For thirty-eight and three-quarter days, the ocean had mostly left them alone. Then, with the finish line close enough to see the lights on shore, the Pacific decided to test their commitment to the cause.

The four men of Foar the Brave had already called their families. They were three miles out, cruising in at three knots, and a jubilant crowd on the beach had a steak dinner waiting on the table. Joe and Ian ran a shift change and figured they would be standing on dry land within the hour. Ten minutes later, they were faced with the most intense fight of the whole crossing.

As they rounded the point, the current shifted and shoved them toward shore, where the waves stopped being swells and started sounding like a freight train. Ian looked over his shoulder mid-stroke and saw mist, a wave detonating behind him. He raised the alarm, “Hey, Joe!” And then a rowboat was surfing down the face of a breaking wave. They hit a reef, and the rudder cleat sheared clean off. Just like that they were rudderless, dead in the water, a hundred yards from the shore they had been rowing toward for over a month.

Foar the Brave crossed the Pacific in 39 days, 3 hours, and 19 minutes, and took second place in the World’s Toughest Row. To hear them tell it, none of that, not the forty days and not the podium, mattered as much as the last two and a half miles.

The Team That Willed Itself to the Start Line

You are supposed to spend one to two years getting ready to row an ocean. Foar the Brave—the name spelled that way because they are, in fact, in a rowboat—came together late and pulled off in nine or ten months what most crews take twice as long to attempt. That alone tells you something about them.

The crew was an odd, perfect mix. Joe was the skipper and the driving force, a former Green Beret who had already rowed the Atlantic, a crossing that, he says without drama, saved his life. Ian, his old Special Forces teammate, was the Executive Officer, twenty-seven years in the Army and twenty of them in special operations. Steve came from the FAA, air traffic control, widely regarded as one of the most stressful jobs in the world, and would turn out to be the only man on the boat immune to seasickness. And John was Joe’s friend of thirty-odd years, a man who had never really been tested and wanted to find out what he was made of. He found out.

The training was its own proving ground. To be eligible, the team had to log a hundred and twenty-plus hours on the boat, one of them a continuous 36-hour row, and a mandatory 24 hours of it at night. Some thirty separate proficiencies, from deploying a para-anchor to man-overboard drills. Courses in seamanship, safety at sea, navigation, and first aid, all verified by a race committee in Europe through GPS tracks and drill videos. To build cohesion, they rented a house and rowed eight-plus hours a day for a month, grinding through the coursework together. All four of them had to complete this training together, and if anyone backed out and had to be replaced, they had to start all over from square one.

They also made a deliberate choice about why they were out there. Some crews approached the race like elite athletes, on the rowing machines by dawn, drilling their stroke for hours. Foar the Brave came for the adventure and the cause, and they never pretended otherwise. “That just seems like a lot of energy to use before we row for a month,” Joe says, only half joking. It is worth remembering how that bet paid off. Several of the boats that breezed past them early, national-champion crews among them, would finish behind them.

They packed for the long haul and packed heavy. Along with the required food and gear went a stash of quick calorie snacks like a bag of Skittles big enough to double as ballast when the boat needed leveling. Leaving Monterey Bay, they watched most of the fleet pull ahead, including a three-woman crew who were sure these four would never make it. They were wrong. The plan had been to row three at a time to punch off the coast, and when that did not click, they adapted, settling into a two-up, two-down rhythm that was theirs alone. It was not the textbook stroke of the champions, and yet it carried them across an ocean.

Life, Distilled into Two-Hour Blocks

The first week nearly broke them, and it had nothing to do with the finish everyone remembers. It was cold, and it rained, and they were in full foul-weather gear, shivering, fighting a super El Niño that pushed them back toward the coast while they clawed to get off the continental shelf. Thirty-to-forty-foot rollers, twenty-to-thirty-knot winds, a boat crawling forward at less than half a knot. “The first week was ten times tougher than the Atlantic,” Joe says.

Seasickness arrived around day three and stayed. Two men would be over the side at once while Steve, sick-proof and insufferable, filmed them and lovingly pronounced them weak. John, eating more than 5,000 calories a day, still lost fifteen pounds. The body burns something like 6,000 a day out there, and each of the crew came home nearly thirty pounds lighter. What set this team apart was that nobody stayed down. On other boats, rowers were out for days. Foar the Brave learned to be sick and get right back on the oars, and that refusal to quit put them in first place for a stretch.

