Original subtitles

Mom, I'm going to cross the Atlantic with a rowing boat.

I laughed.

I thought it was a joke.

He said to us, I've met someone who's interested in rowing across the Atlantic.

I'd like to do it.

Literally, out of the sky, he gets a phone call from Omar Samra,

Who tells him, hey, how about we row an ocean together?

Two guys who really have no idea what rowing is about,

going across the Atlantic together.

The idea seemed so crazy to me

that I did not take it seriously to begin with.

Because I thought he would, the idea would fade away.

But it didn't.

We were at a conflict between

potential drama occurring and trying to be supportive

for the cause that he was standing for.

In the back of my head I just like

kind of wrote him off straight away.

I was like, there's no way this is actually going to ever happen.

And then I started kind of thinking about the logistics of it all.

You don't row.

The seas are relentless

and the open water is relentless.

It doesn't forgive, it doesn't let people pass easy.

It's mother nature.

He's climbed the highest mountain in the world.

He's done seven summits.

He's went to both poles.

These are very big achievements and very big adventures.

I think this looked like a very reasonable next challenge to go.

There are actually more people that have

gone to space than have rowed across an ocean.

I'm Omar Noor.

I'm the first ever Egyptian professional triathlete.

My name is Omar Samra, also Egyptian.

I am the first Egyptian to climb Mount Everest.

We were obviously rowing the Atlantic because

it was a challenge that we wanted

to raise awareness about the fight of refugees crossing dangerous seas.

We knew that crossing an Atlantic could in some ways be similar to that.

What we didn't know is how close

our stories would become during those eight days at sea.

My story begins 29 ,000 feet up in the air.

I was on a plane heading to the United States.

And I remember looking to my right and just seeing this vast ocean below me.

There was nobody that I knew at the time

that I would want to do this with or

would take the time or have the ability to do something like that.

I didn't know much about his character but he said something to me, he said,

look Omar, I have an idea and I want to come discuss it with you.

I said, alright, come on by.

He came, within two hours he said to me,

look, we're going to do this, I want to do this thing,

I want to row across the Atlantic.

So we decided to do it.

We decided that we were going to

row unsupported for 3 ,000 nautical miles across the Atlantic Ocean.

Omar, enough!

I'm getting old and I just can't

have all this heart palpitations and this experience anymore.

He said, what do you think?

I said, why?

I mean, your domain is the mountains.

Why are you crossing the Atlantic?

Very quickly we realized that we were completely unprepared for this.

We had, you know, no experience.

There was so much to learn over, you know, a number of months.

If you think about it, it's probably not the most logical thing to have

people that have never been in the ocean.

They don't know anything about navigation.

They don't know anything about boating.

They don't know anything.

There's so many things wrong in that picture.

I remember they went over to the UK to do a row, a practice row.

and they had to get rescued because of bad conditions.

So I was thinking, oh,

they're not as well prepared as they think they may be, or as good as they

think they may be.

And then when they went to Lagomera to do another practice

row, I believe they were gonna row around the whole island, and they went out and

they had to turn around and come back because of bad conditions.

I was like, oh my gosh,

They can't even get around La Gomera.

How are they going to cross the Atlantic?

It's been many years in the making,

and for over the past year we've been preparing

and training ourselves for what is going to be

the greatest adventure of our lives.

I did a lot of my training in the Nile,

which is a completely different animal.

Omar came one time over to Cairo,

and that was the first time he held oars.

He'd been training on a machine in the gym.

We're very committed, we're very focused.

I would say that we put in more training time than most teams.

And over a number of months, we accomplished a lot.

Omar and I have very different personalities.

Next time we see each other, we'll be back here.

Where are we going?

Broadway, just basically.

A lot of Broadway.

He's much more of an extrovert, I'm more introverted.

Omar and

I

had amazing conversations where

we sat down and played the what -if game and

And I think that's really important when preparing for something like this.

What happens if you get injured?

What happens if I'm weak?

What happens if I have this issue or that issue?

What do we do?

Well, well, well, hello everybody.

It's been a really long journey.

Really long journey.

I didn't realize how far the Canaries are and we're finally here.

My name's Nikki Holter.

I'm the event coordinator for the Talisker Whiskey Atlantic Challenge.

We have a race village.

All the rowers are asked to arrive 12 days before race start.

And in that 12 days, there's a lot of checks, a lot of equipment checks,

a lot of safety checks,

a lot of extra training, crisis operations, meetings.

The rowers getting to know us,

so they know that they can trust us whilst they're on the ocean.

Once we get the ziplock bags we'll take care of the food and then I don't know

when they're gonna figure out your incident thing and we can pack that.

They're supposed to do it today.

You pack that extra extra hatch.

Yeah perfect.

We're actually pretty close.

We are.

We spend hours every day working on our

boats, getting everything right, you know putting everything together, making sure

that we knew how everything worked, how if anything broke down,

we knew how to fix it.

And the sense of excitement and

nerves prior to leaving was intense and just kept escalating

until it reached that crescendo just before we left.

See, if you're out there, if you look just beyond the harbour, you can see the white

tips on the waves.

Yeah, I mean,

that's usually not a good sign when the waves are breaking like that at mid -sea.

Some say it's actually a good naivety to not know what's coming.

Often those that are sailors already that have done a transatlantic passage

feel that it's too much to take on.

All I can say about this experience is it will find your weakness.

If you are not prepared, if you don't have knowledge,

If you have a physical, emotional issue,

anything that you think it's not a big deal, it won't matter.

It will itch and itch and itch until it becomes raw.

And you will be forced to deal with it head on.

