Hostile orcas, night sweats, 17kg weight loss and learning to walk again; Ollie Phillips reveals brutal ‘payback’ of World’s Toughest Row
Ollie Phillips and team celebrate after completing World's Toughest Row.
When first Antigua, then English Harbour came into view Ollie Phillips assumed the ordeal was over. Four hours into their 39th day at sea he and his three pals stepped onto dry land.
Behind them was the Atlantic Ocean, all 3,000 miles of it from La Gomera, the second smallest of Spain’s Canary Islands where the World’s Toughest Row race had begun in mid December.
As flares went off and family and friends filled the air with joyful shrieks, the former England sevens captain paused to take it all in. Then he became emotional.
Biggest release
Not only did he look different, having lost 17 kilos of weight and dyed his beard to mark the occasion in the colours of the Union Jack; he felt like nothing he had known before.
“I let out the most enormous scream,” he says. “It was the biggest release I’ve ever had, an overwhelming sensation. I found the experience so difficult on a psychological and mental level. I couldn’t believe it was finished.”
Only it wasn’t. He got out of the boat and found he could barely walk. His back was in pieces. Then came the night sweats.
“The euphoria of coming in was enormous, seeing my wife Lucy and our three kids. Nothing about the row was harder than being away from them.
“But my body is all over the place. My legs still don’t really work that well. For almost six weeks I’ve been sat down. The muscle wastage means I’m kind of learning to walk again.
“Then there’s my back. Because I lost so much weight, two-and-three-quarter stone, it is not used to supporting my frame the way it is now. After 20 minutes on my feet it aches like hell.
“At night my body is an absolute furnace, just pouring with sweat. Temperature-wise it cannot regulate itself. I’m told it is the result of a big hormonal imbalance from doing the row.
“For all that time at sea it was in a state of shock, in fight or flight survival mode. It adapted to the challenge. But now we’ve stopped it’s like, ‘right, payback time’.”
Phillips, 42, knew there would be a physical price and he is happy to pay it, given £300,000 has been donated, so far, to the six charities selected by him and crew mates Tom Clowes, Julian Evans and Stu Kershaw.
It is the continuing mind games he was not prepared for.
“I’m not trying to dramatise it,” Phillips tells Planet Rugby. “But I have never, ever faced a mental, emotional, psychological battle as stern or severe as the one I had during this race.”
Hostile orcas
Every passing hour as Christmas and New Year came and went and they racked up the nautical miles, he wondered what was going on beneath the surface. Other boats were attacked by marlin, bumped by killer whales.
“You don’t want to mess with orcas,” he says. “If they don’t like you they’ll rip your rudder off. The feedback we got was that they were being hostile.
“So that always in our thoughts, not least when we had to go into the water to clean the hull. There was this hesitancy. Who is going to go first? Because as soon as you break the water, you’ll see what’s there.
“It reminded me of that 1980s film The Abyss, this massive vastness of blue. You’re down there thinking: ‘Oh my God, is there something that can see me, smell me, hear me? Some creature stalking me that I can’t see right now but in a minute I’m going to find on my leg?'”
Closer to space than to land, toiling under a burning sun by day and a canopy of stars by night, these fears took hold in the minds of the quartet. Ironically, though, Phillips’ concerns were more in the boat than out of it.
“Nothing to do with the physical element, that was fine,” he explains. “I didn’t have any real dramas or issues with that. It was dealing with effectively being a prisoner in 28-foot of space.
Former England captain ‘closer to space than land’ as he takes part in World’s Toughest Row race
“I didn’t know where to go and how to handle it. It was so oppressive. I tried to compartmentalise it into two-hour blocks, on and off the oars, but every time my turn finished the only place to go was into the hatch where the heat was unbearable.
“It’s supposed to be where you go for recovery yet it was like jumping into a swimming pool that’s boiling hot, that burns your skin off – and you know it’s going to do that.
“You’re so relieved to get out of it because it’s so f***ing hot but you know in two hours’ time you’ve got to go back in there. You don’t have any alternative. There is no option, nowhere else to go.
“For day after day it was that constant rehearse of ‘I really don’t like this. I don’t want to be in there’. I don’t use the word hate on anything, but I hate that cabin.
“One million per cent I will have nightmares around that cabin. I can’t tell you how much it affected me.”
The oarsome foursome were kept alive by freeze-dried food and water taken from the ocean and made drinkable by a desalinator, powered by the boat’s solar panel, which filled three 10-litre jerrycans daily.
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For their morale there was contact with home via a Starlink satellite communication system; the chance to reassure family a world away that they were okay.
Lucy Phillips had taken some convincing that rowing the Atlantic was a good idea.
“My biggest thing was the fear of him doing it, the risk he was taking,” she says. “In my eyes, I was thinking, ‘God, what if the kids are left without a dad and I’m left without a husband?’
“The hardest bit for myself and the kids was actually the lead up to it, rather than the actual adventure itself.
“When Ollie announced on Christmas Eve 2024, ‘I’m not sure I’m going to be here next Christmas because I’ve just been asked to do the Atlantic Row’, my heart sank.
Pushed to the limit
“I thought, ‘Oh, my goodness, it’s something I really don’t want you to do’. Of course I’d never stop him because he lives for these things. He loves pushing himself to the limit.
“But for a long time I struggled to properly get behind it. It was about four months before I thought, ‘This is actually happening, I now really need to get behind this and support him’.
“We decided not to go to La Gomera because we knew it would be too emotional and once he went, it got better. We had a focus. The kids and I did a paper chain of the number of nights until we would meet him in Antigua.
“And then there he was. Before he left everyone was saying, ‘We’re so proud of you, this is amazing’. And I really struggled to feel that.
“But he got back on dry land, I saw him with my own eyes and my fear disappeared. That’s when I told him, ‘I’m so proud of you. I really am.'”
You can still support Ollie Phillips and his Seas Life crew, by donating here.