When Niall Brannigan cast off with his three crew mates to row across the Atlantic Ocean, his worst nightmare was the possibility of capsizing their 28ft boat.
Just 11 days into the World’s Toughest Row race his nightmare became reality when a 50ft wave hit them at night, sweeping three of the crew overboard and leaving Brannigan trapped in a flooded cabin.
“It was one of those moments where I thought I was saying goodbye to my wife and children,” he said.
Speaking over satellite phone from the boat, now 49 days into the voyage and just days away from reaching landfall on the Caribbean island of Antigua, he said some of the crew did not want to continue after surviving the near-death experience, but they eventually pushed on.
Disaster struck Team Seasoar, four British men in their fifties, several hundred miles from land because a howling gale meant those on deck, rowing their two-hour shift at night, could not hear the instructions Brannigan was trying to give them from inside the stern cabin.
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“One of the crew opened the hatch door a tiny bit, which was an absolute crime in our book, and all of a sudden this huge rogue wave hit and ripped open the door and filled up the cabin, which I was inside of,” Brannigan, the boat’s skipper, said.
“I pulled the door shut but for four or five seconds I thought that was it for me.”
Their boat is designed to right itself in the event of a capsize, but not if the cabins are flooded with water.
The three crew on deck were thrown clear of the deck, but everyone was tethered to the safety lines.
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Brannigan said: “At one point they said they could see themselves underwater next to each other.
“They had to hang on to the outside of the boat in this horrendous storm. Eventually they pulled themselves back on to the upturned hull.”
Brannigan, trapped in the semi-flooded underwater cabin, had to shout instructions to the crew to put all their weight to one side to get the boat to roll back upright.
“It was actually very well executed and it’s not something you can really rehearse,” he said.
The four men huddled in the cramped aft cabin until daybreak.
A damage assessment revealed they had lost their automatic steering system, most of their electronics, including internet, and their dagger board, which helps keep the boat stable and in a straight line when waves and wind are hitting them from the side.
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“Two of the crew said ‘that’s it, I want to go’,” Brannigan said. “It was a horrific experience and very frightening but at the end of the day it wasn’t a May Day situation, we were in a boat that was upright and none of us were injured.
“It was a quick pep talk to say ‘this is ocean rowing, we can’t push a button to get off the boat’, and very quickly the lads came around.”
Since then they have had to revert to manual steering with lines, meaning a two-man rowing shift was reduced to one man rowing and one steering, lengthening their time at sea and complicating navigation.
It is one of the worst capsizes in the history of the 3,000-mile ocean rowing race, which was first held in 1997.
A team of four military veterans had to be rescued in 2022, after their boat capsized 16 days into the challenge after being hit by a large wave northwest of the Cape Verde Islands. Their cabins flooded and they had to climb into a life raft after they were unable to right their vessel. They were rescued by a passing Dutch cargo ship.
The four men on Team Seasoar — Brannigan, 56, a construction business owner; John Watling, 58, a jeweller; Sam Weber, 52, a sales and marketing director; and Jason Wilder, 57, a managing director in the construction industry — did not know each other before they decided to row the Atlantic and began looking for a boat to join several years ago.
They have been training together in Brannigan’s boat for three years and are raising money for the charity Lyme Disease UK. Watling’s daughter Yasmin, 26, suffers from the chronic and debilitating disease after being bitten by an infected tick and misdiagnosed by her GP.
Soon after the capsize, Brannigan said they were “rewarded” with visits from a pod of Orcas, leaping dolphins and a whale and its calf.
They have battled physical and mental fatigue throughout their journey, never sleeping for more than two hours at a time. One of the crew suffered a chest infection which ruled him out of rowing for two weeks.
They almost faced another capsize at night this week. “Everyone dropped oars and held on to the safety rails for dear life,” Brannigan said. “It knocked the boat over 90 degrees and then it righted itself and came back with an almighty smack. With rogue waves you just hear them coming in a split second.”
After surviving the danger and intense periods of fright, as well as the long stretches of solitude and disconnect from modern life, he said all of them will return to their lives changed men.
“An awful lot of the talk is about the clarity this row brings,” he said. “All four of us are going to change our lives.
“I think for everyone it will be about spending less time in the rat race and more time enjoying everything outside it and our families. You see that life is short and it’s a rude awakening.”
The team is expected to arrive in English Harbour in Antigua on Sunday morning.