There isn't anything else that's like this.

There's nothing that tests you for

this amount of time continuously in an environment that's so unpredictable.

I am thrilled and pleased to announce that we

have a race start at 11 o 'clock for the

Talisker Whiskey Atlantic 2017.

I still remember that moment when we

were still on the pontoon and they said something like

Thanks everyone for, it's going to be a great journey,

we're going to keep you posted.

Everybody got on the boat and this was

it because 10 minutes before they had told everybody to clear the pontoon.

I've never been part of a race where it takes two hours for me to actually start.

My races are ferocious.

You come out all out.

Your heart is in your throat.

I think I went and hugged my brother like six times and my girlfriend five times.

I was just so easy about it all.

On one side, but on the other side, it just built, right?

And you could feel that pressure built.

Wrapping your head around the magnitude of it was very difficult.

Team O2, we got so much love coming in via Facebook Live.

Yeah?

Yeah, a lot of love.

We're gonna send a lot of love back.

And I remember a camera coming at me and saying,

your mom is watching.

And at that point, I was like, come back here.

I need to talk to my mom.

Mom is watching.

How is she?

Mom is watching.

Hi, Batata.

Yes, we're about to go.

We're about to go.

So, don't worry about a thing, we got this under control.

Omar here knows what he's doing.

I think I know what I'm doing, we're good to go.

And even Omar gave a couple words like, don't worry, I'll take care of him.

I'll take care of him, and tell my mom if you have any problems.

And I remember that was a very emotional time.

I didn't romanticize it too much.

Although, no matter how much you think you understand,

nothing will compare to the real thing.

You must go through it in order to truly understand.

Given the Omar's background of a professional triathlete,

an extreme adventurer,

they were the same as anybody else going in.

They were quite aware of the fact they had no maritime experience,

and they were ready to learn.

They knew that this wasn't their background, and this wasn't their speciality,

and they were just part of the rest of the fleet.

They started where everybody else did.

We get the signal to set sail, to leave the port, and as we're going round the bend,

and for the first time stare into the, you know, the openness of the sea, there's

people on the sides waiting.

The land starts to fade, the experience just

becomes inward, it becomes just very clear that this is now just about us.

My whole world has now become this seven meter

by two meter boat and it will be for the

next, you know, few weeks.

Some people say that it's hard work to row an ocean.

I think it's really relaxing.

When you have Spider -Man as your teammate.

It's awesome.

As soon as we went out there, Omar started to feel ill.

The first 24 hours were maybe the worst 24 hours of my life.

I puked about 8 times.

Violently, violently seasick.

We were hoping it wouldn't happen,

both because it's a very uncomfortable situation for Omar,

but also, as a team,

we would like to progress and we're setting out to do something amazing

and I want to break records.

Brutal again.

Jesus.

Trying to chew this.

It's our first storm.

Close quarters, isn't it?

Omar is rocking it over here,

but that noise is going to get old for sure.

After the first 24 hours, I became severely hydrated, very malnourished,

feeling queasy all the time, can't eat anything.

In fact, we didn't eat a solid meal for eight days,

and then very quickly, just things started to compound.

It just kept getting worse.

The violent part of my seasickness kind of started to subside a little bit.

I was very, very depleted because of all the vomiting.

Omar had to pick up a couple of shifts.

I think my longest shift was seven hours on the oars non -stop.

I prepared my body for that and I prepared my mind for that.

I knew that I, yeah, it's in the tank and I know how to do something like that.

Needless to say that the first few days were absolutely exhausting for me

because of these long shifts.

I was a bit frustrated.

I was frustrated the fact that I was working so hard

but we were also falling behind other two -man boats.

Our strategy was to go further south than everybody else

to capture some weather.

Around the fourth day, I already had a nickname for the ocean.

The ocean's name was Tito.

It was an angry ocean sometimes.

We had our boat named Jen,

so when I went out there, I had a little conversation with everybody.

All right, Tito.

All right, Jen.

Let's all play nice.

Give me something good.

Give me some good progress on this one.

Tito, try not to make me too wet.

And then finally the conditions get better.

Waves get bigger.

Wind gets stronger.

And now we're moving, finally.

The monotony and the realization of, you know, this is it.

This is our lives now for the next few weeks started to settle in.

And there is, you know, there's no respite.

There is no new day.

Every, you know, today merges into tomorrow, to the day after.

And if you're not sitting there and, you know, using your marker

and putting these little sticks to count the number of days,

you know, you have no idea what day it is.

But the part that you cannot prepare for is the beautiful ocean.

When it soaks you, it soaks you all the time.

I have to say that in the midst of all this frustration,

there were some pretty epic moments.

We would have the most amazing sunrises and sunsets.

There's nothing to obstruct your view when you're in the ocean.

Every day you see the sunrise, every day you see the sunset and it's beautiful.

And after a while we just lost the sense of time and we were, you know,

we got into a mode where, you know, we're on a mission.

And at no point in time did I feel that we're not going to make this.

I knew that it was going to be difficult.

I knew that it was just going to be miserable.

But we were going to get this done.

We were going to get to the other side.

And we would talk about this for the rest of our life.

You know, how we spent those 30,

40 miserable days and endured all of that to get to the other side of the ocean.

This extraordinary thing that very, very few people do.

The most important thing that people need to work on,

to train for and to psychologically

prepare ready is to be real.

Is to have a plan A, B, C, D and E.

Is to manage their

expectations that really very often the first thing isn't going to go as planned.

It's going to take a couple of different angles

to work at any problem that's going to happen.

They are going to have to think outside the box.

They have to think in simplistic survival ways

to get themselves to the other side.

