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“I need at least 300,000 calories, for the voyage.”
With these words, an Englishman named Peter Sage proved that the world is still ripe for exploration and discovery – if you’re creative and courageous.
It used to be a daunting voyage to cross the Atlantic. Now you just get a passport and hop on a plane. As far as exploration is concerned, you might think the old Atlantic is just another big, salty pond. We’ve been there. We’ve done that.
But what if you strip some technology away? Take away engines. Take away sails. Go back in time, to the era when human muscle was the only way to cross the water. When you approach the Atlantic by oar, the ocean becomes wild again. And people start to think you’re crazy.
“You’re going to row? Across the Atlantic?”
The look on people’s faces while they ask this question defines the word flabbergasted.
An Epic Voyage
As for me, as an adventure enthusiast who once paddleboarded 300 miles down the Columbia River, I never had to ask Peter why he was rowing across the Atlantic.
If you have to ask why, you probably won’t get it. The answer is beyond words. Sir Edmund Hillary expressed the ineffability of it all: when asked why he summitted Everest, he said “Because it’s there.”
But Peter Sage, the internationally-famous motivational speaker, is doing the row for a good cause: he’s raising money for Service Dogs UK & Royal Marines, focused on improving mental health for military servicemen returning to the civilian world.
Peter and his teammate Lee make up one of several dozen teams rowing across the Atlantic, as part of the World’s Toughest Row Competition
Apparently, it takes about 1.5 million oar strokes to cross the 3,000 miles of ocean between the Canary Islands and the Caribbean. Boats go up and over 20-foot waves. Sometimes whales follow the rowers, probably out of curiosity – “What are these wild humans doing now?!”
And the rowers burn around 5,000 calories, daily. That’s where we come in.
The Right Food, The Wrong Hemisphere
Pemmican has supported many famous overland adventures: the first trip to reach the North Pole, Ernest Shackleton’s famed Antarctic voyage, and grueling fur trapper missions across Manitoba, to name a few. To my knowledge, Peter’s journey will be the first ever multi-thousand-mile trip supported by Pemmican.
When I picked up Peter’s phone call, from a UK number (I never get calls from the UK), he explained that he had been on a carnivore diet for months, and he loved it. He wanted to maintain that diet for the entirety of his trip across the Atlantic. There’s really only one way to do that, unless he could somehow catch and process and cook enough fish from his rowboat.
The surefire way to eat a carnivore diet in the wilderness (such as the ocean) is with Pemmican.
I told Peter that he’d come to the right place. Then I heard the number: 300,000 calories. I did some quick math: that’s about 105 pounds of Pemmican. Pretty light weight, with all things considered – there is no more nutrient-dense complete food in the world, unless you could somehow live on pure coconut oil (spoiler alert – that doesn’t work).
He would need 26 bricks and 215 Pemmican bars, with as much variety as possible. But at the time of our conversation, the Steadfast webstore was completely sold out of Pemmican.
To get his order together, I pulled out all of the stops: I cajoled our ranchers for more beef and tallow. I harassed our co-packer to make sure the order would get done in time. And I attempted to send a sample batch to Peter, out in Tenerife.
That first small box of Pemmican made it all the way across the Atlantic from America, only to be stopped at customs. It turns out the European Union is surrounded by a maze of red tape if you want to import any food.
I had the right food for Peter’s trip, but it was stuck in the wrong hemisphere.
I started researching arcane import/export laws. I almost contacted a lawyer. I looked into flights to Tenerife, and wondered if the sniffing dogs at customs would be on the hunt for meat, in addition to drugs? My google history included this: “Penalty for importing unauthorized American meat into EU.”
The Journey Begins
Thankfully, Peter had a friend in San Jose, California, who was already planning to come out to Tenerife, for the voyage’s launch. After a few phone calls, we worked out the logistics.
And now, Peter has embarked! The hull of his rowboat is loaded with enough Pemmican to power his muscles across the Atlantic.
I’m praying that his voyage goes swimmingly (Hm, maybe that’s a poor choice of word), and that he stays strong in the wild.
If you want to follow his epic voyage and see if he learns to love Pemmican even more by the end of his journey, follow his popular YouTube channel or Instagram account.
Get ready for your own adventures – we have a bit of Pemmican in stock, still, and have exciting production news coming down the pipeline, soon.
