Stouthearted men

For 10 minutes Ralph Brown panicked. Monster waves began breaking over the tiny flats boat, out in the icy dark of the Atlantic off the Faroe Islands, swamping the boat and pushing it up on a shoal.

The antenna broke off. A dry box on the deck broke open and the papers critical to his quixotic trans-Atlantic trip were streaming away in the foam. The two flat-bottom fishing boats he and his brother had tried to follow into port vanished into a night fog. Wave after wave flooded the deck. It can't sink, he kept telling himself. It can't sink. It can't sink.

The boat didn't. The two Florida men, who stopped in Charleston over the Fourth of July holiday, motored their flats boat all the way up the Canadian Maritime, across the Atlantic to Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe and Orkney islands, down to London, England, and over the English Channel to France and Germany.

Again and again, the people they met told brothers

Ralph and Bob Brown that they were going to die. Hurricane winds and waves battered their boat. They got frostbite. They ran out of gas. They ran out of money. But they made it. It was the trip of a lifetime, except for one thing.

"It's a terrible failure. I'm utterly discouraged," Ralph Brown said recently, vacuuming the dust in his office after he returned to Tampa.

Brown made the journey partly to fulfill a promise to raise money for wounded veterans and their families, to honor three Marines who died trying to free hostages in the American embassy in Tehran in 1980. Brown had been one of the Marines on the original roster for the mission before a different unit was called in.

The trip cost more than $100,000. He raised little more than half of that. So Brown doesn't consider this mission finished. He's going on national television to tell his story and make his plea.

He can understand why people wouldn't want to help him, he said, but he couldn't understand why more people wouldn't help wounded soldiers. "These guys are out there dying," he said.

The trip was astounding -- a 7,000-mile ocean journey in a boat without a cockpit. A flats boat is designed to float into shallow water for fishing. The brothers' boat was only 21 feet long and shallow-hulled enough to maneuver in 4 inches of water. It didn't even have a cabin, just a console. On the wild seas of the North Atlantic, that's not much more than a raft with a motor.

In July, as the boat left Charleston Harbor Marina, marina manager Jason Poe said he hoped they had all their papers together -- their wills.

"Oh, wow. What a trip," Poe said this week after hearing the two reached Germany. "Never underestimate the determination of humans, I guess."

Some 400 miles off the Canadian coast, among icebergs in the remote Canadian Maritimes, the boat hit the remnants of Hurricane Bill -- 9-foot waves "coming straight at us," Brown said, and winds blowing faster than the boat could move. They were running low on fuel and still had 200 miles to Greenland.

"It was hopeless at that point," he said. They threw over an anchor and rode it out for two days in the biting cold. Finally the winds slackened. The men turned on a smaller motor to conserve gas and puttered in at 2-3 mph. Both had frostbite.

They arrived in Iceland broke. The trip was saved by a donation. Then there were the Faroe Islands, an ice ledge of the world between Iceland and Norway, where the remnants of Hurricane Dennis punished them with gale-force winds and 15-foot seas in the dark, before the brothers finally managed to coax the boat into a protected harbor.

Off the Orkney Islands north of Scotland, a crew in a Scottish Coastguard rescue helicopter videotaped the boat getting battered like a pinball in 12-foot seas, and a crew member can be heard calling the brothers mad.

In September, the battered boat went up the Thames River into London. They made their destination, the military Landstuhl Regional Hospital in Germany, by their goal date, Sept. 11.

"There's something about being out there, doing something nobody's ever done," Brown said. "God gave us the last night at sea. It was gorgeous, glassy, calm, the largest, most beautiful moon, lights (on shore) everywhere."

They hadn't raised a dime for wounded veterans and were tens of thousands of dollars in debt. But at Landstuhl, a soldier, who had been badly burned in Afghanistan just two days before, demanded to meet them despite the doctors saying he was wasn't healthy enough. He told the brothers that soldiers in the Mideast had followed the trip online, and it motivated them to know somebody cared enough to take that risk.

"So if everything else fails, at least I made a difference in a few lives," Brown said.

Reach Bo Petersen at 937-5744 or bpetersen@postandcourier.com.