Colin O'Brady Rowed a Boat from South America to Antarctica | Joe Rogan

And you're coming back from another crazy trip, right? I am indeed. What is that nonsense that you did on a kayak? What did you do? So after I got back from the impossible first, the Antarctica crossing, right about time I saw you last year, I got a funny phone call actually of all things. People were asking me, you know, what's the next expedition going to be? What are you going to do? And I said, you know, I just walked 54 days by myself across Antarctica. Give me a minute. Give me a minute to... Relax. And I got a phone call via a buddy of mine from college, connects me to this guy, this Icelandic guy. I've never met him before. His name is Fionn Paul. Don't know his story. I do now. He's an absolute legend. And he says, hey, man, you were just in Antarctica, right? And I was like, yeah. And he's like, I think we should go back to Antarctica. And I was like, all right. Well, what do you think? And he's like, in a rowboat. I think we should row a boat from the southern tip of South America to the peninsula of Antarctica across Drake Passage. How far is that? About 700 miles. Can I see what that looks like on the map? And I said, please delete my phone number. 700 miles of row in your boat. Yeah, so Drake Passage is known to be, you know, in seafaring one of the most treacherous, if not the most treacherous kind of passageway in the world. You know, you've got the Atlantic and the Pacific and the Southern Ocean kind of all converging between the Antarctic Peninsula and the southern tip of South America. So you've got 40 foot swells. You've got, you know, crazy waves, icebergs as you get close to Antarctica. And the mission or the goal was to see if we could, there it is right there. That's it. That whole area? That whole area, yeah, right there. From there to there. All the way down, yeah, the main peninsula there, Antarctica. How long did this take? So ultimately, it took us just less than two weeks to do the entire row. But it was a long journey in the planning from that phone call all the way through to that year. But it was a two-week or a 12-day crossing. So in the two weeks, you had to have two weeks worth of food, two weeks worth of drinking water. On the boat. Yeah, so, well, water actually, we have a desalinator. So off of solar panels, everything, you know, solar, there's no engine, no sail, nothing like that. It's just completely human-powered rowing. Do we have a portable desalinator? Yeah. How big is it? It fits inside one of the tiny, look, so the boat's tiny. The boat's like 25 feet long, three guys rowing at a time. So six of us total in the team, ultimately, you know, barely anywhere to sleep. And this tiny little compartment's like the size of like, you know, sleeping in the back of a, you know, hatchback of a Honda Civic or something like that. But, but yeah, so you've got this desalinator that's basically kind of in one of the central compartments. So it's probably like, I don't know, maybe two feet by two feet square, something like that. And it doesn't make a lot of real fast. You can make 10 liters of water in like, you know, an hour or two, depending on the size of the sun. That's pretty good. But it, I mean, it gets it done. Yeah, it gets it done. Does it taste like whale dicks? What does the water taste like? It was weird as we got closer to Antarctica. I think it started messing up because it got real salty. Like it wasn't doing quite as good of a job. The water near Antarctica was like one degree Celsius, so 33 Fahrenheit. I mean, practically frozen cold water. And I think that was kind of starting to tweak out the system. But drinking salt water as we got closer, it was like it was still potable, but it was like this isn't working as well. But early on, I mean, it worked just fine. Like it was pretty much, you know, cold, cold drinking water, like bottled water. Yeah, exactly. But then does it only do it for a certain amount of time? Does the filter get filled up or anything? It worked for the entire 12 days that we were out there. There's guys who have gone on longer, you know, rowing exhibitions across the Pacific or the Atlantic or longer stretches of ocean that, you know, works the entire time. But it is one of the things that breaks down. So we had extra spare parts. Fortunately, we don't have to use any of that. But but yeah, no, it worked. And then, yeah, of course, we had to bring food for the entire time as well on there. So that was a key part of it. How much food? So there were six of us, like I said, pretty much all the compartments were full. You know, there's a tiny little compartments, but we basically ate two things. So we we had freestride meals. So like Mountain House freestride meals with this little jet boil that we were kind of as crazy as the waters like it's 40, you know, 40 foot waves are bouncing around on this trying to hold a jet boil to try to boil some water. It was pretty tough. But some close calls with that. But we also had these bars. So last time I think we talked about last time I was on here, I had these kind of custom nutrition. That were made. And so that worked really well for me in the Antarctica crossing. We had done all this kind of work. Explain that again, like how you made how those made. Yeah. So when I was doing my Antarctica crossing, one of the kind of challenges is basically, can you take enough food with you? Because what I was doing was called unsupported. So no resupplies of food or fuel crossing the landmass of Antarctica, 54 days. And so I wanted to get like the most optimized nutrition. And so I work with this company called Standard Process, who's all like a whole food supplement company. And they've got all these sort of doctors, food scientists and this. And I went in their lab for a year and they did all this kind of custom blood work on my body, trying to figure out, you know, basically my exact sort of physiology. And they created these bars based on all of the research that they did that base were these really high calorie bars because it was the most high calories that I needed to optimize space. And they were kind of they were all they're all plant based and ended up. And then I know there's what's in them again. You know, coconut oil, nuts, seeds, you know, sort of different phytonutrients and a particular macronutrient blend that I needed was about 45 percent fat because I needed the high fat, about 40 percent protein and then 15. We're not with the math on that 15 percent carbs. And so excuse me. Sorry, I alternated the protein