Being in the cabin was just like hell.

My sheet was wet, the towel was drenched.

Every little thing is just soaked.

You know, people talk about how people hate wet socks.

This was like, you know, living in a wet sock.

And no matter if the sun came up and you dried for a few minutes,

the wave would come and it would drench you to the bone.

You are constantly wet and you're sitting and you're grinding.

You're grinding nicely that wetness and that saltiness.

So when you do these really long sessions, the seven -hour sessions,

these got me into trouble very quickly with some of the issues in my behind

because you're literally, you're sitting for seven hours

and you're not taking care of your hygiene, you can't stop to do that.

The new normal is here, and your body, your mind, your brain,

everything is trying to

cling on to the old normal.

And the way down, all the way down, it's fighting you,

and it's an extremely painful experience.

So waking up, when that alarm wakes up, you're confused.

You don't know what's going on.

Am I in bed?

No, I'm not in bed.

What is this?

I'm on a boat.

Okay, is this training?

This must be training.

No, no, no.

It's the race and it all sinks in you have 20 minutes to get on the oars.

It's nighttime.

Your shoes are outside

They're wet.

You just finished sleeping on a wet sheet and a wet t -shirt for a pillow

everything hurts and

It's horrendous

The last thing you want to do is to

get out of that cabin and row the worst times were when I would wake up

I think I'm home

in bed and

And then after four or five seconds, I would actually realize where I am,

and that was

just the worst feeling in the world.

Omar really had to muster up all his strength and start to row.

And as he started to row, he started to feel better.

And they all say that the first 10 days are the hardest.

Eight days had passed, and we started not to feel better, but it wasn't getting any

worse.

And we knew that the worst was behind us.

As soon as we start to move, only hours after,

we realize that we're having another issue.

The batteries are not charging up fast enough.

It's a big issue because the batteries power a lot of key components,

one of which is desalination

of water.

It means not making enough water,

and we're supposed to make something like 15 to 20 liters

of water a day.

Within a few days, we went down to 3 liters a day.

So when you drink 3 liters a day and you're rowing 12 hours a day,

that's not much water

at all.

Another one is our autopilot.

So you can steer the boat with an autopilot, but you can also hand steer it.

Hand steering, you go like this.

Steering with an autopilot you go like that.

So December 22nd will be etched in all of our heads for many a year.

Because we had to cut down our electricity and try to let the batteries fill up,

we had very little water on the final day.

I was in a bad place that night.

I was taking the shift that was six to eight in the morning,

which is the last shift of the night time,

and it was a particularly cold shift.

I remember it was the only time that half an hour before my shift ended,

I had the very

strong thought of knocking the door behind me and telling Omar,

listen I'm going to jump

in with you because it's just really cold.

I was shivering.

So my alarm rings, I wake up, it's 7 .40 and I'm having a tough time mobilizing.

I'm sort

of sitting up and I'm like, you know, I don't want it.

Ten minutes before the shift, I knocked on the door saying to Omar,

ten minutes and has

That's to get an acknowledgment.

You don't want to be late.

And then I just remember taking a big wave.

I just felt the boat rise, rise, rise.

Surfing down that wave and then somehow being hit from the back.

And exactly at the apex of the wave, we just felt a smack.

The boat started to turn, but it started to turn beyond 90 degrees.

And once it started turning beyond 90 degrees,

I knew that we're going to capsize.

We've experienced several times when a big wave would come up,

and then a faster wave that's breaking,

comes from behind, and hits Jen right in the back.

Little did I know that we were essentially airborne,

and that the front of the boat nosedived.

When we hit that water, it was exactly as if I

I got

hit,

propelled back, into the ceiling, and I hold my hands, and I start to, you know,

Shuffle.

Sideways.

I'm shuffling.

I'm shuffling.

Now I'm on the side of the boat.

Now I'm on the ceiling of the boat.

All the cushions fall on my head.

Everything is beeping.

It's complete chaos.

We always knew that that was a possibility to capsize.

Everybody said that the R20 has never capsized,

that the R20 is built for these conditions, and so on.

But we ended up capsizing.

First thought is, no, no, no, no, no, not like this, not like this.

The first thought that I had after I popped out and I realized that, you know,

we'd capsized, we're in this storm,

is, you know, what's going on with Omar.

I'm upside down, two -thirds of my window is underwater,

and there's a sliver that's over water.

And I stick my head right up to it, and I want to see, is Omar okay?

Is he alive?

I'm worried.

I'm worried.

Did his harness break?

And I was so elated to just see him out there.

And I was screaming at the top of my lungs.

We have a lot of time.

We have so much time.

Relax.

You can't hear me.

Things out there is chaos.

It's seven, eight meter waves crashing.

Things are going all over the place.

Our belongings are floating away.

The oars are hitting the boat.

There is rope everywhere.

It is chaos.

The second thought was, what have you just done to your family?

An immense feeling of guilt.

Why?

And I had these thoughts very quickly through my head, you know, thinking like,

you know, what would I tell his family?

And then immediately thinking about, well, if Omar doesn't survive,

then my chances of

making this on my own is absolutely zero.

Finally, he looks at me and he's like, I'm okay, I'm okay.

And I noticed that he's just rocking on the boat, rocking on the boat.

And you can see the entire boat is trying to self right.

So at this moment, I'm still thinking the race is on.

The race is on.

This is not survival.

This is rectifying what went wrong and continuing on our path.

Because if we could self -ride the boat,

we would get back on there and we would be a bit shaken up,

but we would, you know, solve this and we would get back and continue the race.

I started to do the same thing on the inside.

