By AccuWeather staff writer
Updated Feb. 26, 2021 9:50 AM EST
Some thousand miles out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, a churning wave punched into the side of a solo rowboat, tossing 21-year-old Jasmine Harrison around the inside of her cabin. The swell lifted the boat to the crest of the waves before sending it crashing into the trough.
After just one wrong hit, the boat capsized for the second time on her 3,000-mile odyssey.
After about 10 weeks out at sea, facing the fickle weather of the Atlantic Ocean in a rowboat, Harrison stepped onto dry land on Feb. 20, marking her achievement as the youngest woman to row solo across an ocean and completing the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge.
The part-time swimming teacher and bartender from the English town of Thirsk accomplished the feat in 70 days, three hours and 48 minutes -- covering about 3,000 miles from San Sebastian in La Gomera, Canaries, which sits off the northwest coast of Africa, to Nelson's Dockyard in English Harbour on the island of Antigua in the Caribbean.
But the weather hardly aided her on the journey.
Alone out in the middle of the Atlantic, Harrison relied on text messages from the Atlantic Campaigns, the organizer of the challenge, which provided basic weather information in her general area.
"It's cloudy," "Manage your power," and "It might rain," are a few examples of the texts she would receive, Harrison told AccuWeather in a Zoom interview. But even when she would reach back out to home for more details, there wasn't much to do if bad weather ended up spawning in her area.
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"Even when you get told there might be bad weather coming, I can't physically row quick enough to get out of it when they first see it, and so you just have to take it. Take the hit. As I did quite a lot and it slowed me down massively," Harrison said. Even when she could see the squalls coming, there wasn't much she could do besides duck into her cabin and prepare for the rain to hit.
She recounted being hit by big storms toward the beginning of the race, strong winds tossing and churning the ocean. She estimated that she couldn't row for 13 to 14 days due to wayward winds pushing her in the wrong direction.
The tracker on the challenge's website plots each of the participating teams' paths along their journeys -- with that of Harrison, who raced under the team name Rudderly Mad, wiggling and circling around in what she presumed was during times of rough weather. At one point, she estimates the wind pushed her back 30 miles within two days despite her power anchor.
Even the calmer bouts of rainfall could cause a setback, from the water softening and tearing hard-earned callouses that protected her hands to soaking her coat until sunnier weather could dry it out.
"I don't like the rain -- I mean, it's mesmerizing, it's beautiful to watch, bouncing on the water, the droplets everywhere, absolutely amazing," Harrison said, adding that she usually ducked into her cabin when the skies opened up.
To make matters more complicated for Harrison, who had spent a year and a half not only physically training for the challenge but also deepening her understanding of the weather, the Atlantic seemed to test her skills every day, literally sending her through a crash course.
"Every single day the weather was different. To me, it was like I was on a different ocean every day because it was just never ever the same," Harrison said. But, she noted, even if the weather had been exactly the same as the day before, the waves were still different, and ocean currents could impact her.
Even the clear, sunny days held their dangers with the sun glaring down on the racers. Harrison prepared for these days by having sunscreen on hand as well as using hats, glasses and T-shirts to cover up.
Not all of the race was a fight against nature, however. Stunning sunsets painted bright colors across the sky, and wildlife would occasionally stop by Harrison's rowboat for a visit.
"I loved seeing the dolphins," Harrison said. "You really feel like you're a part of them when you're out there on a small little boat ... you feel like you belong there."
While training for the race, Harrison not only had to learn how to row but also had learn more about the weather and how it could impact her rowing.
Just to leave the port, Harrison could only row when the winds measured under 8 knots, otherwise, she risked crashing into one of the harbor walls. And then there were the tides -- if she hit the lock gate at low tide, it could mean waiting another two hours to be able to cross into the Atlantic, where the bigger weather challenges awaited.
"Now we're looking at low pressures, we're looking at high pressures," Harrison said, recalling that the "red," which typically indicate low pressure on radars and weather maps, was bad.
Areas of low pressure are typically attributed to bad weather, such as strong storms, though AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Alex Sosnowski also stressed that high pressure areas could also stir up gusty winds, especially in areas where there are both strong high and low pressure areas close by to each other.
Jasmine Harrison holds up two flares after completing the 3,000-mile journey across the Atlantic Ocean from the Canaries to Antigua in the Caribbean. (Atlantic Campaign)
Harrison embarked on her journey on Dec. 12, 2020, though she was first introduced to the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge in 2017 after Hurricane Maria barreled through the Caribbean as a major hurricane.
At the time, Harrison was on Grenada, an island in the Lesser Antilles in the southern portion of the Caribbean, which had escaped the Category 5 hurricane's wrath for the most part. However, other neighboring islands, including the dual-island country Antigua and Barbuda, had been closer to the line of fire.
In what would be some of her first exposure to sailing, Harrison volunteered to sail over to a few of the islands to do some relief work. However, the relief plans fell through due to restrictions with customs between the islands.
The man who had originally recruited her for the relief effort loaned her the sailboat and later introduced her to the natural disaster relief charity ShelterBox would also be the one to introduce her to the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge.
"Immediately, I was like, 'I want to do that,'" Harrison said, recalling having spoken with the family of one of the previous racers. "'I'm gonna do that one day,' before I'd even seen a boat or anything or a finish. And then I went to the finish line and watched another boat come in."
Although the man who introduced her to the challenge has since passed away, Harrison said that a bit of supporting ShelterBox and raising money for the charity through the race was in his honor.
Looking ahead, however, Harrison says the experience is not yet over with 70 days of GoPro diving camera footage to look at and plans to make a film about the epic journey now in motion.
"There's a lot to do," Harrison declared. "So, this isn't over."
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