Photo: @unitedworldchallenge and @tezsteinberg
After 126 days at sea, a Colorado man arrived in Queensland completing a 5,000-mile solo row across the Pacific Ocean. The journey from Honolulu was expected to take as much as six months to complete but Tez Steinberg, 36, finished on the very, very short end of the original estimate for the self-support trip. Steinberg’s first ocean crossing came in 2020 when he left California for Hawaii and completed his row in a record 71 days. His past health issues, and a mission to raise awareness about the plastic problem made both expeditions extra special.
“I couldn’t forget all the plastic I saw at sea,” he said after that journey in 2020. “It was such a pristine environment yet filled with trash from around the world. The oceans are at a tipping point. There was so much plastic, it was heartbreaking. We’re never going to clear microplastics from the middle of the ocean. We have to prevent it from getting there in the first place. There will be more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2048, unless we act now. Effective, low-cost solutions exist. We just need to scale them to the most plastic-polluting regions.”
Steinberg’s solo row from Hawaii to Australia was named the United World Challenge, which is a global crowdfunding campaign that invests in infrastructure projects that prevent the flow of plastics into the ocean. Upon completing the row, he shared some poignant thoughts that put the overall mission into perspective.
“We know about ocean plastic, but we act like we can’t do anything about it,” he wrote. “So, by rowing across the ocean – doing something that seems impossible, especially after having a heart attack like I did a year and a half ago – it shows that you can do a lot more than you think, which is an important realization, especially in regard to ocean plastic.”