And I'm basically walking and trying to muscle the boat and I'm talking to Jan.

I'm saying, come on, Jan.

Come on, you can do it.

Come on.

And there's a moment there where you can see the boat is at the tipping point.

It's there.

It's about to do it.

It just goes back.

It goes back.

This is when I hear water.

Water rushing.

This is a cabin that's supposed to be sealed, airtight.

Where's the water coming from?

Eventually, I make out one of the things that Omar is saying,

and he's saying,

Bent!

Bent!

Omar, they're bent!

Everything was just confusing,

and I remember thinking that, you know,

It's righty -tighty, lefty -loosey, but then thinking, well,

the boat is upside down, so maybe it's

righty -loosey, lefty -tighty, and poof,

the vent gets out in his hands.

As soon as that happens, water starts to flow in.

We're not talking about a trickle anymore.

We're talking about water hitting my chest.

I realized that there was a definite possibility of death.

When I saw that vent slowly flow down into the abyss,

that was a pretty alarming thing,

because that's the thing that keeps the integrity of the boat intact.

Omar is like, get out!

Get out!

Get out!

And I'm like, Omar, relax.

I have to get ready.

I have to get ready.

We have time.

Let the water go up.

Let the water go up.

I'm not going to fight the vacuum.

Let me get ready to survive.

Once that had happened, I knew that the race was over.

But we would still make it because we had the life raft.

Now I want you to understand something.

At this point,

I am still believing that we're going to

self -ride the boat and we're going to continue this competition.

We're going to need to do it from the life raft, but it's doable.

So now that there is no more race for us, the goal is to get into the life raft.

I need to find my harness.

Because the harness is what connects you to the boat.

When you're in waves this big, it doesn't matter how good of a swimmer you are.

If you get separated, this is almost a certain death.

So the harness is my lifeline.

One.

Two.

The harness has my beacon, my personal beacon.

And I know how my brother thinks.

And at that point, I wanted to make sure that we deployed three beacons.

My beacon, Omar's beacon, and the boat's beacon.

Because if the boat's beacon deployed with only one other beacon,

I know my brother.

I know what he's going to think.

I think he's going to say, one of them is gone.

I grabbed everything that I could,

but I couldn't find the things that really mattered.

Of course, because everything was happening on the water,

I didn't see him actually swim out.

But he comes out on the water.

He looks fine, but he's not tied to anything.

I look at him, and I'm like, you OK?

And we're finally talking.

We're able to talk to each other.

And I'm grasping that boat.

It's my lifeline.

And I see that the life raft

is just floating outside and it's not inflated.

We both started to fiddle with it, and then the next thing you know,

Omar yanks at the cord and it starts to inflate.

And the first feeling that I get is like, finally, this is going to work.

And this thing is meant to inflate in about 20 -25 seconds very, very powerfully.

But what it does is it just goes like,

and just stops, and it's inflated about 10 to 15 percent.

And so for the first few seconds, we just kind of wait for it.

Okay, something's going to happen.

We start yanking up the cord again.

Nothing's happened.

This life raft looks like a kiddie pool

filled with water in the middle of the Atlantic

with eight -meter waves and this gale -force storm.

It was probably the first time that I realized we could die here.

So I look at that thing, and I look at Omar, this is not going to add up.

Like, something is going to have to change.

And you know, this is something that I believe in life, in business,

in our situation, in any situation that is huge.

You may not see the final solution.

I sure did not see the final solution.

So the key is to continuously try to embed our situation.

A tiny little bit could save our lives.

As the strongest swimmer of the two of us,

he was ferrying between the raft and the boat,

pulling things that we thought were essential

for our survival.

The first thing he pulled out was the life jacket,

two of them, which we put on and did not inflate,

but was there just in case we needed it.

We're getting pretty cold.

We're starting to shiver a little bit.

It's a very stressful situation,

and I realized pretty quickly that our entire bodies

are basically underwater,

and we're not gonna last very long, right?

The water temperature is about 18 degrees Celsius.

Yeah, you can hang out in that kind of water for an hour or two

and not be too bothered, but a day?

Twelve hours?

No, I think you're probably going to die.

Each rower has to have a personal locator beacon,

shortened to PLB,

that is attached to their life jackets or their harnesses,

depending on where they prefer to have it.

And each vessel must have an EPUB,

which is the same as the PLB but for the vessel.

We activated the EPIRB and we could see that it was blinking.

But I personally had no confidence whether it was working or not.

I take Omar's PLB that's on his harness.

I take that out.

I deploy that.

I pull it out.

I deploy everything I can possibly deploy.

One of the things that I had picked up from the rear hatch was our grab bag.

And the grab bag is a bag that you're supposed to grab in case of an emergency.

It should have some water, it has some basic survival tools.

And one of the things it has is a spare PLB.

So when I couldn't find my harness with my personal beacon,

I said to myself, it's okay, when you get the grab bag, you deploy that one.

So I grabbed the grab bag, found the PLB, boom, deploy it.

And I said, Omar, this is our lifeline.

If this thing floats away,

rescue operations will be looking for this, not us.

You don't really have an idea whether it worked or not.

I later found out it didn't.

We weren't doing very much, so we started asking,

you know, what can we do?

Well, let's look at what we have.

And then we realized that there is a bag

that is attached to the raft.

It literally is the best bag in the world

because that bag has a plethora of items.

And we just start to go through it,

and boom!

We find a pump.

Omar puts the end of the pump into the valve,

but it doesn't fit.

Why would they give us a pump that doesn't fit?

Boom!

We're frantically looking in this bag,

and then we find this little piece of plastic.

