Rowing the Atlantic is a ‘completely insane’ adventure for Hong Kong rugby players searching for focus

A rather unusual WhatsApp message appeared on the Valley RFC group that has sparked an epic adventure. The club’s 1st XV captain Rob Lennox wrote: “I’m really keen to row the Atlantic, anyone fancy it?”. Within fifteen minutes, he had his team of four. Grant Kemp, Martin Muller, Lennox and Matthew Bell, all 32 and 33 years old, are embarking on the Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge (TWAC), a 5,000km rowing race from the Canary Islands to Antigua, as team East Rows West. They will row in non-stop shifts – two hours on, two hours off – all day and all night. With no support, the team will carry their food and make their water with a solar powered desalinator. Brit Lennox has lived in Hong Kong for over a year and previously he was in the army. Three of his university and military friends won TWAC in 2019/20 as Fortitude IV. View this post on Instagram A post shared by EastRowsWest (@eastrowswest) “It just seemed like a great adventure, and it was something that was lacking in Hong Kong for me, being part of something bigger, having something to focus on. It seemed like a great challenge,” he said. “In the army, I was part of something bigger, you didn’t have to look for it, the next challenge was always there. You moved on to a new job every two years, a new posting here and there. It was great to get away from that for a while, to get out here. It’s fantastic, and exciting and there’s so much going on,” Lennox said. What is the hardest part of rowing an ocean? “But you’re just living for the weekend. It’s a bit of a party. That was fabulous for a year. But it was starting to get into my head a bit – what’s the next challenge? When you have a normal job, you finish on a Friday and that’s that. I was missing a little bit of something.” The other three echoed Lennox’s sentiment. They lacked a big challenge, and their feelings were exacerbated by the monotony of Covid-19. “We’ve been sitting for months, not being able to do anything, not being able to play competitive sport, and that played a role in us saying ‘let’s go and do something incredible’,” said Muller, a former professional rugby player from South Africa. “In Hong Kong, I was living for the weekend. Rugby was 80 per cent of what I’d done as a sport,” he said. “There was no change up. The challenge really appealed to me as something completely unlike anything I’d done before, the idea of doing something completely insane.” Playing rugby at a high level has prepared the four physically, but it is a different paradigm expecting to row for 12 hours a day with just two-hour breaks. Add in food preparation and other admin between shifts, and sleep is down to a minimum. “We’re used to pushing yourself for 80 minutes then we go home. You don’t have to wake up two hours later and do it again. It’s going to be a massive mind shift,” Muller said. “The sleep deprivation – I’m not one of these people who sits on a bench and falls asleep,” he said. “There’s going to have to be a major readjustment.” Kemp, also a former professional rugby player from South Africa, has a lot of ideas, and often semi-commits to projects. He jokes about his 60 per cent completion rate on anything from learning to fish to taking up a new instrument. But something about the WhatsApp message caught his imagination. “I get gee’d up really easily and when they were talking about how fun and how awesome it would be, I got fully engaged. The motivation for me is very similar to the other guys,” he said. “I have an office job, where there’s not a lot of chance to build stuff outside the office, but this is a nice balance.” For many rowers in TWAC, it is about the adventure of getting to the other side. But increasingly, teams are treating it as a race. The men of East Rows West are used to competing at the top level of sport. “I’m frighteningly competitive,” Kemp said. “We don’t want to just row, just bob along. There are going to be things out of our control, you need luck. But the plan is to win the race. I don’t want to come across as arrogant, but we’re there to compete. If it doesn’t happen, so be it. But we’re going to be as prepared as possible.” South African Bell has some experience at sea. He used to work on superyachts. He was once caught in a seven-day storm on the Pacific coast of the US. Seven-metre swells were breaking over the bow and covering the bridge windows. “Being on a 150ft super yacht is pretty different to being in a 26ft bath tub,” he said. “It is pretty eye opening. I kind of understand what the sea can look like. But it’s a bit different when the wave is towering over you by five or six times, throw in sleep deprivation and the fact you have to row for 12 hours a day …” Bell has searched for an adventure for years. He almost cycled across the US, but says “life happened”. “You start your career, you start ticking over,” he said. “I haven’t had a professional sports career or been in the Army, I’ve rarely had that test of mental and physical fortitude. Timing is everything, and Rob bought it up at the perfect time. Covid-19 meant everything else was on hold.” The team is raising money for ChildFund Rugby, Pass It Back, a charity that uses rugby to bridge social divides across Southeast Asia and teach life skills via sport. Lennox said: “Rugby is a sport that has given us a lot, it’s given two of the guys careers, it connected us, it bought us all out to Hong Kong, it’s opened a lot of doors and its taught us a lot in terms of values and in the way we go about our lives. We wanted to use the row as a vehicle to close an opportunity gap in Southeast Asia, to partner with a charity like that was an obvious choice for us.” ChildFund was the official charity of the Rugby World Cup. Ron Rutland and James Owens, both with connections to Valley RFC, raised money for ChildFund as they delivered the whistle to the opening game of the tournament via bike from London to Japan. The adventure was recently made into a film by another Valley player Adam Rolston. So the four rowers were made aware of the great work of ChildFund. “When we started this, it was about personally what it would mean to us,” Bell added. “Then we started to realise what kind of impact us doing this could do for other people. It transitioned from this being personal, to us making meaningful impact.” You can donate to East Rows West’s charity page here.