‘Emotionally crushing’: Bay Area ocean rower calls for help just shy of Hawaii arrival

From just offshore, he could see hotels, houses and cars, and the lights on the bay’s huge breakwater seemed close enough to reach out and touch. His partner, Betsy, and family and friends had flown in and were waiting to celebrate his arrival.

But Facchino couldn’t reach them.

A storm blew in and strong currents were sucking him north, away from his target. He’d muscled his boat to within a few miles of the harbor but was then yanked several miles away.

On Thursday morning, exhausted after a night wrestling with the ocean and being pelted by tropical rains, Facchino called the U.S. Coast Guard for assistance, effectively throwing in the towel on his goal to row the entire route under his own power. A passing tugboat towed him to the harbor, where he rowed to shore.

On Friday morning, the 47-year-old Fremont rower was processing the experience in his hotel room. His family and friends were ecstatic in greeting him, but he arrived grappling with a deep sense of disappointment, he said.

“It was an emotionally crushing decision because, in ocean rowing, you’re supposed to be totally self-sufficient,” Facchino said. “It’s a tough thing to make that call but it was, I feel, the right thing to do.”

Facchino has been rowing oceans since 2016, when he worked as part of a four-man crew to row from Monterey to Hawaii as part of the Great Pacific Race. (One of his crewmates, Cyril Derreumaux of Larkspur, is in the midst of his own mid-Pacific solo crossing right now.) The next year, he was rowing with a team through the Arctic when the voyage was cut short by storms and ended with a self-rescue to a small Norwegian island.

The Pacific crossing from California to Hawaii, which has drawn a handful of hard-core athletes each of the past several summers, was Facchino’s first solo journey.

As these things go, it brought a mix of beautiful moments and terrifying misfortunes.

At sunset on his first night at sea, near the Farallon Islands, he found himself surrounded by humpback whales — breaching, spouting, flapping their tails and slapping their fins on the water.

“It felt like I was passing through a whale playground — just incredible,” he said.

Weeks later, Facchino’s automatic identification system, which broadcasts his signal to surrounding vessels, started cutting out. While working to repair it, he accidentally fried one of his GPS trackers.

“When you’re out on the ocean, every decision snowballs,” Facchino said.

Shortly thereafter, about 800 miles into his voyage, his electric water maker sprang a leak, posing an existential threat. He jury-rigged a water-capture system but opted to ration his fluid intake from then on.

“Any time you start rationing, it makes the rowing more challenging, because that’s your fuel,” Facchino said. “It just makes everything more stressful.”

In a moment of serendipity, after being at sea two months, Facchino crossed paths with Derreumaux, his old crewmate, who was also attempting a crossing, but in a kayak. Facchino had left two weeks later than Derreumaux, and from a different place, yet the men found themselves just 3 miles apart. They had a friendly catch-up via satellite phone.

“It was pure chance. Normally the closest person is 1,000 miles away at any given moment,” Facchino said.

Derreumaux is days away from finishing his journey at Hilo, and Facchino has been feeding him information on the brutal currents in hopes of aiding his success.

Upon rowing into Hilo Thursday morning, Facchino embraced his family, took a much-needed shower, then downed five papayas and began on a jar of peanut butter. On Friday, he was preparing his boat to be shipped back to the mainland.

Sometime Thursday, he turned a corner emotionally, he said. Strangers had been approaching him at the harbor to shake his hand and congratulate him — they’d been following his journey with enthusiasm. Elation from family and friends had taken the edge off of the disappointment.

“From my standpoint, I feel like I didn’t reach my goal, 100%. There will be an asterisk next to my row,” Facchino said. “And yet, to them, it doesn’t matter that I got towed the last couple miles. They’re just excited that I finished.

“They’ve given me the freedom to celebrate the accomplishment, whether there’s an asterisk or not.”

Gregory Thomas is The San Francisco Chronicle’s editor of lifestyle & outdoors. Email: gthomas@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @GregRThomas