind hitting 60mph several times. Naturally, the boat was taking a pounding just like we were. The T-top roof of the boat, our only shelter from rain and sun, was mended with anything available: kitchen knives, wrenches, wooden strips, strips of metal, and tons of plastic wire ties with duct tape. 

It wasn’t our only problem. A wiring fault off the Scottish coast caused the motor to shut down, with a strong wind taking us further from shore. When you bear in mind that our GPS was only about 4x6 inches and had a distinct lack of fine details outside of U.S. waters you can see we had to stay on top of our game. By the end, we’d broken two blades off our four-bladed stainless steel propeller, and bent the heck out of our only remaining prop while going down the Rhine at night, trying to drive in a straight line without a landmark. Total darkness, icy water, driving winds and total wetness on board, played havoc with everything. We were suffering with salt blisters, nerve damage in our feet, bruising to our ribs and wrists – the constant thumping of the hull against the huge Atlantic waves was a nightmare. 

Picking the time to make our crossings was essential. We had laptops on board and whenever we were in a harbor, we tried to get on the Internet to check out the weather and contact the local Coast Guard. We would look for a small window in the weather and then just go for it, knowing it was only going to get worse. The safest weather for crossing the North Atlantic is from June to July. We left Florida on June 27th, but didn’t arrive in Germany until September 11 – a fitting tribute to the military heroes that our journey was designed to help. 

Find out more about Bob Brown’s journey at www.crosstheAtlantic.com 

You can also watch a video of the adventure here