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TwitThisThe Ultimate Challenge
"Pick up. please!" Bill Butler punched in the 15-digit satellite phone number again. No answer.
The two young women rowers he'd mentored were in the middle of the Atlantic battling ten-foot seas in cloud cover so dense they'd lost all sense of direction. Now they'd apparently lost phone contact too. Butler knew what that meant. They were dead or adrift.
The old corrugated tin boathouse of the Purdue University Crew, with racing shells stacked in rows, echoed with the voices of young women. "There's this awesome race across the Atlantic," Sarah Kessans told teammates one October morning in 2003. The Woodvale Events Atlantic Rowing Race covered a 2,937-mile course from the Canary Islands to Antigua. Two-person teams competed in specially designed rowboats. The women's record was 50 days.
Across the boathouse, Emily Kohl listened intently. She and Kessans were a lot alike, muscular, competitive with ambitions as big as the boathouse. When they'd first met, they couldn't stand each other. Emily, a varsity member, thought Sarah was a loudmouth braggart. Sarah, the novice, considered her older teammate an icy snob. In an effort to boost competition, and perhaps end the hostilities, their coach put them together face to face on rowing machines. Working across from one another, grinding out 2K shifts, they might learn to cooperate.
Now, the more Sarah talked, the more Emily was intrigued. There weren't many opportunities for women rowers after college. This was the ultimate challenge, one that would stretch body and will to the limit.
There was one problem: Their rowing had been in sculls on Indiana's Wabash River. They'd never rowed competitively at sea and would need someone who understood the ocean.
On a hot summer day in 2005, Sarah and Emily escorted Bill Butler down a dock in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to see their new pride and joy: a slender white rowboat they'd christened American Fire.
Butler was a legend at Purdue, where he'd cofounded the crew team in 1949. He was long, lean and fit at 75, and had a scruffy white beard.
He'd also had an extraordinary deep-water sailing career, crossing the Atlantic five times and living through three shipwrecks. Once, while he was fulfilling a lifelong dream to circumnavigate the globe, whales rammed his boat and crushed the hull. He and his wife survived an incredible 66 days in the open Pacific, catching triggerfish, fighting off sharks and riding out lightning storms in a leaky life raft.
American Fire was six feet wide, 24 feet long, with two rear-facing rowing stations and a tiny six-foot-by-three-foot enclosed cabin. It was constructed of fiberglass-reinforced marine plywood and equipped with an array of technical devices. Solar panels fed batteries for onboard lighting and other equipment.
The rowboat could carry 75 days of food (mostly freeze-dried), a water desalinator, a propane stove, three GPS units and a VHF radio. Their toilet was a bucket.
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