Hot, thirsty, hungry and tired, a team of four sunburned men from the four corners of the world rowed into the Ala Wai Boat Harbor on Tuesday afternoon, ending an epic 43-day journey across the Pacific.
Team Uniting Nations — featuring a crew from New Zealand, the Netherlands, South Korea and Great Britain — won the inaugural Great Pacific Race, the first of 13 teams rowing 2,400 miles from Monterey, Calif., to Honolulu and setting a record time for a four-man crew.
The men were greeted warmly by friends and family at the Waikiki Yacht Club and then drank Champagne from a shiny trophy before sitting down to a meal of hamburgers, fruit and beer.
The second-place boat is expected to make landfall tomorrow.
"This journey was hell, very tough, but it was a very good crew," said Junho Choi, a marketing manager from Seoul.
How tough was it?
» Their electric water maker broke eight days into the race, forcing them to use a hand-pump desalinator to turn seawater into drinking water. That required each man to pump from 80 to 110 minutes each day to generate enough drinking water.
» The seats were damaged so badly that they would no longer slide, forcing the crew to row without the use of their legs.
Even so, fast friends for life, right?
Well, maybe not.
"The water maker was a nightmare, frankly," said Casper Zafer, a British producer who lives in Los Angeles. "It led to quite a bit of rowing."
Craig Hackett, the boat’s skipper and a New Zealander, said the crew members were strangers who were brought together only one month before the race. "We were four very different personalities," Hackett said.
And the journey’s conditions could have riled up even the most passive mariner. At times winds gusted up to 60 mph, and waves exceeded 30 feet. Each man lost an estimated 30 pounds, consuming roughly 4,500 calories of freeze-dried meals while burning up to 7,000 calories each day.
Crew members would row for an hour before letting their mates take the oars, but then it was time to operate the hand pump.
"If the electrical pump hadn’t broken, we wouldn’t have gone to the edge," said Andre Kiers, a psychiatric nurse from the Netherlands. "We had some arguments, some really bad ones."
But it never came to blows, he said. "We were four guys in a small boat. I could have hit somebody, but where would you go?"
