Four Days From the Finish, Something Broke
By the time Marc was four days from finishing his 2024/25 crossing, he'd already spent 39 days at sea. Rowing roughly 18 hours a day. Sleeping in 40-minute bursts. His body was worn down, his skin salt-damaged, and the finish line in Antigua was finally, genuinely close.
That's when the rudder started acting up.
"I felt like I didn't have proper control, like something had taken a bite out of my rudder."
For a solo rower, unsupported and alone in open ocean, a compromised rudder isn't a minor inconvenience — it's the difference between finishing on his own terms or losing the race, or worse, losing control of the boat entirely in a swell.
What he actually did about it
There was no calling anyone. No towline, no repair crew, no spare part being couriered out. Marc's options were: fix it himself, in the water, or keep going with a boat he couldn't fully trust.
He chose to fix it. He deployed a para-anchor to stabilise Dan-Dan in the swell, dove underneath the hull, and physically dismantled the rudder himself — in heavy seas, four days from the finish, with the clock still running.
Then he drilled it, epoxied it, and put it back together.
"It was insane. And I knew I was losing time with the other boats on my tail."
Why this story matters
It would have been easy for this to end in a much less clean way — a capsize, an injury, a DNF. Instead, it's a genuine highlight of the whole crossing, and it says something important about who Marc is as a solo athlete: someone who prepares obsessively (right down to grinding every sharp edge off his own boat before he ever leaves shore) specifically so that when something does go wrong at sea, he already knows how to fix it.
He still finished first among solo rowers. The rudder held for the last four days, all the way into Antigua.
Why it matters for December 2027
This is the same boat, the same rower, and the same open-ocean unpredictability. Things will break again — that's just what happens over 4,980km of saltwater. The difference is Marc has already proven, once, that he can solve that problem himself, mid-crossing, with nothing but a toolkit and a plan.
