Highlights
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UCF industrial and organizational psychology doctoral student Andres Käosaar and his team of three fellow Estonians spent three years preparing for the World’s Toughest Row and journeyed as one of 43 boats in the 2025 Atlantic challenge. Read his pre-race feature on UCF Today.
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They successfully completed their mission of rowing across the Atlantic on Jan. 23, crossing the finish line in Antigua and Barbuda in 39 days, 23 hours and 47 minutes.
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As team captain, Käosaar shares his takeaways, highlights, challenges and the new motto he’s still applying to his life back on land: Don’t fight with the ocean.
On how the ocean changed him:
I’ve never been as calm as I’ve been since returning to land. I’m a kind of restless person in general, somewhat impulsive in certain contexts. I always feel the need to do something, another adventure in nature. I have this fire in me that just makes me adventurous. But I think the success of the crossing, including the three years of preparation, gave me a lot of confidence. And with confidence, I think came the calmness of knowing I didn’t need to prove anything to anyone anymore.
World Ocean Day is June 8.
On UCF’s influence in pursuing his dreams:
It was once a dream of mine to leave my home country and do research with NASA. Coming to UCF, I realized that dream. Maybe at one point I wouldn’t have been able to think rowing an ocean was possible, but achieving my dream at UCF gave me the courage to try.
On the role a common goal can have in a team’s viability:
Our ultimate goal was to cross the ocean such that we would be willing and able to do it again in the next few years with the same team. This is the first time I am admitting out loud, I think we failed at that — none of us wishes to row an ocean again, nor are we planning another adventure with the same team.
So, though I have to admit we didn’t succeed in the ultimate holistic goal that we had, I think our crossing in general was quite successful. What I didn’t understand going into this was how strongly a common goal can influence your ability to withstand stress, interpersonal stress or annoyances from other team members. Everyone in this team had to work properly for us to be able to complete the goal. So even though we had that interpersonal tension and occasional conflicts, because of the salience of the shared goal, we were able to work through it.
On the breathtaking force of mother nature:
The ocean is so vast and so powerful. You’re nothing. We felt that the most when we had a school of whales approaching us from the stern. We saw them breaching, and then one whale swam under our boat, and we saw that it was longer than our boat, like 30 feet at least. It could have just pushed our boat over and do whatever it wanted with us. We had no power whatsoever.
And I really enjoyed the storms. During the last week we had such a strong wind coming from behind, with rain falling literally horizontally. It hurts when it hits you. The rain comes on so strong. And then the wind was so strong that it just pushed our boat. We usually did like 3 knots on our own, but the speed at that moment was 7 knots without rowing. We raised our oars and they became sails basically. We felt how the wind pushed through our oars. You’re just experiencing this unbelievable power of nature. It was amazing.
On his new motto — “Don’t fight with the ocean”:
Just don’t fight with the ocean because you can’t win. There is no point. Just let things be, let them go. I think this was one of the things that I really took back with me from the experience. I can apply this anywhere. Like at the workplace, if we have colleagues who are difficult to deal with, you can’t change them. You can’t fight with the ocean. You can only change your own reactions and thoughts.
On halfway home still being a far way to go:
After we crossed the halfway point, it became more difficult. You would expect that maybe it gets easier because, oh, half is done, only half more to go, but only half more is still 20 days. It’s three more weeks. It’s still a lot of time to be thinking about, What do you want do when you finish? What do you want to eat? What are you going to do when you get back home? I think we as a team mentally got to the finish too fast. We really had to take a step back and remind ourselves to take it two hours at a time.
On the feeling of seeing land for the first time after 39 days:
We arrived at sunrise. When the light appeared and we saw those cliffs, it’s just something so overwhelming and unique, this feeling of, ‘It’s over. It’s done — 40 days of suffering basically has ended.’ As we entered the harbor, we saw our family and friends were up there on the cliff, waving the flags and then the finish flare going off. It was the high point, definitely.
On how the experience gave insight into his research on teams in extreme, isolated and confined environments:
I think one of the main takeaways that I got from this project was really that preparation is everything. Everyone externally was focusing on the mission, the row, because of course that’s the exciting part. For us, completing the row was the goal, but it’s the smallest piece of the whole project. The three years of preparation and those difficulties that we had, this was much more important.
So now for my research, I’m thinking, we’re always focusing on the space part or the actual mission. It’s not necessarily irrelevant, but the mission is the outcome. The input that we should study is before the mission, the preparations. So that informs my future research quite a bit.
On what’s next:
I graduate in the summer. Days before we started the race, I accepted a job offer, which was a relief. I was prepared to take job interviews on the boat. I’m starting as an assistant professor of industrial/organizational psychology at Fairleigh Dickinson University in New Jersey in August.
I realized that I don’t like this type of several-weeks-endurance events, it’s too monotonous, too dull. I was thinking that my next big thing would be skiing across Greenland, which is more than a month as well. But now, no, thank you. There’s not enough variability, or excitement, for me. I love mountaineering, summiting a mountain in a few days. I just bought new mountain boots, so I think this will be my next thing.