carb quotient there. But but yeah, it worked really well for that. And so when I was doing the row, I called up Santa process again. They've been amazing partner of mine. They were like, we're like, hey, I'm doing this row. Those bars work so good last time. Like I just said, with, you know, trying to boil water and, you know, all this stuff is really challenging on the rowboat. The best would be to have this really kind of high optimized nutrition that we could use again for the project like this. But the parameters are different. You know, the humidity is different. The temperature is different. There's six of us now. There's not just one of me. You know, can we optimize it for that? So they kind of made a specialty blend of the bars again that they've called the column bars. They probably come up with a better name. But it worked really well. Those online anywhere? They're not for sale. We've talked about doing that. So maybe in the future, but you can you can see online on their website, like all the different supplements and stuff that went into it. So you can kind of buy the component parts. But yeah, one day we might might make them, but they've been kind of just custom for these two projects. But they've worked really, really well, particularly in the rowing. So I mean, they worked amazing in the Antarctic crossing as well. But in the rowing, it was 90 minutes of rowing on 90 minutes of rowing off continuous 24 hours a day. So there's we're kind of in two sets of three, six of us total, three people rowing, three people resting. And in that 90 minutes that you're off, that's also when you got to eat, drink, sleep. It's your only time to rest basically. And so as much time as you can kind of optimize eating and stuff meant more sleeping. And so to have these bars get done with a 90 minute rowing shift, be able to eat a thousand calorie bar, highest quality nutrition in your body. I mean, standard process nailed it again. It was amazing to have these bars and have it work really well for all of us to kind of optimize not just the food, but also the efficiency of sleep because the sleep got crazy out there. I can imagine. Yeah. So you're basically sleeping every 90 minutes for one hour or so. Yeah, exactly. If you can get it and like when once the swells start cranking up, you're in this tiny compartment. Like I don't know if you can pull up a picture of the boat for a visual or some on my Instagram. Covered it all. Not covered. Like really not covered at all. Like so. Well, there's covered in the tiny compartment. So the rowing parts not covered at all. So when you're rowing, waves are splashing up like over top of you. I mean, you're getting completely soaked, like you're getting, you know, complete soaked the entire time. And then the tiny compartment, you know, it's like it's like lower than this table. Like you'd be like kind of crouched down like in there. Yeah, this is the rowboat right here. So that's us. So that's the floor. Is that where all the food is stored underneath? Yeah, underneath there's compartments. You can see that tiny little kind of compartment on either side. One smaller and one's bigger. And that's where you guys would sleep. That's where we'd sleep. Well, the bigger one has a wave. It's hard to believe that there's 12 people. Three. No, six people. Six people. Six people. Yeah, but still. So you got, you know, three people in the three people rowing and three people in the compartments. And I think if you kind of scroll up to the top, maybe there's one of them just that shows like the whole boat or like what it looks like maybe there. There's kind of a shot of it. So, yeah, so you can see in there like the back little compartment. That's where I was. I was alternating with this guy, Fion, who I mentioned, the Icelandic guy who was the captain of the boat and really experienced ocean rower. And we alternated inside this little cabin. And then the other four guys, they alternated two people because that one's a little bit bigger in the front. That's the bow cabin in the front. But they're like you're like head to toe in there or you're crouched into a little ball. It's not it's not glamorous at all. Did you know these guys at all before you did this? So not really. Not really. Yeah, it was a deep dive in the team. And after doing something solo, I was pretty excited to do something, you know, as a team and doing something in a completely, you know, exploring a completely different kind of avenue of exploration in the ocean, something I'd never done before. And I had actually not only did I not know these guys, a couple of them went to college with, but we like really loosely knew each other. Like I kind of like maybe like recognized their face a little bit, but it didn't. We weren't like good friends or anything like that. Three of them I'd never met in my entire life. And I had also have never rode a boat in my life ever before. And so when Fion, he called me up and told me about the project, he's the one of the most world's most renowned ocean rowers. He's got, you know, 30 world records or something like that. Complete legend. He's rode boats across every single ocean. This was like the kind of the last, you know, big ocean that he'd never crossed. No one, you know, no one ever done it just like this before. And so he kind of said, Hey, I wanted this idea, but the logistics are super complicated. Like going to Antarctica is all this sort of like treaties that you need. All this paperwork, getting a boat down to South America, importing it through the Panama canal, et cetera. I mean, it's like a tough thing and he'd been like kind of thinking about it for a year or so. And he said like, Hey, I've seen you pull off some big projects together. Can we kind of team up? And I know, you know, your team has got really good at figuring out these logistics. Would you be interested? And I'd actually looked at ocean rowing a couple of years ago, something that I was wanting to do one day. And so it was kind of a after I kind of got that first phone call, I guess, that kind of like, dude, I just got back from Antarctica. I don't want to go back tomorrow. But, you know, of course, the curiosity inside of me got the best of me and I called him back up and I said, Hey, let's do this. What are you thinking? And kind of dove into it from there. Kind of my my team kind of wrapped their arms around the sort of like logistic and building out the project. And he was definitely the visionary of something he dreamed up. And it was super cool to team up with him after doing something alone.