‘The journey took me three and a half months. I saw no one. I just rowed every day, two hours on, one hour off, around the clock, seeing nothing but sky, sea and all the creatures in it. That is how God first started to re-kindle my hope. He had me alone and he had a captive audience.

‘The beauty I witnessed was unlike anything I had seen before. The colours of the vast array of fish, whales and sharks that would circle under my boat were stunning. These creatures have a gracefulness that, when witnessed in the wild, is breathtakingly beautiful.

‘I found myself, through tears of joy, saying “thank you” out loud over and over again because I knew that such beauty could not be by chance. Somebody must have engineered it and it was totally clear to me for the first time ever, that that somebody was God.

‘So I started talking to him and he spoke back through my feelings and the thoughts in my head. I had such a strong sense that I could put my hope in him and that he was going to get me across the ocean – which was a good thing as there were hurricane winds and thirty-foot waves on more than a few occasions.

‘I wondered if I would still feel the same on dry land. Would I still believe, hope, trust in the Creator God? Did he have anything to say about my life and my future?

‘Mid Atlantic I came close to being run down by a supertanker. On the verge of giving up I spoke to my twin sister by satellite phone. “You can’t give up,” she said. “I believe that you are going to be a presenter on Grandstand.” I was furious with her for saying something so crazy when minutes before I had nearly died. Grandstand is the biggest sports programme on the BBC so it was hardly likely that a novice presenter would walk straight into a role there. Plus, I had no desire to be a television presenter. But God had given her a prophecy for me. She just could not tell me that at the time because it would have freaked me out and I probably would have run a mile from Christianity.

‘It took me one hundred and eleven days to row the Atlantic single-handed. Within five months of completing my Atlantic crossing I presented my first programme for Grandstand. It’s amazing what God has in store for us once we take that leap of faith and put our hope in him entirely.’

By Debra Searle MBE

Extract taken with permission from ‘My reason for hope’ – 53 faith stories compiled by Andrew Swift, published by Authentic £ 8.99