John Fairfax, 1st person to row alone across Atlantic Ocean, dies at 74

Britannia, the boat rowed by John Fairfax in 1969 on the first solo trans-ocean row, returned to Cowes, forty years after she was designed and built in the town (2008 video):



"The only child of an English father and a Bulgarian mother, John Fairfax was born on May 21, 1937, in Rome, where his mother had family.

He crossed the Atlantic because it was there, and the Pacific because it was also there. He made both crossings in a rowboat because it, too, was there, and because the lure of sea, spray and sinew, and the history-making chance to traverse two oceans without steam or sail, proved irresistible. In 1969, after six months alone on the Atlantic battling storms, sharks and encroaching madness, John Fairfax, who died this month at 74, became the first lone oarsman in recorded history to traverse any ocean. In 1972, he and his girlfriend, Sylvia Cook, sharing a boat, became the first people to row across the Pacific, a yearlong ordeal."

References:

John Fairfax, 1st person to row alone across Atlantic Ocean, dies at 74 - NYTimes, 2012.