Now, I'm pumping while floating on my back

and trying to keep the pump out of the water,

because you don't want to, obviously,

to be sucking water in and pumping it with water.

Every once in a while, a big wave hits,

and water kicks in.

I know Omar does very well with positive reinforcements,

So I'm trying to say, like, well, you know, it's working.

I can see it was what it actually was.

The raft was inflating a little bit.

And then we get hit by a wave.

Everything kind of fumbles.

And that little connector piece is gone.

Without the raft, there's absolutely

zero chance of survival.

And without that little plastic piece, you have no chance.

Where is the adapter?

The complete and utter chaos at that point.

And we're just rushing through water.

And everything is splashing.

As I'm saying this, we see this little plastic piece just, like, floating.

And I just, boom, put it back on.

We pump in these three chambers.

So it takes a while.

It takes a while to pump these things.

But now, finally, the chambers are up.

We go in.

Things are looking on the up and up.

We're comfortable.

Well, comfortable.

We're more comfortable than we were in the water.

And this kind of underscores the entire rescue.

It was just this rollercoaster of emotion the whole time.

Boom! Omar gets, like, a full body cramp.

For the next few minutes, you know, forget about me, I'm going to be useless.

So he has to lay down and so I pick up the drug and I tell him,

look, I'm going to keep on talking.

I'm going to keep on talking to you.

Because Omar was like, look, unless I close my eyes, I'm not recovering.

That day was one of the examples of how 12 hours can be the longest and the shortest

12 hours of your life.

They were the longest, most frightening, unsure hours.

I have a call.

Hi, this is Nicky from Atlantic Campaigns.

We have a situation with Team O2 we need to discuss with you.

Do you have time?

So she literally, very formally says,

Dia, I need to tell you there's been a situation with Team O2.

Two out of the three emergency beacons have been set off.

We have also not been able to track them on our GPS tracker.

we've called their primary and secondary SAT phones and they cannot be reached.

I opened my laptop

to see the latest update

and I found that all the boats

have changed their numbers except for O2.

So every four hours there is a

transmission from a tracking beacon that's on board each vessel.

It's a satellite tracker.

The O400 beacon transmission didn't happen.

The 0800 one then didn't transmit either.

So the morning of December 22nd, Mohammed came in and told me that

Omer's locator beacon hadn't gone off.

My first thought was that it's a power problem.

They've been having power problems.

It's nothing.

You know, there's lots of electrical equipment on the boats

and they're known to not function properly, so I wasn't very worried.

It was at this point that the support yachts were alerted.

They were at the back of the fleet but just to start making their way towards

that area where they were.

And then it was 0930 when we got the call from the

Coast Guard to say that one of the emergency beacons on the vessel had been

set off.

I started to be

extremely worried and very anxious and I didn't

I didn't know what to do.

I just found myself calling his name loud.

Omar, where are you?

Till this very day, it hurts remembering the feeling.

Omar Nour's mom was really, really very worried, even more than me.

But we were supporting each other

and just comforting each other that we, inshallah,

Now we are sure that we are going to

have a rescue operation to bring them safe to us.

If my nephew, who I know is fearless and determined and rises to any challenge,

if he's in the

middle of the ocean and he's sending off a distress signal, then I know something is

the matter.

And this is when I got emotional

and was crying and worried about him the most.

When the personal locator beacon went off, there was...

OK, this is serious.

I know that neither of those men on board that boat

would have pulled it because they were scared.

I knew they had the metal to do it.

There was a problem on board.

Why are they not being able to track him?

That's not the power issue, because that has its own battery powered.

The tracking is not on the central power of the boat,

so that shouldn't happen.

Why were only two out of the emergency three beacons set off?

There are three of them.

One is on the boat, one is on Amr Samra, one is on Amr Noor.

Why two?

I don't know what happened to me.

I just wanted to believe it is a power issue and everything is okay.

and I blocked.

I was in a total state of total denial.

No matter what I hear, no,

it's a power issue.

And this kept me alive that day.

Otherwise, I don't know

what happened to me.

I was praying.

I was praying God for their safety.

I couldn't

help anything because I'm very far.

I had a strong belief that they are two, two,

Omer and Omer 2 will help each other to get it through.

They are one body and they are really a big support to each other.

And I asked Nikki,

do you know which

two emergency beacons were set off?

Because that will help me with my scenarios.

And she said the boat and a personal one.

And in that situation,

I felt there is a possibility

that we lost one of our boys.

As all of this was going through our head,

the first thing that changed was at about

4 .15 in the afternoon when I heard the sound of a plane.

I remember telling Omar, I think I hear a plane.

It sounded like a strange thing to say.

and then unzipping the raft, looking up,

and we actually saw a fixed -wing plane

doing sort of circles around us.

Quite big circles, but it was there.

Grab a flare, open the flare,

and I tell Omar, come out, come out!

I want the plane to see there's two of us waving at them.

And they didn't show any sign

that it, whether it had seen us or hadn't seen us,

and what was going through my mind was,

You know,

is it still rotating above us because it's

seen us and it's trying to signal to a nearby vessel,

or it's still trying to look for us?

After a while, we were fairly confident that it was circling, it's going to be fine.

We got back inside, we hugged each other, we're like, it's done, we're saved,

it's over.

Half hour, 45 minutes, an hour, we start to talk about, well,

what if they didn't see us?

What's the plan here?

How does a plane even rescue people in a life raft?

As we're thinking these thoughts, the plane disappears.

There's a moment of sheer panic.

It goes from, oh, well maybe they didn't see us, to two options.

