Rowing-Latitude 35 beats Friday the 13th jinx to set ocean crossing record

Jan 19 (Reuters) - A team of two British and two American rowers set off flares and waved their nations' flags on Wednesday to celebrate breaking the record for the fastest four-man crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. Americans Jason Caldwell and Matt Brown and Britons Angus Collins and Alex Simpson, on board the Latitude 35, beat the previous record by nearly two days after finishing the Atlantic Challenge in 35 days, 14 hours and 3 minutes. The British-American team was on course to break the record at the halfway point, but ran into bad luck on Friday the 13th, when strong headwinds almost brought them to a standstill. "I think (when) we were at 900 miles we thought, 'Right final third, we're on target'," Simpson said. "And then Friday the 13th happened and that was really the lowest and worst day of our row. We were rowing into headwinds, going one knot with winds which were meant to send us back half a knot." Latitude 35 set out from La Gomera in Spain's Canary Islands and was the first of the 12 teams competing in the Atlantic crossing to reach the Caribbean island of Antigua, with a British team called "Row for James" expected to finish second on Saturday. "On the boat I don't say anything about what day we think we're going to come in, what time, records, anything like that," Collins added. "I absolutely hate it so we try to keep it as quiet as possible and I don't really think we admitted it (breaking the record) until yesterday." (Reporting by Shravanth Vijayakumar in Bengaluru; editing by Mark Heinrich)