Rowing Solo Across the Atlantic Ocean with Taryn Smith

0:04In January of 2026, Taryn Smith became the third ever American woman to row solo across the Atlantic Ocean. It was a harrowing journey. For 46 days, Taryn was at the mercy of the sun, the wind, and the churn of the water. We had huge waves, and so a wave would crash over the boat, get on me, I'd have salt water all over my body, which is massively uncomfortable because as it starts to dry you're left with salt and it's almost greasy and sticky it just doesn't feel good and I just started bawling and I said I can't do this for seven more days I cannot I cannot make it through but when you're out at sea there's no other option and so in some ways I think it's easier to be resilient in that setting because you just have to keep going

0:58The craziest thing about Taryn's wild idea is that before she decided to make this crossing, she had no rowing experience at all. But Taryn was no stranger to adventure. She'd traveled all over the world, run the New York City Marathon, and spent many summers exploring Idaho's Sawtooth Mountains. Taryn was drawn to this row because it was unfamiliar and scary. She wanted to look that fear straight in the eye. I'm Shelby Stanger, and this is Wild Ideas Worth Living, an REI Co-op Studios production presented by Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard.

1:42Taryn Smith, welcome to Wild Ideas Worth Living. Thank you so much for having me. You grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, is that correct? That's correct. So did you grow up outdoorsy? Like, did you compete in sports? Did you do any rowing before? I had done no rowing before, but I am a lifelong athlete. So I did figure skating and ballet. I tried just about every sport and then became a runner in high school. And when I was little, my grandparents lived at the lake. And so I spent summers going out to the lake and sailing with my grandfather. So that's definitely where my love of boats comes from. So awesome.

2:19I'm still confused, though. Like, how do you go from like ice skating and ballet to I get sailing, but rowing a boat in the middle of the ocean when you're from Nebraska is like a really wild idea. So where were you in life when you just thought of this idea? So in 2020, I was in college and I went on a yurt trip over winter break to the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho. And I just fell in love with the mountains. I thought it was the most beautiful place ever. And my friend's dad said they have jobs there in the summer. You should apply. And I did. And so I went out to Stanley, Idaho for a summer and I thought it would just be a seasonal job.

3:00I thought I'd be there for one year. But it turned into the adventure of a lifetime in my career. and so I got to be in Idaho for half of the year working at this little lake lodge and the other half I got to travel and work remotely and so in those off seasons I just kept upping the stakes of my adventures so I went and did a ski season in Chamonix France because I wanted to learn how to backcountry ski I went to every continent in a year I did Patagonia and the New York Marathon and I just ran out of things that scared me. And I read this article in Vogue about a team of women that rode the Pacific back in 2022.

3:38Lat 35, they rode from San Francisco to Hawaii. And I thought ocean rowing just sounds like the most amazing adventure. And I read about this row. What really intrigued me was the self-reliance that you have to have. I'd also just become a yoga instructor. And so there was part of me that wanted to really meditate on impermanence and joy and being comfortable in an uncomfortable situation. And the ocean row really fit the bill. Okay, that's amazing. Fun fact, we had those ladies on the podcast. How old were you when you read this Vogue article? 22. Okay, take me to 22 year old Taryn reading this Vogue article.

4:19Yeah. So I read the Vogue article. At the time, I was in Idaho, It was the summer and I was managing the little general store and I had this moment of pretty intense jealousy actually. My assumption was that anyone who would row across an ocean would have been an Olympic athlete or a college rower. But then I learned more about the sport and I realized a lot of people take on this kind of journey with no rowing background and so I leapt in. Initially I tried to join a team. There were lots of groups of three women that wanted to row the Pacific. and they were looking for a fourth. And so I do all of these interviews with all of these teams, but no one chose me for their team.