Either the plane has found someone coming to our aid

and that's why it decided to kind of leave,

or most likely it's run out of fuel and it's going back to refuel

and it's going to be hours before it comes back

and who knows if it will find us again.

I think it was about two o 'clock in the afternoon

We got confirmation that the search -and

-rescue plane had gone over the last known position of the beacons and

Had seen the vessel and the vessel was

upturned and they had sent a photo back

and we could see that the life raft was attached

However, at this point there was no confirmation of sight of either of them

It's been many years in the making I

think it's really relaxing for what is

going to be the greatest adventure of our lives

Can't see a plane

But I see the most beautiful sight in my life.

A 200 -meter glorious ship.

It's about 50 meters high.

It is humongous, heading straight at us.

I received a telephone call from MRC Las Palmas.

They say there is a ship, she needs assistance.

And I asked them, what kind of assistance?

They told me, we don't know, can you go this position?

I checked the position, it was 50 miles from our ship,

and it is 500 miles from Las Palmas.

The ship starts to get closer.

You can read the writing on the side of the ship,

it says Tefaloni.

From the moment I got the call,

I spent four hours to reach this position,

but I cannot see the boat,

because really we have very rough sea.

A ship of that size will launch a rib for a lifeboat,

a smaller vessel that will come to your aid.

And so we were sitting there, all smiles, waiting for this vessel to come closer.

And it's getting closer and closer, and there's no lifeboat.

Why are they deploying the rescue vessel?

Why isn't the vessel coming?

I tried to rescue him by rescue boat, but I found after we lowered,

I found it is dangerous for our crew for this.

But I proceed slowly,

slowly under the wind until we reach and we saw him and we send some rope.

You didn't think that one through.

How does a 200m ship

catch a 2x2m life raft in extremely

high seas with 10m waves without killing them, or at least seriously.

And one of the hardest

things when you're doing a rescue operation is when you can't talk.

So you don't know

what's going on, I'm not sure they know what they're doing.

And they start to throw

Four ropes at us.

I thought it was a joke.

We send the rope when we are half a mile.

We make small drifting and we stop engine.

And when we are ready, I stop engine,

and they are already very close to us,

about five meters, I send the rope.

The wave's very strong,

and he not listen to our instruction.

If this is plan A, what does plan B look like?

The guy is throwing the rope, the wind is so strong, it's 45 knots,

that's about 80 -85 kilometers an hour.

He's throwing the rope, the rope is coming back at him again.

He's trying to throw it down, it's not even reaching the surface of the water.

I felt confident, I said to myself, you know what, the sun is still out,

we still have two hours, we can make it.

No problem, we can make it, sure.

And then they got very, very close to us and then they missed us.

So every time they miss us with a ship of that size,

it takes about half an hour for that ship to reorient itself.

They kept on trying.

They made over half a dozen attempts.

One of the attempts, we succeeded at catching the rope.

They said, tie the rope.

We're like, no way.

A 7 -meter wave means it's 14 meters of displacement.

If we tie it up here and it comes down,

When we dangle on the side of the boat, what's going to happen then?

This ship weighs 35 ,000 tons, we're about 200 kilos.

If that ship just leans a little bit to the side,

I don't even understand the physics

of it.

It's going to throw us up in the air,

or maybe the rope will come taut so strong they

would, you know, tear the raft.

It quickly turned from, we're going to die in a few hours,

or we're going to die in a

few days if things don't get any better,

to we're going to die in the next 20 seconds.

The boat makes another approach and Omar is like look,

I'm going to tell them we don't need help.

He opened, he stood up, and he said,

we don't want any help.

Thank you.

We can try again tomorrow.

We don't want the help.

Like, what do you mean you don't want help?

Like, it's nighttime.

You're going to kill us.

We're right tomorrow.

Like, we didn't sail all day to come here and kill you.

You need to tie the rope.

We're like, no.

That's it.

Thank you.

Thank you tomorrow.

Zip, shot.

We must save these people because actually

there is no other ship near to us to help him.

Or helicopter cannot succeed because it is 500 miles,

already lost his fuel to survive and cannot.

It is only our ship, but when I asked the MRC,

he told me there is no any other ship for research in this world.

The next thing I felt or heard

is screams and noise and a thump on the ceiling.

I'm like, what's going on out there?

We unzipped the raft,

we looked and the ship had just maneuvered

itself so close to us that the steel

side of the ship was actually touching the raft.

We tried this

maybe about

five times but always failed because

the weather and his life raft is very light.

The vessel is a bulk carrier,

so we're talking 220ft up in the air

from what is a 6 -inch freeboard for the OMARS,

especially in a life raft from the ocean.

So it would have felt like a three

-story house was coming towards them at probably great speed.

I look up and all I see is a sheet of metal.

And the second officer, I will never forget his face,

looks out over the ledge and throws

another rope at me.

And I catch it and he says, tie it, tie the rope.

Look at Omar.

And that approach was a perfect approach

because they were blocking the waves from us.

So although the sea was rough, the ocean was still angry,

we were sort of protected.

We looked at each other and we agreed we got to tie it.

And they start to pull.

Pull the whole life raft next to the boat,

dragging the life raft to where there was a rope ladder.

As they're dragging the life raft,

the life raft starts to collapse.

It starts to close in.

Water starts to go inside.

I can feel the pressure.

We're starting to sink.

All of a sudden my waist is in the water.

We're still looking at the guys and we don't understand what we need to do.

They tell us you guys need to climb the ladder.

We look and at first we can't see the ladder.

You know, Omar wears contact lenses.

You know, he'd lost them.

He's got minus 4 .25 on one side.

You know, he can't even see the ladder.

