PROFILE

Always Moving. Even When You Stop.

LESSONS LIVED AND LEARNED IN THE MAKING OF ROW OF LIFE

WORDS SORAYA SIMI

PHOTOGRAPHY NAME HERE

“Angela drowned halfway between LA and Hawaii. In a sport where only eight recorded fatalities exist, this one sticks out.”

It’s refreshing writing a piece for a rowing magazine as I don’t have to fill in as many blanks as I normally do. In other outlets, the average reader has often never heard of ocean rowing, but here I can safely assume that either you yourself are a rower, or, like me, unexpectedly (perhaps even involuntary) became an ancillary member of this institution.

Which means you’ve probably already heard of Angela Madsen.

Angela, a three-time Paralympian, fourteen-time Guinness World Record holder, and Marine Corps veteran rowed the Atlantic twice, the Indian once, and circumnavigated Great Britain. She was rescued ten days into her first solo attempt across the Pacific in 2013, but in 2014, successfully crossed with ocean rower Tara Remington. In 2020, Angela once more attempted to be the oldest woman and only paraplegic in the world to row solo and unassisted across the Pacific Ocean. Tragically, sixty days in, Angela drowned halfway between Los Angeles and Hawaii. In a sport where only eight recorded fatalities exist, this one sticks out. But let’s back up a bit.

The first question everyone asks me, the filmmaker following this story, is how Angela and I first met.

Angela contacted me via Facebook after she watched a sailing documentary I produced and directed which was touring sailing clubs in California. While in film school, I took a leave of absence to accomplish a lifelong dream of living on a sailboat in the Caribbean. The dreamy picture in my mind quickly evaporated as chronic sea-sickness, physical exhaustion, and extreme sleep deprivation took over. Myself and twenty college-aged shipmates were sailing a tall ship, the 134’ SSV Corwith Cramer, with a program called Sea Education Association. Academically, it was rigorous and keeping up with the mental sweat in addition to the awkwardness of learning to be a “real” sailor (that is to say – without the facilitation of contemporary gadgets and gizmos like GPS, for example), was profoundly intense. In typical fashion, I added another variable to the equation: document the entire trip and make a film about the experience, which became a 25 minute film called Where the Water Takes Us.