“I’m really getting to like Hawaii,” Erden Eruç tells me, “so I have to get out of here.”
We’re having lunch at The Grove, a bistro overlooking the Ala Moana Yacht Harbor, the marina where Gilligan began his fateful trip. Eruç, who has just spent the last 80 days rowing 2,400 miles more or less from Crescent City, California, alone in his yellow boat, is a little like Gilligan: stranded with his tiny ship on a desert isle. He’s not really stranded; he’s just laying over, restocking food and supplies, making repairs. But not for long. In a week, he’ll be rowing off again, another 5,500 miles to Hong Kong (or Saigon if he can’t get a visa to enter China), from where he’ll travel overland by bicycle and on foot, climb Mount Everest and Mount Elbrus, then continue rowing his boat across the Atlantic to South America and climb Aconcagua before finally rowing home. If all goes well, he’ll arrive home in Gig Harbor, a small fishing village on the shore of Puget Sound a few miles south of Seattle, sometime in 2024. Or 2025. Or whenever. Last time he did this, he was gone for 5 years, 11 days, 12 hours, and 22 minutes.
Eruç, a serious-minded Turkish adventurer whose nickname is The Human Rowing Machine, completed the first human-powered solo circumnavigation of the planet in 2012 that included a 312-day nonstop row across the Pacific Ocean. But he’s 60 now, and keenly aware that time waits for no man, not even Erden Eruç, a 2013 Outside Adventurer of the Year and holder of several Guinness World Records (including most days alone at sea for a solo male rower which is now more than 1,000 days and counting), he’s out to do it again. But he’s making it more challenging this time; not content with merely circling the globe alone under his own power, he’s adding ascents of three of the Seven Summits along the way. Can he do it? If anyone can, he can.
Eruç never planned on stopping in Hawaii; it just happened that way. But now that he’s been here a while, enjoying sunny days cooled by trade winds and occasional tropical rain showers, and driving around in the white Tesla his friend loaned him to run errands to the marine supply store to get parts for his boat, he’s worried that he might never leave unless he gets back to sea as soon possible.
When I heard he was making a stop in Honolulu, I went out to Cliffs, a popular reef break just off Diamond Head, to watch him row in. When I first spotted him off China Walls, he seemed to be moving impossibly slowly, but he was cruising along at 3 knots, he told me later, impeded only by curious boaters who kept pulling up alongside to ask what he was doing. But as he passed Diamond Head, he was really moving. With a tailwind and strong current, he can really get moving.
While we’re eating lunch, Eruç is explaining the technical details of his boat to me the way I imagine an astronaut would describe the components of his space capsule, about the new hinges he put on the scuppers to stop water from leaking in over the top, the thickness of the plywood sheets he’s going to fashion into a cover for his quarters to keep the temperature a few degrees cooler so his navigation equipment doesn’t overheat and quit working—like it did halfway across the east Pacific. And he’s telling me about the route he’s hoping to take to Hong Kong, either the northern route that is subject to eddies that will make rowing laborious, or the southern route that has helpful ocean currents but will deliver him a thousand miles south of where he wants to go where, if things don’t go just right, he’ll end up shipwrecked in the Philippines. The predicted northeasterly wind currents suggest the northern route is the best option, but he’s worried about the eddies. He’s had to battle with eddies before, like during his 2012 crossing that took him 312 days. He doesn’t mind that it took him so long to row solo across the Pacific. The more days he’s alone at sea, the more his record grows.
But Eruç has a schedule to keep now; he needs to arrive early enough to make it to Everest basecamp and up the mountain before the monsoon. And so on October 7, 2021, at just after 7 a.m., he pushed off from the dock at Waikiki Yacht Club, rowed up the Ala Wai canal, and headed out to sea, smiling the whole way.
I love a good adventure as much as the next person, maybe more, but when I think about being alone in the middle of the ocean in a 7.1-meter plywood rowboat for months at a time, with no one to talk to except the occasional bird, whale, or shark, I know it’s not for me. I’m happy to be stranded on my island. But I know Eruç is one of those people loves being alone out there, the farther away from land the better. I hope he’ll return to Hawaii, though. He says he will, maybe in a few years. He still has some rowing to do.
You can follow Erden Eruç’s journey on his blog (https://www.erdeneruc.com/erdens-blog) and tracking page (https://www.erdeneruc.com/tracking).