I couldn't see it at first.

And eventually,

the raft is sort of like inching on the side of the ship going backwards,

and I can start to see the ladder.

And as soon as I see the ladder,

I realize that the ladder only goes down to about half way down the ship.

So I tell the guys, you know, bring the ladder down,

and then the respondents say, well, that's as far as it goes.

I just quickly check to make sure that my legs are not tangled into anything,

and then all of a sudden, I start to just really look at that ladder,

and it's almost like my entire life just kind of led up to that one moment.

I still don't understand how I'm going to get up it,

but I look and I can see as the waves are crashing into the ship,

the level of the water is going higher and lower.

When it's high, you can just about hold the ladder,

and when it's low, it's pretty far away.

And the raft is moving quite quickly to the back of the ship,

and so I understand that once I get under the ladder,

I'm going to have to jump for it.

I'm not going to be able to wait for an opportune moment.

And so we get closer and closer,

and I can feel like my heart racing,

and I can feel that this is it.

It's almost like my entire life is building up to that moment.

I'm not tied to the raft, I'm not tied to the ship.

If something happens, it's finished.

I only get one chance at this.

And he summoned his strength and got up and grabbed the rope,

and I'm sitting next to him.

As the life raft starts to coast by the boat,

I just see one leap, leap, and grab the ladder.

And all I'm thinking is if this guy falls, ten minutes is all he has.

Ten minutes.

I get under the ladder, I jump, and I catch the second to last rung of the ladder.

I'm flailing with my legs, trying to get a foothold in the bottom rung,

but it's too close, they're too close to each other.

I can't do that.

I try and put my legs on the side of the ship.

I can't.

It's too slippery.

And he's swinging and he's going out and banging back into the hull.

Going out and banging into the hull.

I'm getting very, very desperate.

I can tell that I'm not going to be able to hold on for much longer.

I start shouting and screaming at the guys, I can't hold on much longer.

I'm slipping.

And the last thing that I saw as I

was getting sucked to the back of the boat is Omar with

the one arm yelling, I'm going to let go, I'm going to let go.

But then I remembered my daughter Tila,

it was very clear to me at that point that I made a

conscious choice to live, to keep going and that it wasn't going to end that way.

The next rung was broken,

it was just tilted to the side and which meant that I had to reach for

the one even higher than that.

As this is happening I hear them saying slack slack slack and they

I dropped the rope a tiny bit.

I looked down.

At this point, I can just, I don't see Omar anymore.

The raft had already moved away.

I can see underneath, just black,

this foam and waves just crashing onto the side of the ship.

Then I can see a wave hitting.

As it's coming a little bit higher, I look at it and I'm like,

this is my last chance.

And I just go for this one last run.

It was very shaky and so I was taking a

lot of care and a lot of time to climb the ladder so I don't slip.

I went up until I was about one or two steps from the deck.

I could feel the people put their hands on my life jacket.

I moved one step forward and I just threw myself over the side of the boat.

And I could feel them lifting me up and then putting me on the ground.

Omar's still down there.

So I ran to the side of the ship and

I could see that he was still in the raft and he was

being pulled towards the ladder.

I'm worried.

The propellers.

Am I going to get missed?

And as I think about that,

I get in a position where the life raft is getting pushed under

the boat.

So now my upper body is outside with the thing unzipped, looking out at the ocean.

And my lower body can feel the

pressure of the metal right against it through the life raft.

And this is when my voice was primal.

He afraid, really.

And he say, no, no, I will not come up.

And I tell him, you must come, we cannot,

we must go because really the wave start

hit the vessel from the side and the ship rolling.

As this is happening,

the second officer pops up again and throws another rope at me.

I tie the rope as quickly as I can.

They start to pull, pull me.

And as this is happening, I see a buoy, a circular buoy being thrown at me.

I grab it.

I take it.

I look at it.

I wear it.

I make sure that nothing is entangled,

that I don't want to get caught into something,

and I just dive into the water.

I think he's panic, really.

He's happy, from happy, and yes, he's get shocked,

because really he cannot believe when he saw the waves very high,

and this rolling, he afraid, yes.

I look up and I'm like, how am I going to go from here to that ladder?

It is impossible.

That ladder, even when the wave is all the way up,

that ladder is another one to two meters higher than me.

And then we were there on deck,

eight men, including myself, just going one, two, three.

Hop!

The next thing you know, my body's outside of the water, and I'm starting to rappel.

Up!

Up the boat!

I'm rappelling up the boat.

Every time they go one, two, I jump up.

Up! One, two, up!

When I got to the top, he pulled me out,

threw me onto the floor, came up,

and I looked at Owen, he was sitting on a bench.

I sat next to him, and my legs were just bouncing.

I went, look, Owen, look.

My legs are just bouncing, and I can't stop them.

We just hugged, a massive bear hug.

A massive bear hug.

The feeling is extremely difficult to verbalize.

How that captain managed to maneuver this 35 ,000 ton vessel in pure pitch darkness

to come and extract, you know, this tiny little raft and not run us over

and, you know, persist to, you know, these 19 crew members persist to

make sure that we were safe was just, you know, something I will never forget.

All crew, really, we are very, very happy.

I cannot find words really to say what the feelings were.

It was the human connection.

They saved us and we felt that connection, that really strong connection.

I cannot tell you the relief

when my boss called and said they found them and they were on board safely.

I just burst into tears.

To be able to confirm that

they were on board this vessel was amazing.

After the rescue had been completed,

we had joined the captain and the crew up on the

bridge. The captain looked at me and said,

listen I'm going to tell you something I haven't

I told my officer, and I was like, what is it?