5:03And so I thought, I don't want to be picked for this. I want to do this because it's something I chose to do. So I decided to do the Atlantic instead and do it by myself. Once she made the decision to go, Taryn began researching and learning as much as she could about long-distance rowing. Ultimately, she decided to register for an event called the World's Toughest Row. Taryn would be racing 42 other boats across the Atlantic Ocean, from the Canary Islands to Antigua. The event provided her with a safety team that would track her position and help her with navigation. Taryn wasn't worried about actually winning the race.

5:45Her goal was just to make it across. What is step one? Like, how do you even get these boats? Because these boats, they're not cheap. Like, to get a rowboat that has, I'm guessing, desalination, navigation, won't flip over, it needs to be stable enough so you don't die. Like, these are not cheap vessels. Yes, my first step was putting a deposit down on an ocean rowing boat. The one I used was built by a company called Rannick, and they have all of the things you just said. They're self-riding, so they're bottom heavy. If they were to capsize out at sea, I would stay. It would self-right, and then I would stay with it because I was always harnessed on, and it had the salinator and all of the tech you need to survive at sea.

6:27So how much is a boat like this? About$80 ,000. Yeah, that's a lot for a 22-year-old working at a general store. How did you fundraise for this? At the end of the day, what brought the journey to life was my friends and family. They were the ones that pitched in and sponsored the row and wanted to put their name on the boat. And I think that was what made it so successful for me because I was such a community grassroots effort from the very beginning. And my boat, it was literally wrapped in the names of all of the friends and family that helped make it happen. And so when I was out there, I felt like I was just in this cocoon of love and support from the people who believed in me from day one.

7:08And so, yeah, I put that deposit down and then I started training with a coach. I lifted twice a week, rode on an erg three times a week and then cross trained once a week. And in the spring of 2024, I went to England and I took a course on sea safety and navigation. And then I went and I spent about six weeks just rowing on the south coast of England just to get a technique to get some better form. And then the following year, 2025, I went and lived on my boat for the month of April and then for a month in the summer and got really, really comfortable being on my vessel.

7:52Taryn's boat was 24 feet long and five feet wide. It was designed for two people. So it had two cabins, one at each end. Between the two cabins was a sliding seat where she would sit and row, and a little bit of room to walk around on deck. For her sea training, Taryn had to learn how to steer her boat in all sorts of conditions. She figured out how to navigate with a Garmin chart plotter and use a para-anchor, which is a big parachute that you can throw overboard to hold your position in a storm or headwind. In addition to everything she needed to learn about ocean rowing, Taryn also had to prepare physically.

8:30She focused on building lower body strength, and by the end of her training, she was logging five-hour sessions on the rowing machine. Finally, after three years of training and preparation, Taryn shipped her boat from England to Lagomera and the Canary Islands. In December 2025, she started rowing. Okay, so what was day one like? So throughout training, I was really prepared to be miserable. at sea. I thought it was going to be a slog throughout the entire journey. But what caught me off guard was how happy I was that first day. I woke up on my boat the first morning and we had the most beautiful sunrise.

9:14It was orange and then this really bright blue water. A shark swam near my boat and I felt so alive and so free and everything was working as it should. And I I realized, oh my gosh, I'm actually going to be able to pull this off. It's actually happening. I was having the time of my life. Take me through a typical day, like sun up to sun down. What happens? I would wake up a couple hours before sunrise and that varied. And I would row. Then I would have a little bit of breakfast. So normally that was a granola bar or some crackers and fruit snacks. And then I would row some more until noon. And every day at noon, I would take a fix of where I was at.

9:59So I'd write down my longitude and my latitude and a little captain's log and make any notes of things that had happened to me or the boat in the last 24 hours. Then I would do some systems checks just to make sure everything was working. I would check the auto helm, which helped me steer, make sure that that wasn't overheating. And then I would grab my satellite phone and I would bring that and clip it on deck and wait for a call from land and so every other day the safety team from the world's toughest row would call me just to make sure that I was okay and the boat was okay then I rode through the afternoon and around four or five I would normally make a video summarizing what had happened in the day and in the evenings I would send that to my mom I would get on my Starlink and getting on my Starlink was always the biggest treat or reward while I was out there because it meant that I got messages and I was doing voice notes with a lot of my friends and so it was so nice to get to talk to people in that way and then I would have a dinner at sunset and after dinner I would row for maybe two or three more hours after the sun went down and then I would go and sleep and I got a pretty good amount of rest every night there were some times I couldn't sleep but for the most part I did sleep pretty well throughout the journey.

