By JAMIE

But rowing, other than when faced with faulty outboard engines, didn't appear in any of our lives until a year before our Atlantic voyage. Only one of us, Ewan, had stepped briefly inside a rowing boat before the start of our campaign, and even that ended with an unwelcome swim in the River Clyde.

Our childhoods had been grounded in the far northwest of Scotland in a place called Assynt. Long Easters and summers without Wi-Fi, TV, a landline or mobile signal had driven us to find creative ways to entertain ourselves. We took to the mountains and coastlines of this wild place, finding comfort by the ocean and getting lost among the hills. We gravitated towards the water: kayaks full of holes, and dinghies without a proper rigging. As we bobbed a few hundred metres from the shore, imagining we were 'deep-sea fishing', I can vividly remember looking out to sea and wondering what lay beyond the horizon.

The ocean was our highway to the world. We could leave the shores of this remote corner of the UK and make landfall on any continent on the globe. Were we to attempt it then, aged six, ten and twelve, it would have been a disaster, but a seed had been sown for what might happen if we were to just set off and go.