My name is Adrienne Smith. My name is Sophia Dennison Johnston. My name is Libby Costello. My name is Brooke Downs and I was part of the four women team, the Lat 35 team that wrote from California to Hawaii.

And we broke a world record as the fastest women's team to do the crossing.

In the summer of 2022, four women set a new record for the fastest all-female team to row from San Francisco to Hawaii.

Sophia Dennison Johnston, Brooke Downs, Libby Costello, and Adrienne Smith completed the journey in 34 days, 14 hours and 11 minutes.

Their boat was four feet wide and 28 feet long. For over a month, they slept in 90-minute increments, ate rehydrated meals out of a bag, and even went to the bathroom in a plastic bucket.

So we would just like talk about it for hours how we had this luxurious like two bedroom, one and a half bath, seaside view.

When it was like really crazy at night, we would like pee in the daggerboard hole because at that point we were rowing in the most bow section.

And we didn't want to go all the way up to the stern to go to the bathroom. It was just too much, too much.

And then we would just like pee behind each other and it was like very close quarters and then we just rinse it out in the morning.

The reality was these women were not living in a luxury apartment. The boat looked like a big inflatable raft combined with a rocket ship.

The front and back of the boat each had a small cabin, more like a crawl space, where one person would sleep at a time.

When they weren't in the cabins, the women were in the open air, completely exposed to the elements.

They had some solar power, a satellite phone, and enough food for a couple of months.

But for the most part, it was just them and their ores, rowing to Hawaii as fast as possible.

I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production.

Rowing from San Francisco to Hawaii is a wild adventure. And to be honest, it's one that had never even crossed these women's minds.

The idea came from Roar and author Jason Caldwell. Jason owns a leadership development in an adventure racing company called Lap 35,

and he wanted to help assemble a team to break the women's record for a Pacific Ocean Crossing.

He asked Sophia Dennis and Johnston would just return from Olympic trials if she was interested in being the first member of the team.

She said yes, and immediately started looking for other rowers to join her. Here's Sophia.

The first person that came to mind was Libby. So Libby and I rode together in college.

If you know Libby, you know that she's just one of the most genuine and kind people there is.

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