11:20What happens to your boat when you're sleeping? So because we are on a route that uses the trade winds and because we have an auto helm, the boat would drift in the correct direction. And if the boat started to drift off course, then I would get an alarm and I'd wake up and adjust the course. Are you seeing any other boats while you're out at sea? I saw a lot of cargo ships and every once in a while I saw an ocean rowing boat that happened maybe three times. I didn't see it physically, but I could see it on my chart plotter. It must have been nice to know that you weren't totally out there alone.

11:55What other kinds of sea life did you see out there? Birds? Oh my gosh, the sea life was amazing. So one of the highlights was a little bird who started following me day one and stuck with me for the entirety of the journey. When I first saw her, she flew over to me and I immediately named her Jo March, the character from Little Women, because she just had such a free spirit. And in the mornings and the evenings, she would fly laps around my boat. And then she would dive off into the waves and come back and say hi. And there were a couple of days, about halfway through the journey where she wasn't there and I thought I had lost her, but then she came back and she was with me up until the last day.

12:37And so she really became a friend and we had a little routine. And dolphins came and swam next to me. The dolphins always knew to come when I really needed friends and when I needed a little pick-me-up. And a whale swam underneath my boat, and it came up, and it took a breath just a couple feet away from me. And it was so gentle and kind, and then it swam off, and I saw it splashing off in the distance. And then it came back and swam away again. I saw another whale jump up in the air. It was completely vertical, and then it splashed down into the water. And I saw a marlin a couple times. Those are less fun.

13:15They're spooky, spooky fish. They weigh about 700 pounds. And what makes them so dangerous for ocean rowers is that they have that long pointy beak. And every once in a while, they actually will strike an ocean rowing boat and pierce a hole in it. And so I had to bring supplies to repair my boat in case a marlin struck. Oh, wow. What about the night sky? The night sky was fantastic. When the clouds went away and it was a new moon, the stars were just beautiful. There were a couple times I laid out on my deck for hours and just looked at the stars.

14:00My morning routine these days looks like this. A cup or two of coffee with my AeroPress, then out to the ocean to catch some waves before an interview. And as much as I love being in the ocean, what I genuinely look forward to is using my AeroPress again the next day. It's that good. If you've never tried AeroPress coffee, you're in for a treat. It's a French press, a pour-over, and espresso machine all in one. It uses a completely unique brew method, which means you get a cup of coffee that's rich, smooth, and genuinely different from anything else. And it's fast. It only takes about two minutes to brew your coffee and clean up.

14:39Lately, I've been using the Aeropress Go Plus. It's a complete travel coffee system I can take to the beach or out on the trail. Everything packs into a double-wall insulated stainless steel tumbler for storage and travel. It's compact, durable, easy to use, easy to clean, and it makes great coffee no matter where you are. I just unpack it, brew, and pack it back up. To ensure you never have bad coffee wherever you are, visit your local REI or head to REI.com to grab your AeroPress. That's A-E-R-O-P-R-E-S-S. It's time to ditch the drive-through, toss the French press, and say yes to better mornings fueled by better coffee.

15:37Taryn Smith is a yoga instructor and adventurer who recently rode solo across the Atlantic Ocean. The first month of the row had plenty of challenging moments, but Taryn generally felt joyful and free on the open water. Every day she made Instagram videos for her friends and family. It is day 11 of my row across the Atlantic Ocean and today we have the most beautiful rainbow ever. It's raining right now but it's also sunny so we've been gifted this absolutely stunning picture perfect rainbow. I need to start rowing again but I just can't stop looking at rainbow. Then about halfway through the trip, things changed.

