Rowing 3,165 miles across the Atlantic Ocean sounds like an exciting and dangerous activity, but Ryan Worth, 24, said boredom was the hardest thing to deal with when he made the crossing earlier this year on the catamaran Big Blue, in an attempt to break a world record.Mr Worth is currently in Bermuda coaching rowing for the Bermuda Rowing Association. He will be giving a talk this evening about his adventures on Big Blue, as part of a Roc expedition with 15 other rowers. Roc organise various land and oceanic teams in an attempt to break different world records.“I completed the Atlantic Crossing about four months ago,” said Mr Worth. “Big Blue left from Morocco, North Africa and finished in Barbados. If you are going to try to cross to the United States across the Atlantic, you will have to cross from the Canary Islands because of the currents. The other options are to cross the North Atlantic going from Great Britain.”The tradewinds route that Big Blue took is one that has been followed by mariners for centuries, including Christopher Columbus, because it is the shortest, and generally the fastest crossing with the most consistent weather.“When you are rowing without sail, the current has almost as much play on it as the wind does,” said Mr Worth.Mr Worth grew up in landlocked Tennessee and had never actually rowed on the ocean until setting off on the crossing. He said he found it less difficult than he anticipated.“The surprise was the amount of boredom,” he said. “I thought it would be more mentally engaging. There was a lot of time to do nothing but row. I thought that as rowers you would play a lot more active part in the wave to wave conditions, but when you get into a bigger boat it is different. You keep rowing, but you are just trying to add a little bit to it. You didn’t really feel a big difference when you added something to it.”He and the crew rowed in two hour shifts and then picked up around four spurts of an hour and a half of sleep each day over a period of 800 hours. One of the hardest things for the crew was finding the time and energy to eat. The food was mostly powdered, so it was also difficult to raise enthusiasm for the food. Too often, it was more tempting to just lie down and sleep. The trip was also physically gruelling.There wasn’t a lot of space to walk on, so their leg muscles tended to atrophy. They were also operating on a slight sleep and caloric deficit, which meant that they were burning their own body mass.“I was thinking that I was going to be pretty fit when I arrived home, but I was in the worst shape I had been in in five years, from being eaten up, slowly, by two months straight of sitting on the boat,” said Mr Worth.One of the dangers was from passing ships, as Big Blue was not large enough to appear on some radars.“We had a radar mirror which helped,” he said. “The only close encounters we had were with container ships. If we were on a collision course we had an alarm and the radio and a global positioning satellite (GPS) device that would try to hail them to make sure they knew we were there. We had one ship that was on a collision with us until a couple hundred yards off in the middle of the night.“We were hailing and they weren’t answering us. Finally, when they were passing us to our stern, a Russian came on and hailed us and said ‘sorry, we saw you’. We didn’t hear the radio, at first. It was 4am.”It took them 48 days to cross the Atlantic (plus five days to move down the coast from Morocco), and unfortunately, they did not break the speed record. They arrived at 12.59pm North Point, Barbados on March 4 to a crowd of friends and family. They did make a few other records, however. For example, they were the first catamaran to row across the Atlantic. They also had the oldest rower to cross the Atlantic, 67-year-old Canadian, Tom Butscher.“When we left, the record was doing it in under 34 days, but two boats left around two weeks ahead of us and both broke the record and hit it down to a little under 32 days,” said Mr Worth. “The boat that holds the record from last year took 59 days to cross. It is just weather that can hold you back.”He started rowing seven years ago after a knee injury. He liked it so much he never looked back. Soon, he began to dream of rowing across the ocean. Now that that dream is finally completed, his plans now are to finish his degree in environmental science at the University of Tennessee. He took some time off from his studies to prepare for the row. He isn’t completely sure what his next rowing adventures will be but he would like to row the length of the Tennessee River, unassisted, and ultimately row the Yukon River across Alaska.His talk is at 6.30pm at the Royal Hamilton Amateur Dinghy Club at 25 Pomander Road in Paget. The talk is meant to be a fundraiser for the Bermuda Rowing Association so tickets are $20 at the door. For more information about the talk, rowing workshops or Bermuda Rowing Association activities, contact Barbara O’Shaughnessy at 337-0922.Also see websites, www.bigbluerow.com, or gorow.webs.com, or check Mr Worth out on Twitter under gorowryan.