A SURGEON from Emersons Green has rowed his way into the record books as part of a crew racing around the coast of Great Britain.
Stefano Capella, his brother Marco and three other members of Team Rowmads became the first and fastest crew of five to complete the GB Row Challenge unsupported, finishing the 2,000-mile journey in 32 days, 30 minutes and 58 seconds in July.
Stef is a Royal Navy trauma and orthopaedic surgeon, who has lived in Emersons Green for just over two years.
When he is not on deployment he works at hospitals across the region, including Southmead, treating bone and muscle injuries for the NHS.
He and his teammates spent three years planning for the epic row, which started and finished at Tower Bridge in London and took them around the coast.
Each rower spent two hours on and one hour off the oars for 18 hours a day, then two hours on and four hours off overnight.
Rowing unsupported meant they relied on a solar-powered desalination machine to provide drinking water, and cloudy weather during the leg around the Scottish coast meant it stopped working – leaving them close to the end of their 100 litre reserve by the time the sun emerged again.
They also lost the power to their speakers and radios, so had to make their own entertainment until it returned in time for them to recharge the batteries – and catch up on England’s World Cup campaign.
Stef said: “The biggest highlight was seeing just how extraordinary our country is from the water. We had dolphins following the boat, and saw otters, whales and incredible stretches of coastline.
“There were some brutally hard moments, like being on the oars at two in the morning for the fifth night in a row, rationing water and dealing with no power. But morale stayed remarkably high because we had such a fantastic team.”
Each team member was raising money for a charity – Stef was supporting a specialist charity for trauma patients called DayOneTrauma Support.
As the Voice went to print the team had raised £8,750 of their £10,000 target and their fundraising page is still open at tinyurl.com/yxth3sjj.
The team also carried out research monitoring the health of the seas around Britain, using hydrophone monitoring, twice-daily environmental DNA readings and daily microplastic sampling.
They also collected a wealth of biomedical data on themselves to aid research projects into sleep, bone health, human metabolism, and small team psychology.