16:27Day 27 was when things really picked up. And so that day in particular was very tough for me. I hadn't slept in about two days because I had hives all over my body from sun exposure. And they were so unbearably itchy at night that I just could not fall asleep. So I hadn't slept. I cried in the morning. I literally said I want my mom out loud because I was dealing with so much exhaustion. And then the wind picked up and there were huge waves coming from every direction with so much force that they would knock me off of my rowing seat and out of my shoes. And it did not stop raining. It was so much water.

17:10and I really struggled on the gray days. I like sunshine and so when it did rain that's when I had the hardest time and that day a marlin started stalking me and so for about three miles I saw this marlin and a big wave would pick both of us up and I'd look up and I would see the marlin floating above me and that was equally terrifying but it's interesting because it was also one of my fastest days at sea. So it felt really scary, but I was really successful that day. And that's kind of the pattern we fell into for the remainder of the trip. There was really big weather, really big wind, big waves, but it was all pushing me in the right direction.

17:54So I had to remind myself that while it was scary and really uncomfortable, I wasn't unsafe and I actually was achieving my goal. What was the most challenging day? It sounds like the day the Marlin stalked you was the most challenging day. That one was really tough. The second, maybe first most challenging was a similar day weather-wise. We had huge waves, huge wind coming from every direction. And so a wave would crash over the boat, get on me. I'd have salt water all over my body, which is massively uncomfortable and a wave knocked my boat so it was actually pointing due south instead of due west and that's a really dangerous position to be in because then the waves could crash over my boat and capsize me so I had to work really hard to unpin my boat and get it pointing in the right direction again and the rest of the day was a similar experience it was just it was brutal there were waves from every direction I felt like my boat was going to capsize.

18:57And I called my dad at the end of the day and he was helping me with weather rooting. And I called and asked, Hey dad, what's the weather looking like for the rest of the week? And normally how it worked is there'd be a really bad day. There'd be crazy weather and then it would kind of calm down the next day. So that's what I was expecting him to say. And he having no context for the day that I just had said, Oh yeah, whatever you have, that's going to continue for the next seven days. And I just started bawling. And I said, I can't do this for seven more days. I cannot, I cannot make it through.

19:30But when you're out at sea, there's no other option. And so in some ways, I think it's easier to be resilient in that setting because you just have to keep going. Yeah. How did you get through those days? That sounds awful. I really relied on my parents those days. I called them quite a bit. And just hearing their words of encouragement meant a lot. And I tried to find joy wherever I could. I tried to remember that this is going to pass, that all weathers pass, all storms pass. And there were moments when it did get easier, where we had a nicer sea state instead of having waves coming from every direction.

20:08So there were moments of reprieve, and those let me catch my breath a little bit.

20:17Right around the time of this arduous stretch, Taryn's journey went viral online. She had posted a video about getting sun hives, and it got a lot of views. From there, hundreds of thousands of people began watching the videos of her journey and cheering her on from land. In fact, some of them came to meet her at the finish line in Antigua.

20:43So when you're on your last day or maybe second to last day, the last night, what did it feel like knowing you were going to finish? You only had a few miles to go. My last night out at sea, I was hit with this huge wave of nostalgia for the experience. I realized that it was coming to an end and the last three weeks had been really painful and difficult and scary but in that moment I thought oh my gosh it's over this is really sad I've had I've also had a lot of fun out here and I'm not ready to be done and I thought about everything that I had put into the road the blood the sweat the tears that had gone into making this happen and I thought about how happy I was to see my family when I finally got to Antigua.

