The GB Row Challenge 2024: Experiences from an environmental physiotherapist rowing around Great Britain

I was initially drawn to the environmental aspect of the GB Row Challenge, I thought that collecting environmental DNA and microplastic data from the UK coastline was a genius way of giving reason and justification to the trip of a lifetime. I was unable to finish the circumnavigation of mainland Great Britain in 2022 when I first attempted it, due to an almighty storm, but I am glad that we were able to use it as a platform to raise £16,000 split between charities Renewable World and BLUE! Humbled by the ability to live sustainably and beginning to fathom the extent of ocean pollution, I was driven to finish the data collection. 

This year, I completed the challenge as part of the first-ever mixed crew of 6 to do so. I am proud to say that we completed the whole 2000 miles unsupported in 49 days and set a new Guinness World Record! We are proud to have collected 59 eDNA samples for biodiversity analysis, 28 microplastic pollution samples, and our fin-embedded sensor collected over 1,000 hours of underwater sound data, which equates to just under three terabytes ready for experts at the University of Portsmouth to analyse! This data will then be hosted on the Marine Data Exchange (MDE), the world-leading collection of survey data that supports sustainable development of the seabed while protecting the UK’s marine environment for future generations.

We spent a lot of time hiding from storms this time around. Between shifts of manually filtering salt water into drinking water, being on anchor was a great opportunity to catch up on sleep and survey the tranquil wildlife. I am excited to see how the scientific data collected compares to what we saw, was there a lot of underwater sound pollution, for example? In contrast to the 2022 unprecedented heatwave, the weather was dire this year and we never saw prevailing winds. We dreaded getting out of the warmth of our winter sleeping bags to go out in the rain, and we even ran out of battery due to insufficient sun on our solar panels. Both years we experienced uncharacteristic weather conditions for the UK, just another example of climate change and unreliable weather systems that we can expect in the future.