Kelsey Pfendler completed a solo row from Monterey to Honolulu, arriving on land on Friday night, July 3, after more than 43 days on the water. She became the third woman ever to make the journey solo, and set several additional world records.
As she rowed her 132-square-foot boat into Honolulu harbor July 3, hundreds of spectators lined the shore chanting, “Kelsey, Kelsey!” She was surprised and overwhelmed, with little sense of just how big she had become. Her Instagram account, @Yourowkesley, gained hundreds of thousands of followers, and her TikTok grew to almost 2 million as people looked for updates on her attempt.
“I was shell-shocked coming into the harbor, people chanting my name,” Pfendler says. “It was really intense. I had a lot of emotions.”…