John found the phrase for what the whole thing became. “Your life is just distilled down to a series of two-hour blocks.” Not tomorrow, not tonight, just the next two hours. The team had a blunter name for it, “F you, pay me.” You’re tired? F you, pay me. Didn’t sleep? Chaos at home? It’s one hour and fifty-nine minutes, and then you’re back on the oars.

And there was real chaos at home. Mid-ocean, Joe took a call from his daughter in Italy. Someone was trying to break into her hostel, the scene straight out of Taken, and he could do nothing but listen from a thousand miles out until his clock ran out and he could coordinate with his wife. And then went back to the oars. His daughter got out safe. Ian’s stretch was harder. His mother-in-law, his wife’s best friend, had a stroke on a cruise, was found to have stage-four cancer, and died on Ian’s birthday. The crew marked the birthday anyway, everyone working around the pain, because out there you could not stop.

The “F you, pay me” was not cruelty. It was the only mercy available. “I can feel empathetic once I get in there and come off the oars,” Joe says, referring to the two, small one-man cabins fore and aft of the thirty-by-four-foot boat that they called home between rowing shifts. “But right now I need you to get out here.” You carried your grief to your seat, and you rowed it.

Ricky the Bird, the Flying Hammer, and Other Survival Tools

If the ocean was going to strip their lives down to nothing, the crew filled the nothing with each other, mostly by being relentlessly, lovingly awful to one another. This is not out of malice, rather, it is heartfelt way of coping with stress commonly used among the Military’s combat arms units, and First Responders.

For long stretches there was no wildlife at all. Then the flying fish came, thirty or so dead in the boat every morning. A bird started trailing them, so they flung fish for it to catch. They named him Ricky. He was probably ten different birds over the span of the voyage, and they were all Ricky. One fish caught John full in the face at freight-train speed, and he smelled fish in his hair for a day.

They razzed each other without mercy. Joe once threw a hammer into the cabin at a sleeping teammate, the “flying hammer,” a decision no one, including Joe, can explain. And then there was the infamous bucket. Going to the bathroom meant a teammate coming off the oars, and a five-minute production while the boat crawled and the miles refused to tick off. Ian, at one point, dispensed with the ceremony entirely and produced a technical marvel involving a gallon bag and considerable core stability on undulating seas, the first time billed as an emergency, the rest, by unanimous testimony, not.

It sounds like chaos, and it was, but it was also the mechanism. “I didn’t really know John,” Ian says, “and we gelled so well, so quickly.” The gallows humor got them through, and every one of them knew it.

The Last Two-and-a-Half Miles

Which brings it back to the reef.

With the rudder gone, John and Ian on the oars had to physically turn the boat while it scraped bottom and work it north into deeper water, the single most important move of the whole expedition, because nothing else they tried would have mattered without it. It was the closest they came to tipping over all trip. A hundred yards from shore, hit sideways, John tangled in a safety line and aware that in water this shallow a capsize might not right itself. Steve and Joe were sealed in the cabins, able only to call out ideas over the crashing water.

Now they had no rudders and no backups, roughly two-and-a-half miles from a finish line thirty-nine days in the making, and the committee boat pulled alongside with a hard choice. They could fight to make it themselves, or take a tow and be disqualified.

For a moment, Joe quit. He will tell you so plainly, not that the team quit, but that he did, his lowest point of the whole crossing. Charlotte, the media operator filming it live, told him afterward that it was not his lowest point at all but his most triumphant pivot in mindset. A half-second later, when he said “okay, throw the drogue out” and started working the problem, the entire team began to dig deeper than they had over the last 2,798 miles. A lot of teams, she said, would simply have taken the tow.

The solution to their rudderless plight came from a single half-remembered slide in an eight-hour safety course, the one that said, if you ever need it, which you never will, you can throw the drogue out and steer with it. A drogue is basically a small parachute or cone that you drag behind a boat in the water on a line. They threw the sea anchor off the back, and suddenly they had steering again. It was clumsy, like rowing while dragging a bucket, but it was steering. And they rowed.