21:31And I went to bed. I got a couple of hours of sleep and then I woke up in the morning and I could see land. I was about 15 miles out. I could see Antigua and my face hurt from smiling. I was so, so happy to be there and to have made it. And so that morning I had the best time and I started seeing lots of sailboats around and I could start seeing details of the land and everything was great until the last mile. So I'm rowing in, I'm coming into the south coast of Antigua, but there was also a breeze coming in from the south that day, which was pushing me towards land. I hadn't seen land in 46 days though.

22:17So my depth perception was completely off. and I thought as I rode in and got closer and closer to land that I was about to be pushed into the cliffs I could see water splashing up on the cliffs and I thought I was seconds away from crashing my boat in front of half a million people and so instead of continuing to row west to get into harbor I started rowing due south because I thought if I didn't I was going to crash and eventually I got a call from the safety team I said Taryn where are you going you need to keep rowing west. They were very kind about it. And so eventually I got turned around in the right direction and rode around into Nelson's Dockyard in Antigua and everything was so green.

23:03I hadn't seen the color green in two months. So everything was really bright and almost neon in my eyes. And I heard lots of screaming, lots of cheering, lots of yelling. And then it all went quiet right as I was coming across the finish line, which were these two buoys. And then I made it across the finish line. All the super yachts honked their horns. People started cheering. There were flares. And I just crumpled into relief that I had made it safely and hadn't crashed my boat at the last minute. After 46 days at sea, Taryn arrived in Antigua on January 29, 2026. Once she hit land, she celebrated with family and friends and ate some fresh fruit as soon as possible.

23:53Taryn also did some press interviews before heading home to Nebraska a few days later. But like many people who execute big, wild ideas, especially on their own, it's been challenging to adjust back to normal life.

24:10the first month back I was really irritable and I was very snippy and I didn't know where it was coming from but I would get very overwhelmed very quickly especially when people started talking about the road of me and when I shared stories about it I felt like I was giving a book report on someone else's life it was really hard for me to picture myself even being out on the boat and I had pictures of course but I just couldn't remember it and now that there's been some more time I can picture myself very vividly sitting out on the ocean but there were moments that were traumatic and I it's not a complaint I chose to be out there and I'm glad that I was able to push myself through that.

24:57But being back home, yeah, like I would sit at a dinner table and someone would ask me a question about the road and maybe it was my mom or my dad. And there were a couple of times I just got up and left. I just couldn't talk anymore.

25:13In order to ease her transition back to life on land, Taryn has been focusing on her yoga practice. Even when she was on the boat with extremely limited space, yoga kept her mind and her body in balance. Were you able to do any yoga while you were on the boat? I did a little stretching every day. My yoga practice was different than it was on land, of course. And so I did some stretches to floss out the shoulders, keep my shoulders and my back open while I was out there, and a lot of twists because there was so much forward and back motion with rowing. And I think the act of rowing itself was a huge meditation for me.

25:54So it's almost like my life became yoga while I was out there. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Yeah. We go to a yoga practice and you get on the mat and hold some poses. And some of those help you feel strong. Some of them help you feel flexible. but the word yoga means to yoke it means to bring together to unify and while I was out there I felt like a really unified version of myself I felt like the most me that I've ever been and it was such a liberating experience as well because I was out at sea I was by myself every day I was doing this challenging thing. I was learning to be comfortable in an uncomfortable situation.

26:44I got to just be myself. That was such a gift.

26:55Taryn's Row raised money for Girls on the Run, an organization that builds confidence and empowerment in young women through running and movement. Check out their mission at girlsontherun.org. You can follow Taryn on Instagram at Taryn Smith Movement. That's T-A-R-Y-N-S-M-I-T-H-M-O-V-E-M-E-N-T. Wild Ideas Worth Living is part of the REI Podcast Network. It's hosted by me, Shelby Stanger, produced by Annie Fassler, Sylvia Thomas, and Sam Piers-Nitzburg of Puddle Creative. Our senior producer is Jenny Barber. Our executive producers are Paolo Motula and Joe Crosby. Thank you again to our partner, Capital One and the REI Co-op MasterCard.