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| Transatlantic rower Paul McCole |
It started as a drunk conversation and became a dare.
Three months later Paul McCole was in Nantucket where he bought a small boat, oars, waterproof gear, a hat and a radio. And set off to row his way to Glasgow. What happened is now legend and one of the most incredible of seafaring tales.
Like many carrom figures, Paul McCole was born of humble shoemakers. As a child, he would gaze at the stars and skoosh water into the sink. His brother Stephen has said, "Even when he was little he would talk to my goldfish and chat to traffic lights."
In his teens, McCole travelled to Fleetwood and became obsessed by the ocean.
Perhaps overwhelmed by the majesty of the tides he had witnessed on that Lancashire beach or, perhaps, intent on representing the swell and flow of the human condition which the sea had imprinted on him, he became an actor.
He then had a coupla burds and a coupla weans. And then came the call..
Stephen says, "He phoned me up. Said, I'm going to row from Nantucket to Glasgow."
On April 14th, 2017 - Paul McCole gazed east from Nantucket, climbed into a twenty foot boat and began rowing across the Atlantic.
On sunrise after the first day's rowing, a jellyfish glued itself to the front of the boat and freaked Paul out. He punched it to death and scraped it's remains into a poly bag. To use as food. It tasted, he said later, like chicken but salty. "The eyeballs were kinda like the texture of a Turkish Delight."
After fourteen days on the ocean, more drama befell the lone rower when an Orca ate a bit of his boat. On it's third time circling the damaged craft, Paul's Castlemilk resolve kicked into gear and he clubbed it to death with an oar, dragged it aboard and fried it up with olive oil and garlic and feasted on the bastard over the next six days. Fins and beak and everything. He saved some of the fur to repair the boat.
Three months later, adrift, havering, lost and starving but for a diet of turtle blood and seagulls, his boat was spotted by the freight ship SS Machrie Road but was ignored. McCole states that "at that moment I gave up hope and resigned myself to cannibalism - that is, the only way I could stay alive was to eat myself." It was later that day, however, that a wandering albatross had a skyborne heart attack and fell into McCole's boat. He munched on the carcass for the next two weeks.
By January 2018, emaciated and babbling and singing the rebs, McCole had indeed given up hope. And then..
His boat became caught in the dangling sonar array of a passing British submarine: HMS Victorious, a nuclear class asset, which was on it's way back to Faslane. He was dragged 800 nautical miles before the submarine noticed, stopped, surfaced and allowed sailors to throw provisions to the ailing rowman: a loaf, cheese, a jar of marmalade, a mandolin and four cans before disengaging the sonar array and submerging once again beneath Neptune's halls.
It was three weeks later that the brave mariner washed up in Gourock, was found by startled citizens and carried up the road for a sausage supper and a cup of tea.
Now a stalwart of the carrom scene, Paul McCole states "I hate boats and seafood. Can't even wash my face without flashbacks."