And he's like, on that last,

on that last maneuver, the last time I came round,

when it was getting dark,

and when it had already gotten dark,

and I knew that I had not been able

to successfully pull you guys out when it was light.

I went quickly into the comms room and I called my wife,

and I told her I don't have time

to explain everything that's going on,

but I have two souls in my hands, their lives depend on me

and just pray for me, please pray for me

and he hung up the phone

and it was emotional for me to hear that

because I already knew that it was a grave situation

and I already knew that these guys had done so much for us

and had not given up on us

I don't know how we succeed in dark

You cannot see your hand.

Really, you have small like this and dark, very dark.

It means only God really help us to give him life again.

We wanted to use our experience,

which is quite a unique experience of rowing across the Atlantic,

To be

frank

with you, my connection to it on an emotional level didn't exist at that point.

But things have changed for me since the incident.

Since the capsize an entire survival experience,

I have a much stronger emotional connection with the plight of refugees.

People who are forced to flee their homes due to persecution, due to conflict,

have to make a perilous journey and

many times this has proven to be quite dangerous.

As a race organiser, it's somebody who deals with competitors in a race environment

that choose to put themselves in this situation.

I cannot imagine the desperate levels, the situation, the need to survive

that anybody must feel to do it voluntarily because they have no other option.

We need to remember that many of the people making this trip

haven't even seen the sea to begin with.

They have no expertise, no experience in guiding boats, driving boats,

and this means that they are not

ready to respond to turmoil in the sea, in the middle of the ocean.

Yes, it is very dangerous, yes,

to be in a small boat crossing even the Mediterranean.

How did I take a

decision to put myself in

such a situation with my own wife and my kid?

I kept blaming myself.

I kept all the way.

From the point I get in the bus with the smugglers, I started to blame myself.

what I did, what I have done.

Some of us didn't have a choice to make.

Some of us just had to go through.

Like myself, I didn't even know where I was crossing over,

which country I was going,

how safe I was going to be and everything.

Because I was trying to move away from danger.

Two days before I took the boat, I called my mother in Syria and I told her that

because I needed to say

to someone that I'm gonna be a father

and no one knows about it but I told her that Sarah is pregnant and we're

gonna take the boat.

From the moment we jumped on the first boat from Alexandria

We had no other choices.

Everyone was crying, yelling, everything.

I can't remember faces,

I can't remember anything.

I can't remember the smell because I keep remembering the smell

of the boat.

It was disgusting.

We started to vomit immediately.

We couldn't be able to talk, we couldn't be able to feel

what's happening around us,

we were just throwing up and started doing the same thing.

The first night, it was very tough.

Very, very tough.

During the night was when so many things were happening,

like the abuses and then the fights

and so many things.

When we reach a certain point, certain people are just taken out of

And then when you feel weak or you feel sick, they just throw you out in the sea.

We are very tired of like just seeing all

the blue around us and there is no ground we can see like a park.

The most thing that makes us hopeless.

We didn't drink clean water from 10 days.

We drink water from the engine of the boat.

I begin to think about who's going to die first.

Is it me, or Sarah, or the baby?

And...

Sarah got broken.

She was just broken.

And she began to cry.

And she asked me to do something in the middle of the sea.

And I couldn't.

I just hold her and say like, just calm down, calm down, calm down,

you're going to lose that.

That's what I said to her.

The sea was not smooth, it was always moving,

so there was a point in time when I wanted

to just shift a little bit and then the ladies started shouting,

then the men just got angry

and then some of them were saying they should just take me off the boat,

they should just

They threw me off the sea and then there

was like a fight on the boat just because of me.

So I even had to beg to just calm

down because if it's going to continue this way then I

don't think all of us will survive.

I'd seen a boat coming in and I

was pointing towards where it should be landing and all

of a sudden I heard a big bang and a lot of screaming.

The sounds that we could hear were incredible, you know,

they'll stay with me forever.

I looked out into the sea and I could

see people that had been spread over a large distance.

And there were people screaming.

You could hear mothers shouting their children's names.

I ran down to the shoreline and dropped my coat on the floor,

put my helmet on and just started swimming out.

We left from Egypt 20th of July 2014.

We got rescued on the 31st of July.

Morning, by about

10am.

We got rescued by the coast guard.

I can't like, everything like happening right

now around me, like it's happening.

The first thing I,

I hold Sarah

and I look at her and

I think when I compare my journey to the journey of refugees,

I think it's completely different.

I mean, yes, our journeys did intertwine for those 12 hours during the rescue.

I think what we went through is something that was very, very dangerous,

and maybe there's

There's a lot of similarities there,

but where we come from and how it all started is extremely

different.

I mean, we decided to do this by choice.

We prepared.

We had the best equipment.

They have no choice.

Most of the refugees are fleeing terrible situations back home.

They don't want to leave, but they have to.

It took me a good two weeks to be able to get back home,

but I cannot imagine if I have

I have no home.

And my problems are just starting.

I've gone through so many dangers and struggles.

But at the end of the day, you have to have faith, and you have to be strong.

Because I've seen so many people who wanted to act tough, and later they got killed.

What I just want is, first, I just want to feel safe.

I was thinking about,

like,

I need to be with Sarah

the rest of my life after this experience.

No one will know about this

except me and Sarah

and what we did to save our child and

to come here.

His name is Ruan, because he saved us from the sea.

And he's the only reason we

keep like strong to continue this trip.

I firmly believe that it is the most important issue that we face in the world today

and the way that humanity chooses to react to this cause

and how we deal with it will dictate the face of the planet for years to come.