How One Adventurer Spent 293 Days Alone at Sea

Women Who Travel | Condé Nast Traveler

Condé Nast Traveler

Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.4 • 636 Ratings

🗓️ 15 July 2020

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When cabin fever first set in during the early stages of the pandemic, we turned to the experts for help: three women who chose to live in isolation for long stretches of time, whether at a fire lookout in Idaho, on a remote Greek island, or in a sea kayak, like Sarah Outen did while rowing solo across the Pacific Ocean.

Three months later, and we're still grappling with what it means to isolate ourselves from friends and family. So we decided to check back in with Outen, a British rower, biker, and adventurer who has spent months-long stretches alone in grueling conditions, including a solo row across the Indian Ocean and a four-year, around-the-world solo trip executed exclusively on bikes, kayaks, and row boats. In this week's episode, she shares her tips for making it through the toughest stretches of being alone, stories about a logistically complicated long-distance relationship, and her newfound joy from rest. (That said, she'll likely inspire you to haul your bike out of the garage and get moving, too.)

Find a full transcription of the episode and links here: https://www.cntraveler.com/story/how-one-adventurer-spent-293-days-alone-at-sea-women-who-travel-podcast

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is Women Who Travel, a podcast from Condonast Traveler. I'm Lalei Aricoglu, and with me, as always, is my co-host Meredith Carey.
0:12.6	Hello! After months spent isolating ourselves during stay-at-home orders, we've decided to spend this
0:18.6	episode chatting with someone who's, well, somewhat of an
0:21.8	expert on solitude. Sarah Uten is a British athlete in adventurer who at just 24 became the
0:27.7	first woman and youngest person ever to row solo across the Indian Ocean. She then spent
0:33.3	four years rowing, cycling and kayaking across the northern hemisphere and back, a journey which
0:39.0	is now captured in the film Home. Thanks for joining us, Sarah. Thanks for having me. It's good
0:44.2	to be here. So you didn't just decide on a whim to spend four years biking and kayaking and
0:50.4	rowing around the world. What was the path that led you there?
0:56.0	So that journey came very much from the Indian Ocean journey. And that Indian Ocean journey
1:03.3	came from being 20 years old at university, hearing about ocean rowing, and not having a plan for after university at that
1:12.5	stage. And so I was totally captivated by this idea of having a big adventure in a little boat
1:20.1	across a big ocean. And I thought that I'd go as part of a team because it did not occur
1:26.6	to me that I could do a big solo voyage
1:29.3	like that. Who would you speak to? And I started making sort of plans and preparations
1:35.3	going from trying to find out everything I could about how to row an ocean and sort of how I'd
1:41.9	get there, how I'd find a team. And it was about five or six months into that process when my dad died really suddenly and
1:50.4	unexpectedly. Very swiftly, I just knew that, A, I still wanted to row across the ocean, but now
1:58.4	it was going to be more than just having this big adventure. It was
2:02.5	actually a way for me to chart my way through grief and to do something positive and tangible
2:09.8	with, you know, the shock and devastation of my dad's death. And so it took me three years to get to the point of being out in Australia
2:20.5	with a six-meter boat ready to row. I'd graduated from university and then spent the rest of the time
	...

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