By Andrew Findlay, Capital Daily
Date: February 25, 2021
In 2005, Julie and Colin Angus set out to row across the Atlantic Ocean in a seven-metre boat, built from quarter-inch marine-grade plywood wrapped with a composite of epoxy and fibreglass. It sounds like an eggshell in a tropical storm, but the boat was built to last, and so was the adventurous couple who took turns on the oars for five months during the crossing from Lisbon, Portugal, to Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. Along the way, Julie became the first woman to paddle trans-Atlantic from mainland to mainland.
The days were long, at times rolling on wind-driven waves that could reach as high as a two-storey building, and at other times drifting on flat calm seas beneath the unrelenting sun. It gave them plenty of time to get up close with the ocean’s inhabitants, and also to ponder the challenges of monitoring the farthest reaches of the world where human eyes rarely look but are nevertheless well within the range of anthropogenic environmental damage…