Two years ago, Colorado river guide Kelsey Pfendler joined three teammates in an attempt to set the women’s record in the World’s Toughest Row, a grueling 2,800-mile, human-powered race from California to the Hawaiian island of Kauai.
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The team, dubbed Hericane Rowing, missed the record of 34 days by nearly a week.
But that contest set the stage for a remarkable achievement this month by Pfendler. The Buena Vista resident recorded the fastest time ever for a solo rower — male or female — traversing the mid-Pacific from Monterey, California, to Honolulu, Hawaii.
Her journey across the ocean, unassisted by engine or sail, started on May 21 and concluded late on July 3. It was just day after day of backbreaking shifts on the oars, rowing in daylight and dark, negotiating big waves or praying for wind while bobbing on defiantly still waters.
According to Ocean Rowing Society International, Pfendler completed the 2,300-plus mile journey in 43 days, 18 hours and 12 minutes — half the time it took the next-fastest solo woman to complete the route six years ago. Her time was nine days faster than the men’s world record.
Pfendler is also the youngest person to make the crossing. She turned 32 toward the end of the trip, receiving a serenade from a U.S. Coast Guard ship just days shy of docking in Hawaii.
Pfendler, on her Instagram page, posted the total time of the voyage at 43 days, 17 hours, 55 minutes and 59 seconds. It’s not clear why there is a discrepancy in the listed times.
Regardless: “It’s impressive,” said Fiann Paul, the president of Ocean Rowing Society International. “Ocean rowing exposes the very end of your limits. That is how character is built.”
Pfendler didn’t respond to requests for an interview but had plenty to say about her oceanic efforts in a day-by-day video blog she posted to Instagram. She prefaced each installment with the hope that she’d become “the first American woman to row solo from California to Hawaii.”
With about a week to go to reach Ala Wai Harbor in Honolulu, Pfendler seemed to recognize the momentousness of her quest — while at the same time wishing it wouldn’t end. On Day 37, she told her online audience that she was already “kind of grieving the loss of this row.”
“This is all going to be over soon, and there’s a part of me that feels so sad that that’s going to happen,” she said. “This is a part of me I don’t really get to hang out with unless I’m really doing stuff like this and pushing myself far outside my comfort zone.”
A boat called Lily
By most standards, Pfendler already operates outside the comfort zones of most people.
When a Denver Post reporter spent a couple days with her in Buena Vista in 2023, she was guiding raft trips on the Arkansas River. She also has supplemented her income with excursions on the Colorado River, taking clients through the majestic rock formations of the Grand Canyon.
Pfendler has worked ski patrol, emergency response and avalanche control at Copper Mountain. She joined the ambulance crew in Chaffee County, and she continues to work toward earning a nursing degree. Her mode of transport doubles as a home — a 1984 VW Vanagon outfitted with a diesel heater, a propane stove and a solar-powered fridge.
But water, especially the ocean, has a special calling for the upstate New York native.
“Most of my life has been spent finding new ways to be on a boat in the middle of nowhere,” Pfendler writes on her website.
For her solo row this year, she relied on a 2019 Rannoch R25 named Lily. At 21 feet long and 5 ½ feet wide, the boat weighs about 730 pounds before anything goes on board.
Duncan Roy, a professional ocean rowing coach from England who circumnavigated Lily around Great Britain in 2020, said he was amazed by what Pfendler was able to do with his former boat.
“Kelsey’s crossing of 43 days — and the world records she broke in the process — is a clear display of her successful preparation, skill, determination, grit, seamanship and execution,” said Roy, who has rowed across the mid-Pacific and twice across the Atlantic Ocean.
Ocean rowing, he said, is widely regarded as one of the world’s most arduous challenges.
“It is a holistic monster of an expedition, demanding mastery over an overwhelming array of variables, from sleep deprivation and physical fatigue to ever-changing ocean conditions and a relentless daily routine,” Roy said.
