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For that matter, he also rowed across the Pacific, too, with his girlfriend - the first people ever to row that ocean.
John Fairfax, Who Rowed Across Oceans, Dies at 74 (New York Times)
An even better obit - documenting Fairfax's earlier career as a gun smuggler and whiskey runner - from the Daily Telegraph:
John Fairfax
John Fairfax, who has died aged 74, was a British adventurer in the classic mould,
and achieved celebrity in 1969 as the first person to row solo across the Atlantic.
John Fairfax, Who Rowed Across Oceans, Dies at 74 (New York Times)
The whole story at link above.He crossed the Atlantic because it was there, and the Pacific because it was also there.
He made both crossings in a rowboat because it, too, was there, and because the lure of sea, spray and sinew, and the history-making chance to traverse two oceans without steam or sail, proved irresistible.
In 1969, after six months alone on the Atlantic battling storms, sharks and encroaching madness, John Fairfax, who died this month at 74, became the first lone oarsman in recorded history to traverse any ocean.
In 1972, he and his girlfriend, Sylvia Cook, sharing a boat, became the first people to row across the Pacific, a yearlong ordeal during which their craft was thought lost. (The couple survived the voyage, and so, for quite some time, did their romance.)
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An even better obit - documenting Fairfax's earlier career as a gun smuggler and whiskey runner - from the Daily Telegraph:
John Fairfax
John Fairfax, who has died aged 74, was a British adventurer in the classic mould,
and achieved celebrity in 1969 as the first person to row solo across the Atlantic.