Transatlantic Rowing

In 2003, Kevin Biggar and Jamie Fitzgerald, rowing as the Holiday Shoppe Team, won the 3rd Transatlantic Rowing Race in 40 days, 5 hours and 31 minutes, setting a new race record. One of their secrets was the routing advice that Incremental's Geoff Leyland and Professor Andy Philpott from The University of Auckland had provided them.

The race rules are strict about outside advice during the race, and computers have trouble surviving in transatlantic rowing boats, so Geoff and Andy's expertise was distilled into a map, several copies of which were laminated to protect them from the wet and taken on the boat.

The map, shown below, is a set of isochrones from Barbados - lines of equal expected time from Barbados (on the bottom left). Using this chart, Kevin and Jamie could plan each day so as to head towards the finish line as fast as possible.

While the chart's format (a laminated A4 sheet) is simple, using it in the high seas was less so, and computing the map was even trickier. Computing the isochrones required analysing 20 years of historic data on winds and currents across the Atlantic, estimating how fast champion rowers row across a bumpy ocean, and solving a large stochastic dynamic programming problem.

The map has been the subject of a number of conference presentations by Geoff and Andy, an article in OR/MS Today, another article in the NZ Institute of Mathematics and its Applications newsletter, and will be the subject of a forthcoming video to promote mathematics to NZ high school students.