#1429 - Colin O'Brady

Joe Rogan (0:01)

Three, two, one, boom. Hello, Colin. Welcome back.

Colin O'Brady (0:04)

What's up, man? Good to see you.

I brought a book. You wrote it? I wrote this book last time since I saw you last.

Joe Rogan (0:10)

The Impossible First?

Colin O'Brady (0:12)

Indeed, indeed. Yeah, about my solo journey across Antarctica and kind of diving deep through my whole life, and kind of what brought me there and other expeditions and the ups and downs of it all.

Joe Rogan (0:22)

And you're coming back from another crazy trip, right?

Colin O'Brady (0:25)

I am indeed.

Joe Rogan (0:25)

What is that nonsense that you did on a kayak? What did you do?

Colin O'Brady (0:31)

So after I got back from the Impossible First, the Antarctica crossing, right about the 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 get 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's Fion 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.

Joe Rogan (1:19)

How far is that?

Colin O'Brady (1:20)

About 700 miles.

Joe Rogan (1:21)

Can I see what that looks like on a map?

Colin O'Brady (1:24)

And I said, please delete my phone number.

Joe Rogan (1:27)

700 miles rowing a boat.

Colin O'Brady (1:31)

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 got 40 foot swells, you 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?

Joe Rogan (1:54)

That whole area?

Colin O'Brady (1:55)

That whole area, yeah. From there to there? From there to there, all the way down. Yeah, the main peninsula there, Van Erdekal.

Joe Rogan (2:00)

How long did this take?

Colin O'Brady (2:02)

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 12 day crossing.

Joe Rogan (2:13)

So in the two weeks, you had to have two weeks' worth of food, two weeks' worth of drinking water, all in the boat.

Colin O'Brady (2:19)

Yeah, so, well, water actually, we have a desalinator. So off of solar panels, everything's solar. There's no engine, no sail, nothing like that. It's just completely human powered rowing.

Joe Rogan (2:30)

We have a portable desalinator?

Colin O'Brady (2:32)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (2:32)

How big is it?

Colin O'Brady (2:33)

It fits inside one of the tiny, so the boat's tiny. The boat's like 25 feet long, three guys rowing at a time. So there's six of us total in the team, ultimately.

Barely anywhere to sleep in this tiny little compartments like the size of like sleeping in the back of a hatchback or a Honda Civic or something like that.

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 water real fast. You can make 10 liters of water in like an hour or two, depending on how hot the sun is. That's pretty good. I mean, it gets it done. Yeah, it gets it done.

Joe Rogan (3:09)

Does it taste like whale dicks? What does the water taste like?

Colin O'Brady (3:13)

It was weird. As we got closer to Antarctica, I think it started messing up not 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.