Alone in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with no land in sight for weeks, numerous nights of nonstop rowing, blistered hands, and auditory hallucinations due to sleep deprivation all became part of 32-year-old Kelsey Pfendler's journey. It was a journey that made her the youngest, fastest, and first American woman to row solo from Monterey, California, to Honolulu, Oʻahu.
Forty-three days, 17 hours and 55 minutes: Thatʻs how long it took Pfendler to row approximately 2,400 miles across the Pacific Ocean. She finished her journey on July 3, breaking both the women's and men's records.
“ I just feel so much gratitude for what had happened and what I was able to do, and kind of still processing the whole thing. I didn't go into it thinking that I was even in the running to be able to get the men's record. I was going for the women's world record, so I had no concept that that was possible for me,” she said.
Recalling first week challenges
For the first week of her journey, Pfendler would row for 45 minutes at a time and sleep for 10 minutes. Ultimately, she got approximately an hour of sleep a day that first week. Due to the lack of sleep, she hallucinated, where she would hear people and see city lights.
“The majority of it was auditory hallucinations where every noise my boat was making was, like, a person's voice, and it just felt like pretty often like a chorus of people talking to me in very understandable words. It was very unsettling for a little while,” she told HPR.
Pfendler packed 85 days' worth of food. She shared in one of her videos that she needed to eat around 4,000 calories a day. For each day, she also packed a snack bag, which equaled about 2,500 calories' worth of snacks.
Surviving over six weeks alone at sea meant planning for more than just food and sleep. Daily fresh water posed another challenge. On Day 7, Pfendler lost all the fresh water she had planned for that week.
The solo rower used a solar-powered reverse osmosis desalinator that turns seawater into drinking water. Pfendler didn’t have enough solar power to make more, which ultimately caused her to break into her emergency bottled water earlier than she would have liked on her journey.
The challenges didn’t end there. She pointed out that traditionally, the hardest part of these types of rows is getting off the California coast.
For the first 300 to 400 miles, she had to work her way through the continental shelf, where she said currents and wind direction are either pushing vessels back towards shore or down south.
“The first week was deeply challenging for me, but I had prepared myself a lot for that. And I talked to almost every ocean rower I could that did a mid-Pacific row as a solo to get their perspective on how they handled the first week, and I kind of formed my own plan off of what they said.”
Social media following and support
Throughout her journey, Pfendler documented those daily updates through social media, especially on TikTok, where she now has almost 2 million followers. During her row, she had no idea how much support she had.
Pfendler had a Starlink that she used for about 20 minutes a day to send her support team videos, which they would then post on social media. Many followers requested to see certain things or ask Pfendler questions about her journey. Her team would relay some of those questions, which Pfendler would sometimes answer in the next video.
One of her most common questions was “What is that screaming noise?” She addressed that in her Day 11 video that it’s her autopilot system that keeps her going in the right direction but does not create any forward momentum.
From the beginning of her trek, Pfendler knew she wanted to document it for other rowers.
“ Watching other people's rows has been such a joy in my life,” she said. "I just wanted to do it as like a gift to the ocean rowing community because like everyone just like lives vicariously through everyone else's rows because it's very rare for people to do more than one ocean row.”
@yourowkelsey Ho radio’d in because he saw how slow Lily was moving on AIS, and was concerned it was a vessel in distress. These are just a few snippets of a conversation with the chief officer of the cargo ship Turtle Island, over 10 miles apart!
♬ original sound - YouRowKelsey
Her trek also reached people beyond social media. On Day 25, Pfendler was contacted via radio by Ho, a chief officer on a cargo ship. After noticing how slow her boat was moving on the Automatic Identification System, he checked to see if everything was OK.
After talking for 10 mins, Ho asked Pfendler for her email so that he could email her and make sure that she arrived in Honolulu safely.
By the time Pfendler reached Honolulu, Ho did end up sending her an email. But she shared that her emails to him keep getting bounced back, so she hasn’t been able to get in contact with him.
Support for her journey had grown beyond what she had realized at sea. Hundreds gathered along Magic Island and Ala Wai Boat Harbor to watch her complete the record-breaking journey. She described that last day as “really intense.”
“It all was like this building to like a crescendo of just like the finish where it was just all so intense because it went from me not seeing anyone for so long and being completely isolated in myself to just all of these people and all of this stuff happening so fast,” Pfendler told HPR.
After arriving at the Hawaii Yacht Club, Pfendler was so overwhelmed that she hid in a storage closet with her close friends and family. To ground her in that moment, she had her loved ones go around and tell her what they had been up to for the past month and a half.
“ It was kinda grounding because it's people I love and care about and haven't gotten to connect with. So I just got to sit there and hear about them, and that was really nice because it kind of just took me out of my own head and my own body,” she said.
More rowing ahead
The journey took two years of planning, but this wasn't Pfendler's first time rowing across the Pacific Ocean. In 2024, she rowed with three other women as part of The World's Toughest Row - Pacific. Her group arrived on Kauaʻi after 40 days, 22 hours and 14 minutes.
It was during that 2024 expedition that Pfendler realized one crossing wouldn't be enough.
“There was a moment in the middle of that row where I realized that we were already halfway done, and I knew that I was closer to the finish than the start, and I was devastated that it was going to be over soon,” she said. “ I wanted to be in that space again. … I stepped off the boat knowing I was going to do another row.”
After being a Grand Canyon river guide for almost a decade, Pfendler developed a deep connection to life on the water. Ocean rowing, she said, combined the two things she loves: big water and rowing.
“ The humbling nature of being in a space that is so much more powerful than you, and then you get the privilege of being there and just existing in it while trying to work with it, but also the recognition that you are not in control, I love that. I think it's really special, and you don't always get that in your normal life because we all try to pretend like we're in control of everything that's going on for us when in reality we're not,” she said.
When asked what her next goal is, she said she still plans to “forever do hard, scary things.”
“ I'm always looking for a way to be on a boat in the middle of nowhere. So I don't think this is my last row in any way, shape or form,” she said.
Pfendler shared that the journey wasn't just about breaking the record; it was about the process as well. She now encourages people to take on their own challenges.
“ Anything special that you're gonna do with your time will take effort, but it's so worth it in the end to be, to know that you committed yourself to a goal and saw it through," she said. " The process is almost bigger than the actual row itself. Getting yourself to the point of where you're ready to do something like that, I think is so valuable. Anyone's capable of doing their own big, hard, scary thing.”
This story aired on The Conversation on July 13, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m.