They rowed the last two and a half miles for six hours. John, at the helm, kept telling the guys the shore was a quarter mile off. It was not, and he knew it, but it was the kind of good lie that keeps a team rowing when the truth would sink them. Somewhere in there,  John, who a week earlier had admitted he had lost his why, found it again, as if the ocean had called his bluff. And all at once he cared more than he had the entire trip.

Finally, they crossed the finish line on nothing but that. Stepping onto the pier, they had to hold onto each other to walk, because a month of sitting had stolen their legs, and they came off the boat unsteady and laughing and spent, with everyone on shore cheering.

“Anybody can be at the helm when the seas are calm,” Steve says. The last six hours were when they were not. “Whatever soup mixes up our personalities,” John says, “I honestly don’t think we come out of that cauldron if we didn’t have the exact mix we had. We couldn’t have planned it. It just kind of worked.”

The Why

They did not row across the Pacific for the podium. They rowed because Joe has lost soldiers under his command to suicide over twenty-five years, because the number of veterans still slipping under is unconscionable, and because a rowboat crossing an ocean is a very hard thing to look away from.

Foar the Brave is a 501(c)(3), and its fundraising goes toward veteran mental health and suicide prevention. Raising the money was brutal at first, ten dollars here, fifty there, but something about the mission reached people. A woman in a New Jersey bar talked to John for five minutes and wrote a check for twenty-five thousand dollars on the condition that no one ever learn her name. Small donors saved gas money to give ten bucks. “Those two ends of the spectrum,” Joe says, “are what regain your faith in humanity.”

The mission got real in the worst way mid-ocean. One of Ian’s friends, a soldier he had served alongside who was struggling with a divorce and a drifting sense of purpose, took his own life while the team was on the water. Ian recorded a video afterward and was overcome. Everything they were rowing for turned suddenly, unbearably concrete.

Ask them what they would say to a veteran closer to the edge than anyone around him knows, and the answer is immediate and unanimous. Call your buddy. Make the phone call. “Being brave enough to say, ‘Hey man, I’m done,’ that alone probably saves your life.” And here is the warning they want every friend to memorize. The word to listen for is not “done.” It’s “I’m tired.” It’s “I’m exhausted.”

“If you hear those words,” Joe says, “you need to get on a plane and go grab that guy in person. That’s past anger. Once you reach that point, it’s not going to be good.” Make it to the next day, they kept telling everyone watching. This too shall pass. It may take a while, but it gets better.

Sometimes healing looks less like a hotline and more like a deer stand. Every year Joe and Ian run what they call the Rocky Ridge Recovery Center, a “hunting trip” on which, in ten years, not a single deer has died. There is bourbon, there is storytelling, and once there was a man who had not told his story in years finally screaming it into the dark while his brothers let him, until he stopped, said, “I think I’m good now,” and sat back down. That was the whole treatment, being broken, out loud, and accepted anyway.

They know they did not save everyone. But a childhood friend told Joe those videos seemed like they were about him, and got help. Another called and said he thought they had saved his life. A man Joe had not spoken to in thirty-five years texted to say he wanted to try the ocean row himself. “We only know of a couple people we know we’ve helped,” Joe says. “I hope there’s more.”

There almost certainly are, because the thing spreads. A 2023 crossing inspired a Ranger crew to row, that crew raised millions and inspired others, and Foar the Brave rowed this year on seats borrowed from them. “The cumulative effect of being the catalyst,” John calls it. You never learn its full reach, but every so often someone tells you that you were speaking to them.

The journey ended. The mission continues. Foar the Brave is already looking for the next team, veterans or a mixed crew, Atlantic or Pacific, to shepherd through the whole gauntlet, from the training to the fundraising to the lessons learned the hard way. They will help them get to the start line, which Joe swears is the hardest part of the whole thing. “This is not a burden,” Joe’s wife would remind him back when wrangling four grown men and their four complicated lives had him ready to quit before they had even launched. “This is a privilege that you get to do this.”

Two and a half miles from the end of the World’s Toughest Row, with no rudder and no reason left to believe, four men decided she was right.

Learn more or donate at foarthebrave.org.

If you or a veteran you know is struggling, reach out. Call your buddy. In the U.S., the Veterans Crisis Line is available by dialing 988 and pressing 1, or texting 838255.

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