In other words, “you cannot simply stop.”
“The moment you push off from the shore, you are entirely committed,” Roy said.
First trouble for Pfendler arrived on Day 5, when she had to hit the oars at 3 a.m. because the wind blew up and started tossing Lily around.
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With a helmet affixed to her head in the event of a capsizing, Pfendler downed an energy drink, cranked up some electronic dance music and “rowed through it.”
She had gotten seven hours of sleep in the five days since leaving the California coast.
“It’s been a hard day,” she said in her video blog. “I haven’t figured out how you sleep and do this.”
But Pfendler buckled down and pushed forward. She ate the food she had stashed in Lily’s hatches, using her Jetboil stove to heat up water for instant mashed potatoes, ramen and even chana masala.
“Last but not least, I have this lemon pie treat,” she said on Day 13, when she had 500 miles already under her belt.
Pfendler’s solar-powered desalination machine, which transforms salty ocean water into potable water via reverse osmosis, is “100% a lifeline for me out here,” she said. (Her despondent Instagram dispatch from May 27, when she lost a week’s worth of fresh water because of a loose cap on a bladder, made that clear.)
On Day 25, at the halfway mark of the journey in terms of distance, Pfendler treated herself to canned coffee.
“To celebrate, I have brought myself a latte,” she said wryly.
The next day was laundry day, with a plastic orange Home Depot bucket serving as washing machine. Five days later, Pfendler demonstrated how she scraped barnacles off the bottom of her boat without ever getting off the vessel. (She used a long string connected to two handles that she maneuvered along the hull from the boat’s deck.)
One of her teammates from the 2024 Hericane Rowing trip, Sierra Myers, said she wasn’t surprised by Pfendler’s desire to hit the waves again after their grueling journey.
“During our first crossing, she expressed her want and need to be back out in the ocean,” Myers said. “She didn’t know what that looked like, but she had a vision she worked extremely hard to make reality. If there was anyone I had to say ‘They can do it,’ it’s her.”
‘Your own hard thing’
Paul, with Ocean Rowing Society International, said comparing modern records with past generations of rowers — when boat, weather and communications technology was nothing like what is available today — can cast an undeserved shadow on the sailors of a previous era.
But that takes nothing away from what Pfendler was able to do, Paul said.
She is part of an elite class of just over 2,000 ocean rowers worldwide, he said. Men outnumber women in the sport 4-to-1, giving Pfendler a unique megaphone for the thousands of women and girls who followed her journey online.
“Every ocean row begins with a destination, human power and an identity built around intention,” Paul said. “The ocean gradually deconstructs all three until the journey becomes one of humanity’s oldest archetypal stories: the dialogue between character and faith, between what we can control and what we can’t.”
Pfendler becoming the first solo American woman to have completed the mid-Pacific passage — as well as the fastest and youngest solo rower to do so — makes her “a great ambassador for the sport,” said Roy, the rowing coach.
“Perhaps what is just as impressive as the records she’s broken is the way she’s performed at sea while sharing her story — and bringing awareness to her campaign, challenge and charities,” he said. “It’s clear to see she thrived out there and not simply just survived it.”
Pfendler’s mid-Pacific journey raised money for the Whale Foundation, which provides mental health services, health insurance and counseling to the Grand Canyon river guiding community.
Pfendler has been off the boat for nearly two weeks now, and her first few days back on shore were tough. Acclimating to people who wanted to congratulate her on her feat led her to briefly take refuge in a supply room — a sort of necessary harkening back to being alone on the high seas.
“I needed a moment,” she said in a video from Hawaii last week. “I’m still working through all the thoughts and feelings.”
As for what would come next, Pfendler was noncommittal, beyond saying that she would “always chase hard, scary things.” And then, looking into the camera, she gave one parting piece of advice and inspiration to her nearly 800,000 followers on Instagram.
“Go look for your own hard thing.”
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