Current Biography Excerpts: Rowing

SAVILLE, CURTIS
Aug. 22, 1946- Long-distance rower; explorer.

SAVILLE, KATHLEEN
Mar. 22, 1956- Long-distance rower; explorer.

At a time when security, comfort, and material rewards are prized more than ever by many younger Americans, Curtis and Kathleen Saville, the indefatigable long-distance rowers and nautical explorers from New England, have been challenging the forces of nature and testing the limits of human endurance. Aided only minimally by state-of-the-art technology in their conquest of the world's oceans, the Savilles have relied primarily on their own physical and mental capabilities and a large measure of sheer guts and determination.

In the spring of 1981 Curtis and Kathleen Saville rowed their custom-built craft, the Excalibur, across the Atlantic from North Africa to the West Indies. In 1982 they undertook a rowing expedition along the icebound coast of Labrador, and in the following year they rowed the length of the Mississippi River from northern Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. Then, in July of 1984 they embarked on the longest rowing voyage ever recorded, a journey of some 10,000 miles across the South Pacific, from Peru to Australia, traversing what Curtis Saville has described as "the largest and wildest oceanic region in the world." Along the way the couple undertook some valuable scientific work, including a monitoring of pollution of the oceanic environment. "You don't do something like this for fame and fortune," Curtis Saville told interviewer Mike Safe of the Sydney Daily Telegraph (August 24, 1985), after completing the South Pacific odyssey. "You do it for...the adventure, the challenge, because it's there." Kathleen Saville added: "There is...a sense of achievement. But there is also a sense of knowing that nature, the ocean, is greater than anything you can do. Out there you realize your insignificance."

Copyright © 1996 by The H. W. Wilson Co.

The complete article can be found on the Current Biography CD-ROM and in the 1986 Current Biography Yearbook.

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