Limerick's Shane Ryan talks 'shark attacks, food and water running out on Atlantic crossing

IF you think lockdown is hard imagine being in a small boat with four strangers for 53 days in the Atlantic ocean.

That’s how Shane Ryan, aged 31, from Ballybricken spent some of his time during the global pandemic. Not only that, he has about 6% vision. Shane was 16 when he began suffering the effects of the rare condition. It isn’t fair but life isn’t fair.

Rowing across the Atlantic with that impairment is bravery, courage and downright daring.

Shane represented his country by rowing in the Paralympics and he did it again in an Atlantic rowing challenge. He and four others went from Lagos, Portugal, down the Moroccan coast, and then headed straight for French Guiana, South Americal Shane is the first blind rower to row across the Atlantic,He came up with this crazy idea around December 2018.

“It was one thing on the list that I wanted to do. I just went googling it. There's a guy in Holland (Ralph Tuijn) that actually runs this event every year. He interviews you to see if you are up to it, what your health is, what your character is, he'll decide then if you are good enough to come on board as part of the crew.

“I told him that I was visually impaired and he said that was fine. Rowing is one of those sports that you don't really need your sight because you are kind of rowing backwards. It’s one of the great sports out there for disabled people,” said Shane. Ralph knew Shane was made of the right stuff.

Fast forward to Portugal in early March 2020. Shane met four strangers that he would spend every waking moment with for the next two months.

“We had a couple of days in Portugal, just chatting with each other and we went off on March 4.” Was he nervous or excited?

“It was more excitement. It was a ready to go kind of feeling, ready to go and do it.” And do it he did. Torturous, gruelling, punishing, excruciating - you can go through the dictionary to describe it.

“You do two hour shifts, two hours on, two hours off, through the whole journey.”

There was no eight hours shut-eye.

“Within the two hours off you have to get a bit of food into you and clean any salt that is coming on you from the waves and then you get to go to sleep. You'd only get max 70 or 80 minutes of a sleep because you get a warning of about 15 minutes before your next shift, you get a tap on the door saying, ‘Come on, time to get ready’.”

This was Shane’s life for 53 days and nights.

“The only food we had was the dried out food that you just add water to. For breakfast you had porridge or granola and then for dinner, there were various options, chicken tikka or thai green curry with rice and a small bit of veg. We also supplemented that with cereal bars, chocolate bars. It was fairly high calories.”

Despite lots of calories Shane lost over three stone. They also caught tuna fish from the sea and flying fish literally landed in their laps.

“They kept on jumping into the boat. They hit you in the head and the arm. I got a couple of smacks in the head and shoulders,” laughed Shane.

The weather was kind with skipper, Ralph, saying it was one of the calmest crossings he had ever done on the route.

“There were a couple of days that we had high seas and waves crashing in, nothing too bad just waves coming in over the boat.”

Shane says it as calmly as if he was paddling in a kiddie pool in his back garden.

“The boat is designed especially to take on these ocean crossings. If it does flip, it is designed to self right itself. If it didn’t we had a liferaft on board.”

One time they had to contact a ship to ask them to change direction as they were coming straight for the boat.

The weather was kind but apart from the back breaking rowing, problems began to surface.

“On board we had an automatic water maker - it converts seawater into fresh drinking water. - but it broke. We had a manual hand pump that does the same thing as the automatic one, but you just have to do it by hand."

Even more exercise for them. They had to row to the Cape Verde Islands to pick up 400 litres of drinking water there.

“That kept us going until the last two and a half weeks and then we had to start using the hand pump again.”

Then it was like a scene out of Jaws.

“I was on shift at the time. It was actually the middle of the night - that's when all the sea life come up to eat, that’s when they are most active. All of a sudden we got a massive shunt on the boat. Initially we thought, 'Oh we must have hit off a whale or something'. Ralph spotted that it was a shark, it was seven foot. They try to hit the boat and knock you over.”

This was certainly worrying for mum and dad Marie and Tom, sister Jessie and all Shane’s friends and family to read about on the Shane’s Facebook diary.

The shark left its mark. It broke the rudder which also made navigating their course more difficult.

“That's when we knew there was a serious problem. We tried several different options of rowing but in the end what we had to do was put up a sail. We used one of the sleeping bags. We strapped that to a set of oars and put it up in the air - it was our last option. So for the last two and half weeks we weren’t rowing, we were sailing and one person was steering with a set of oars.”

The delay meant they had to ration their food. Otherwise they would have ran out.

Coming into French Guyana and stepping on to land was a good feeling. Although Shane said you forget how to walk and his balance was all over the place for the first few days.

But it was mission accomplished after a mammoth adventure.

“It is a great achievement but it didn’t really hit me until I came home and saw all the support in Ballybricken-Bohermore.”

Shane was given a socially distant but well-deserved hero’s welcome.

Despite Shane’s vision impairment he decided to take on the 6,000km arduous challenge to raise money and awareness for Vision Sports Ireland (VSI). VSI has helped to open the world of sport to him allowing him to row at international level, tandem cycle at a competitive level, along with skiing and water skiing for leisure.

Shane spent a year training for this expedition both mentally and physically, and with the help of his main sponsor AMCS, who are based in Limerick, sponsorship from Analog Devices, proceeds from a table quiz held in Ballybricken-Bohermore and generous donations through his GoFundMe page, he is hoping to raise as much funds as possible for Vision Sport Ireland. Donations can be made to www.gofundme.com/ atlantic-rowing-challenge- 2020. Shane’s next undertaking is to be assessed for a guide dog with the Irish Guide Dogs for the Blind. He is acutely aware of the disruption to fundraising for this charity due to Covid-19 restrictions, so set up a head and beard shave Facebook fundraiser for the charity. He raised €5,000 and asks people to text WOOF to 50300 to give €4. See guidedogs.ie for more. Shane has other ideas floating around in his mind so his guide dog is in for an exciting time.