Sam Brown interview for Mutiny

Why on earth would you want to sign up to something like this?
Hindsight is 20:20.It seemed like a good idea at the time! It was one of those things that I heard about, and I thought if I found out about someone else doing it, I’d be wildly jealous, even if it sounded awful.

Why do you think you were chosen?
I think I’ve got some track record of doing that sort of thing before. I think the pool of people prepared to drop everything and give up their life for that amount of time is probably not enormous.

How did you prepare for the series?
I did a sailing course – I had no experience of being under sail at all. Other than that, I ate quite a lot of burgers in the run up to it. I tried to put my life on ice as best as I could so I could come back to it afterwards.

What were your worries going in to the series?
I really genuinely didn’t know if it was going to be physically possible – such a small vessel, and such a vast distance to cover, and so many unknowns, things we couldn’t plan for and couldn’t second-guess. Freak weather, wind, lack of wind. I also had concerns that there wasn’t going to be enough content for the series. Once you’re in the boat and it’s sailing fine, basically your job then is to try not to move around too much. So I was worried that it was going to be really samey, that not enough stuff would happen. I don’t think we need to worry about that anymore.

What was the reality like, compared to the theory?
I would say there were about 15 once-in-a-lifetime moments that I’ll take to my grave – incredible moments. And then the rest of it was pretty awful. The level of discomfort, monotony, the feeling of powerlessness, isolation, it was really tough. It was psychologically harder than anything I’ve done in my life. In my head I always thought I’d do quite well in prison, I’d just do loads of weights and get a degree. I think this gave me the sense of being cut off from the rest of the world, and I found it really hard.

What did you miss the most, from everyday life?
Cheesecake. It’s bizarre, it’s not something I’d ordinarily eat at all. Most of us became massively fixated on food. Our diet was really restricted, and it was really monotonous. Apart from occasionally getting fresh fruit on an island, we were basically left eating rock-like sea biscuits and dried meat. We were all fixating on sugar and fat. More so than friends and family, even. Food is one of the hardest things to be deprived of. Food and privacy.

What about sleep?
I think the longest I slept in 60 days was about two hours. I’d say, if I got four hours’ sleep in a 24-hour period, I was doing very well. You can’t sleep if you’ve got water landing on your face. If we were in rough seas or it was raining, that was it. So sleep was a commodity you snatched whenever you could. And also, as the cameramen, myself and Dan would have to try and stay up later than everyone else to try and cover stuff that was happening.

What was the aroma like, all living on close quarters on the boat?
Everything smelled really strongly of sick after about five days. Then, after a while I think we all lost our sense of smell. After a while, you stopped giving a fuck, to be honest. You’d be on the tiller, and someone would be next to you having a dump off the back of the boat, and you wouldn’t bat an eyelid. That wasn’t really an issue at all.

What kind of relationships did you form?
It varied massively. With a couple of people on the crew I formed what I would say will be lifelong friendships. A couple of other guys I could happily never see again. And most of the others are somewhere in between.

What was Ant like as a skipper?
I wasn’t sure what to make of Ant when I first met him. I was a bit worried that he was a major TV hard-man. But Ant grew into the role, and I am unashamedly in awe of him. I think he was an incredible leader. I know for a fact we wouldn’t have made it without him.

What were your lowest moments?
There were two. The first one was after the storm. It rained for 96 hours, and there was no way to get dry or warm up. You’ve heard of trench foot? Well I had trench hand. Both my hands had huge chunks of flesh dropping off them. I couldn’t undo my fly. I couldn’t hold a rope. I couldn’t operate a camera. If it had rained for one more day, I think I’d have had to have been medevac-ed. My hands were literally falling apart. I still have scars on them now. I’m not used to my body giving up on me like that. So that was really hard, feeling like I was useless, and knowing that Dan was having to do all the filming. The other lowest ebb was in the last stretch, between the Australian islands and Indonesia. We got completely becalmed, and what was meant to take nine days ended up taking 17. We were running out of water, we were really deteriorating physically and mentally. We were on that boat for too long. The way I perceive three people on that boat was permanently tarnished by that. I’ll never be buddy-buddy with some of the guys on that boat because of the resentment levels that built up over the last few days.

What were the high points?
I probably saw my top five best ever sunsets and my top ten best ever sunrises. The island we stayed on in Vanuatu was pretty magical – those three days were uninterrupted bliss, having really suffered before and really suffered afterwards. Other high points? Finishing was pretty damn good. And there was a school of whales that followed us for a while, and we could hear them clicking and talking to each other. There were mothers and babies. They came right up to the boat – I think they were False Killer Whales – and that was just spectacular. We were very aware that we were in the presence of a large, intelligent mammal. Drinking all the rum was fun in Vanuatu – that and their local hallucinogen. That made for a very good couple of nights.

What did you learn from this experience?
This experience stripped us all bare. It reveals people’s character, warts and all, more than anything else I’ve ever done before. It revealed strength, weakness, kindness, meanness. The other people on that boat, I will forever see them as how they were towards the end of the journey. There was nowhere to hide, no way of concealing your true nature. In terms of myself, I learned that I really hate being wet for long periods of time.