Leven Sinclair Brown

The Sunday Times - Scotland

All oars and graces

May 29, 2005

There’s a hint of the harmless toff about Leven Brown, but there’s nothing harmless about his plan to row across the Atlantic, writes Adrian Turpin

The terrors of rowing the Atlantic hardly bear thinking about. After John Ridgway and his Scottish companion Chay Blyth rowed from Newfoundland to Ireland in 1966, Ridgway recalled in his memoirs: “During the first week of the voyage we were in considerable pain, for the boat was so full of food, water and equipment that our movement was greatly restricted.”
The seasickness of the first 24 hours was only the start. Two weeks in and the paratroopers were hit by an unseasonal hurricane. “The sea,” wrote Ridgway, “became a giant switchback with moving hills and valleys, all covered with foam which looks rather like icing on a cake.” Frantic bailing of water saved the day. Ridgway observed that should the water ever reach the gunwales, every bucketful would flood in again because the water level inside and outside the boat would be the same. What he failed to explain was that such an eventuality would have meant the end of his trip and his life.

You might expect such sang-froid from a member of the parachute regiment who later served in the SAS. Those are not, after all, jobs that can be done without encountering risk. But it seems stranger coming from Leven Sinclair Brown. As an Edinburgh stockbroker, the greatest risks Brown has taken in his 32 years are with other people’s money. Yet, on August 14, he will take up his oars in Cadiz and attempt to row single-handedly to Port of Spain in Trinidad, following the same route taken by his distant relative Christopher Columbus in 1492.

This is a journey of almost 5,000 miles, considerably longer than Blyth and Ridgway’s trip. If Brown completes it, he will break the record for the longest single-handed Atlantic transit, yet the most arduous thing he has done previously is taking part in the Caledonian challenge. And although a 54-mile walk through the Highlands within 24 hours would tax many people, compared with rowing 18 hours a day for three months through fog, storm and scorching sun, it seems exactly what it is: a walk in the countryside.

Brown, who has spent the day making alterations to his boat, the Atlantic Wholff, looks fit and boyish, his dark fringe bordering on the floppy. But he also looks — it’s hard to say this politely — just a tiny bit chubby. This is not really a problem. (Even eating the 7,000 calories a day he is taking on board, he will lose an estimated 3st during the trip.) Still, you get the feeling that the gruelling training, supervised by Charlie Pelling, is not his natural forte. The diary entries on his website last autumn are marked by evenings where he has been too busy partying to have much sleep. He has even had a cocktail invented for the challenge, the Columbus Run. His onboard luxuries are some cans of Guinness and a bottle of Ardbeg.

As adventurers go, he is firmly in the cavalier rather than the puritan camp. And, if not exactly cavalier about the challenges he faces, he is certainly undaunted. What is the scariest thing about his trip? He hesitates for a moment, as if struggling to locate any area of fear, before replying in his soft east coast accent: “Freak waves, maybe. There is just no defence against a 60, 80 or 100ft wall of water. If you come across that you’ve just got to pray. Even if you survive, you’ve then got to assess the situation and work out how injured you are.

“You have to respect the dangers, but it’s not very constructive to be petrified. What you have to do is write down and keep going over a drill for every emergency, from the smallest item of equipment breaking to the whole boat breaking in half. It’s amazing how quickly your mind turns it into a routine.”

As for the trip itself, it is, if you believe Brown, little more than a pleasure cruise. “I’ve always played around in small boats and I’ve often been surprised by how seaworthy they are,” he says. “I’ve been in a few rough situations and always made it back. It gives you confidence.”

As with many adventurers, Brown has a dash of the gentleman amateur about him. In his journal, he comes over as impeccably pukka, marching against the hunt ban and in defence of the Scottish regiments. The diary is full of him meeting corking girls who make — to borrow his own phrase — steam come out of his ears. In spite, or perhaps because, of this, he is single. In between the training, he portrays himself umming and aahing his way through a succession of Edinburgh dinner parties, relentlessly jolly, like a nautical version of Boris Johnson. This self-portrait as a guileless toff is topped off by his claim that he is related to Columbus through his great grandmother. Beneath this veneer of bonhomie, however, there seems to be another character waiting to get out. “I am known as a frustrated Ray Mears,” he says, “always heading off into the forest and building myself shelters. I’ve survived in the Highlands for three weeks, living off the land, eating thistle roots and generally annoying the wildlife.”

Ridgway — not exactly a softy — was his biggest inspiration, after Brown met him aged 15 on an outdoor adventure course at Ardmore. “I remember John was a very tough cookie,” he says. “He had these steely eyes that fixed you. I don’t remember him saying very much. If you did something wrong you just knew.” Far from being deterred by this, Brown decided that one day he would row the Atlantic too. To help finance the trip, which will raise money for Sport Relief, the Sportsman’s Charity and Edinburgh’s One City Trust, he has sold his house on Edinburgh’s Easter Road and his battered old Saab. The boat, which was used in a previous Atlantic crossing, has been brought up from Ipswich.

His father, Lorne, an experienced sailor, has been helping his son to familiarise himself with the boat on Loch Etive near Oban. An overnight trial on the North Sea has given him a small taste of the dangers. “We had an electrical fault so there were no lights and we found ourselves in a shipping lane,” says Brown. “We could see a ship coming straight at us but we just got out of the way.” With a little help from Lorne, he covered 32 miles in the dark. The hardest part was learning to row when he couldn’t see the end of his oar. “Dad was very helpful. He just said, ‘You’d better get used to it, laddie’.”

In some ways, Brown says, he has it easy. “The people you have to really admire are guys like Ridgway and Blyth, who did it with very little technology.” The pair navigated with an old-fashioned sextant, fiendishly difficult on a cramped rowing boat. Brown, in contrast, will have three satellite tracking systems.

Brown has not read Ridgway’s memoir: he is dyslexic and says it takes him a painfully long time to get through books. If he had, however, he would know that his months at sea are likely to be punctuated by alarms of one sort or another — the threat of whales, the loss of an oar, the threat of shipwreck. Brown has prepared himself for all of these eventualities. Rower’s claw (an agonising shortening of the tendons in the hand) and butt rot, caused by the effects of saltwater on chafed skin, are expected. The hardest bit, he thinks, will be escaping the Spanish landmass with his 70st fully laden boat. An automatic alarm will warn him of approaching oil tankers, giving him sufficient time to row for his life, and he knows that the best way to get rid of a whale is to sing to it.

Information on Brown’s trip, including sponsorship, can be found at www.columbusrun.com