By JAMIE

Thursday 20 February 2020; 1,878 days to go. My alarm went off. Memories of crashing waves, bagpipes and flares faded away. I was in Glasgow, and the feeling of fresh linen sheets was still novel and comforting on my skin. It’d been 35 days since we landed in Antigua after spending 35 days rowing across the Atlantic Ocean.​

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Before we even stepped foot back on dry land, we knew life would never be the same. Back in Glasgow, the ocean still filled my dreams, ebbing and flowing with fragmented memories of water and sky. It was visceral, and yet it still didn’t feel real. Was it really me on that boat? I felt like I’d changed. I knew I had. But when asked exactly how, I struggled to express it. Maybe the depths of emotion felt in such an intense period of time can never quite be articulated. We lived and breathed the ocean. We depended on it, survived on it, thrived on it. Moments of elation were juxtaposed with periods of despair. It was raw, it was honest and it will stay with me for the rest of my life. 

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Thousands of miles from land, in the mid-Atlantic silence, I found a clarity of thought that I’d never experienced before. Thoughts came and went like the waves that rolled on by, uninterrupted by the usual distractions of modern-day life. Our existence was unbroken and simple.