JANETTE BENADDI is a 52-year-old businesswoman from Leeds. She is married with two children.
HELEN BUTTERS is an NHS communications expert from North Yorkshire. She is 46 years old, married and has two children.
FRANCES DAVIES is a solicitor running her own law firm in Leeds. She is 48 years old, married with two sons and lives in York.
NIKI DOEG runs her own business and is a qualified rugby coach. She is 46 years old and lives in York with her husband and their two sons.
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First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2017
Copyright © Janette Benaddi, Helen Butters, Niki Doeg and Frances Davies 2017
Janette Benaddi, Helen Butters, Niki Doeg and Frances Davies asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © January 2018 ISBN: 9780008214821
This book is dedicated to you. We hope itwill inspire you to conquer your own ‘ocean’,whatever it may be.
JANETTE, HELEN, FRANCES AND NIKI
‘You can never cross the ocean unless you have the courage to lose sight of the shore.’
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS
Contents
Chapter 10 The Final Countdown
‘To be is to do.’
SOCRATES
30 November 2015, San Sebastián Marina, La Gomera
‘This’, said Frances, shaking her head slowly as she stared at the waves smashing into the harbour wall below us, ‘is not an entry-level ocean.’
Standing next to her, looking at the violent swell just outside San Sebastián Marina in La Gomera, the rest of us – Janette, Helen and Niki – were inclined to agree. The waves were enormous and the distance we were about to row was substantial. Who on earth could have possibly thought this was a good idea? Collectively, we were about to leave four husbands, eight children, five dogs, two cats, two snakes and a gerbil and row 3,000 miles across one of the most dangerous oceans in the world. It is said that more people have travelled into space or climbed Mount Everest than have crossed the Atlantic in a rowing boat.
And not one of them, to be frank, was a middle-aged working mother from Yorkshire, firmly the wrong side of 40 (or 50), with little or (more accurately) no sporting prowess.
In fact, there was not a single Olympic athlete, extreme sportsman or endurance nut among the four of us. None of us had marched to a Pole or bivouacked on the side of a mountain or lived in a cave drinking nothing but rainwater with only a small rodent for company. That said, we weren’t