The upcoming Christmas will be quite unusual for 27-year-old IMechE member Ewan MacLean. Instead of roasting a turkey and popping crackers in a cosy family kitchen, he will find himself in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, on a tiny boat, eating freeze-dried food and rowing for days on end accompanied only by his two younger brothers.
The three will take part in the 2019 Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge, which will dare them to row the 5500 kilometres that separate the Canary Island of La Gomera from Antigua in the Caribbean. The MacLeans aim to become the first three brothers and the youngest trio to row unsupported across any ocean. Along the way they are raising money for charities Feedback Madagascar and Children 1st.
“It was originally my youngest brother’s idea,” says Ewan, an alumnus of the University of Glasgow, who has been working as a design engineer at Dyson for the past four and a half years. “We have always been adventurous and have spent a lot of time on the west coast of Scotland, sailing way up north. This is a great opportunity to do something very unique, together, as three brothers.”
Cross-Atlantic rowing is a young and extreme discipline. Fewer people have rowed across the Atlantic than have climbed Mount Everest or flown to space, according to Ewan. The rowers will have to endure temperatures of up to 40 °C and maintain control of their 8.5m-long boat in up to 12-metre waves. Ewan and his brothers will be working punishing shifts at the oars, with each of them allowed only an hour-long break after two hours of rowing during the day and no more than a four-hour continuous rest at night. The crossing might take anywhere between 40 to 60 days, according to Ewan.
“The average time for a trio is about 50 days,” he says. “But it really depends on the weather. It can be with us or against us.”
To make the adventure as comfortable as possible, and to increase their chances of winning, Ewan used his engineering skills to finetune their boat - a cutting edge R45 built by Rannoch Adventure, an Essex-based maker of record-breaking ocean rowing boats.
“Over the past year I have identified a number of problem areas whilst training or working on the boat,” he says. “Because there hasn’t been that many crossings, people don’t know exactly what the best thing is to do, so there are many opportunities to innovate.”
The boat has a removable centreboard, which helps to maintain course and resist cross winds. When the weather is rough, the crew can insert the centreboard from the row deck into a slot that runs through the middle of the boat. When the sea is calm, they can remove it. However, Ewan realised that having only two options – with and without the centreboard – is not convenient. The centreboard can slow the boat down by about 0.2 knots and thus add time to the journey. He therefore designed a mechanism that allows the crew to change the length of the centreboard from the deck to match the weather conditions.
“I have made a simple clamping mechanism that fits above the slot and allows us to use the centreboard at any height,” Ewan explains. “When the weather will be going with us, we can plug the slot after removing the centreboard with another board that I made, which will make the bottom side of the boat smoother and therefore minimise drag that would otherwise be created by the hole. This will give us another small increase in speed.”
When rowing, the brothers will benefit from an adjustable foot support system that will allow them to change the heel height and angle without weakening the power of their strokes. This will help prevent injuries from muscle overuse during the approximately one million strokes the rowers will have to take.
“During our long training sessions, one of my brothers and I in started to develop slightly sore knees and lower backs from the repetitive motion,” says Ewan. “We found that raising our heels by using a block of wood or two helped greatly. After some experiments, I designed and machined interlocking spacers that will provide us with incremental variability.”
Ewan says being a Dyson engineer helped greatly as he was able to use the company’s CAD facility and cutting-edge workshops.
To further improve the rowers’ comfort, Ewan made a custom-moulded heel cup for each brother, with a hard insole supporting the medial arch. The solution reduces blistering and sores and allows the brothers to row barefooted instead of having to change shoes up to 20 times a day.
To make the crew members’ time off as comfortable as possible, Ewan developed a simple air-conditioning system for the boat’s two tiny cabins consisting of two lightweight Peltier-based units, a set of waterproof fans and a couple of heat sinks.
“The unit sits inside an acrylic chamber with channels for warm air to flow out of the cabin and ambient air to be circulated over the cool side of the unit,” describes Ewan. “Air from outside the cabin will be drawn in from another opening, which will give us greatly improved airflow and will hopefully help avoid the huge amounts of condensation build -up that is expected.”
The brothers have spent the last year training intensely and are readying to set off on 12 December.