Hello my friends and welcome to the Robcast. I'm here in the back house with Deborah Sirl.

Welcome. Thank you. Home is Plymouth, England. It is. The English coast, English channel.

Yes. And this is her first time in the back house. It's good to be here. It's having heard about it.

It's nice to see what it actually looks like. Does it live up to whatever was looming large at your imagination?

Well, you know, anywhere with a surfboard is always good in my mind.

Oh, I love it. That was a great opening line. Okay, my friends. I know when I do interview somebody in the

Robcast, you're always like, what's the angle where we headed? Who is this person? Why are they in the back

house? So let's start because as soon as I interacted with you and then did the normal Google thing,

I was like, oh my word, I have a thousand questions for her. So several years ago, 2001,

you got in a rowboat and rode alone across the Atlantic Ocean. Yes. You started in England?

No, I started in Tenerife off the coast of Africa, which is traditionally the said the trade winds go

from Tenerife across to the Caribbean. So from Africa across to Caribbean, the old trade route,

spice route. And so if you leave it a certain time of year, the conditions are prevailing in that direction.

So you see this once again, I have like 9,000 questions and you rode from the tip of Africa and you landed

where? In Barbados, which is a great place to finish if you're going to spend three and a half months

in a row. Dear Robcast listeners, if you're going to row across the Atlantic Ocean alone, Barbados,

apparently, it's a wonderful place. Okay, how long, how many days did it take?

Took me 111 days. She's like three and a half months of high adventure on the high seas.

Okay. Now we got into the back. Where did the idea come from and had you been doing things like this before that?

So I'd never rode before. I was an obvious roger. And I had done a lot of that.

Where you never rode before. No, so I, so to explain and put it into some kind of context,

I as a teenager got obsessed with adventures and explorers and I'd read all these books by these kind

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