A BRITISH oarsman finally admitted defeat yesterday after a renewed bid to become the first to row solo and unsupported around Antarctica ended in disaster.

Colin Yeates, 47, vowed to circumnavigate the icecap on his own and was expecting his 11,300-mile journey to take more than ten months.

Mr Yeates declared that the Antarctic Circumpolar Expedition was “one of the last major challenges out there”. It was fraught with danger and “the most difficult and hazardous circumnavigation of the globe”.

He planned neither to touch land nor take on additional provisions throughout the voyage during which he expected to encounter “waves as high as a five-storey building, ice and freezing fog”.

After four years of planning and preparation, the landscape gardener set off from Port Stanley in the Falklands last month, his boat packed with 200kg of freeze-dried food to provide him with the 6,000 calories a day he needed.

He was planning to row south and then head clockwise around Antarctica. Instead, strong currents took him north to Cow Bay, where he ran aground on rocks after just thirty hours and ten miles at sea.

He was rescued by farmers, wet and freezing cold but unharmed. Undeterred and desperate to achieve his dream, he made minor repairs to Charlie Rossiter, his purpose-built, 22ft (6.7m), £30,000 boat, and set out again on Thursday.

But in just 39 hours at sea he capsized five times as his boat was battered by huge waves, and lost vital navigating equipment.

Mr Yeates, a former merchant seaman who served in the Falklands conflict on the QE2 liner-turned-troop-carrier, said: “It was like being in a washing machine. It rolled 360 degrees five times and was going up and down as well. I lost a lot of equipment and it was a fairly unpleasant experience, but I never really feared for my life as it’s such a good boat.”

He was rescued by a Falklands patrol boat after setting off an emergency beacon.

Mr Yeates, of Chandler’s Ford, Hampshire, had hoped to collect scientific data to be used in the study of global warming on behalf of scientific bodies such as the Met Office, the British Antarctic Survey and the Oceanography Society.

His boat was built by Rossiter Yachts of Christchurch, Dorset, and was designed to withstand the southern oceans and to hold 1.7 tonnes of supplies and equipment.

Mr Yeates added: “Sadly, I’m going to have to call it a day, but what’s happened has happened. My boat is still bobbing around somewhere in the South Atlantic. The authorities tried to sink it with a cannon, because it’s a hazard to shipping, but they couldn’t hit it.

“It’s been an adventure, if nothing else. But the realisation was that it is probably an impossible thing to do. It’s a very unforgiving ocean.”

Mr Yeates admitted that while planning the voyage he had received an “upsetting” letter from the Commonwealth Office that suggested it was destined to fail.

He said: “It turns out that the Commonwealth Office weren’t far off. I’m now expecting a fair amount of ridicule but I’m planning to write and thank them for their concerns.”

Even his website, which listed the many hazardous places he expected to encounter, was all too prescient. It proclaimed that his journey would “begin and end in the Falkland Islands”. It did, but without the much-anticipated 11,300 miles in between.

Mr Yeates’s wife, Melanie, with whom he has five daughters and two sons, aged 6 to 29, declined to comment.

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