A SURGEON from Emersons Green has rowed his way into the record books as part of a crew racing around the coast of Great Britain.
Stefano Capella, his brother Marco and three other members of Team Rowmads became the first and fastest crew of five to complete the GB Row Challenge unsupported, finishing the 2,000-mile journey in 32 days, 30 minutes and 58 seconds in July.
Stef is a Royal Navy trauma and orthopaedic surgeon, who has lived in Emersons Green for more than two years.
When he is not on deployment he works at hospitals across the region, including Southmead, treating bone and muscle injuries for the NHS.
He and his teammates spent three years planning the epic voyage, which started and finished at Tower Bridge in London and took them around the coast.
Stef said: “I have some friends who have some quirky ideas, and we sat around in a pub and threw them around. We thought about rowing the Atlantic but decided on something that was closer to home.”
After training by running, cycling and using rowing machines, the team built up experience on the water, including a five-day row from Plymouth to Portsmouth.
During the challenge, each rower spent two hours on and one hour off the oars for 18 hours a day, then two hours on and four hours off overnight.
Rowing unsupported meant they relied on a solar-powered desalination machine to provide drinking water, and cloudy weather over 10 days around the Scottish coast meant it stopped working. The rowers rationed themselves to two litres of water a day for a week, and were down to the last 10 litres of their 100 litre reserve by the time the sun emerged again.
They also lost the solar power to their speakers and radios, so had to make their own entertainment until the sun returned in time for them to recharge the batteries – and catch up on England’s World Cup campaign.
Stef said: “The biggest highlight was seeing just how extraordinary our country is from the water.
“We had dolphins following the boat, and saw otters, whales and incredible stretches of coastline.
“There were some brutally hard moments, like being on the oars at two in the morning for the fifth night in a row, rationing water and dealing with no power. But morale stayed remarkably high because we had such a fantastic team.
“It was amazing having our families at the finish at Tower Bridge – that’s a day I’ll never forget.”
Each team member was raising money for a charity – Stef was supporting a charity called Day One Trauma Support, which helps patients who have suffered major trauma injuries to rebuild their lives.
As the Voice went to print the team had raised £8,750 of their £10,000 target and their fundraising page is still open at tinyurl.com/yxth3sjj.
The team also carried out research monitoring the health of the seas around Britain, using hydrophone monitoring, twice-daily environmental DNA readings and daily microplastic sampling. They also collected a wealth of biomedical data on themselves to aid university research projects into sleep, bone health, human metabolism, and small team psychology.
