Amazingly, no one here asked us those questions. No one ever asked what we were doing. Or who the hell we thought we were. Or questioned our motives. They merely accepted that we were. We could not help thinking as we moved among these extraordinary can-do people who encouraged us, rather than discouraged us, that there really should be more of them in this world. It is a rare feeling of empowerment for a woman, not to be judged.
Having said that, the inspirational crew Row2Recovery – a four made up of single - and double-amputee soldiers: Cayle, Lee, Paddy and Nigel – did once give us ‘the look’, like we had no idea what we were doing. In their defence, we were playing the uplifting anthem ‘Let It Go’ from the kids’ movie Frozen at full volume at the time as we cleaned the boat. They moaned, groaned, covered their ears and begged us to turn it off – just as Greg Maud, a solo rower who’s climbed Everest and Kilimanjaro and completed the Marathon des Sables, loudly joined in on the chorus as he walked past, his arms outstretched as he sang.
‘LET IT GO-O-O! LET IT GO-O-O!’ He paused. ‘What can I say?’ He shrugged at the appalled faces of the Row2Recovery team. ‘I have a daughter.’
As race day edged a little closer, so the atmosphere in the town got a little headier; the tension increased, as did the amount of gins consumed in The Blue Marlin.
The unofficial race bar, The Blue Marlin – a tiny watering hole in a side street of La Gomera whose walls are graffitied with the last words of adventurers past – was where all the rowers and their support teams would gather after a long, hard day of packing and repacking their boats. A veritable hub of all things transatlantic and rowing, it smelt of salt and spilt beer and was the place where friendships were formed and hangovers were made. As the days ticked by, the talk turned from past adventures, tall waves and tall stories to the present. We’d talk in intense detail about how to distribute the weight properly around the boat, how to deploy a para-anchor (a giant parachute of an anchor used in storms to stop the boat being blown around in the sea) and when exactly you should launch a drogue (in very rough seas and currents, apparently). Later in the evening, as a few more rums slipped down, the singing and the guitar playing became a little louder and would sometimes carry on until two or three in the morning.
Frances was in her element. Having been at university in Southampton, she was right back there, loving every minute, reliving her student days. Normally quite reserved, she was now talking to all the competitors, thriving on everyone’s positive attitude. Of course we were all going to make it across! Of course it was possible! Of course! Of course!
There was the small matter of passing our scrutineering test first. We knew the race organisers would not allow a boat into the water until it had passed this very intensive check. Every tiny piece of kit, from survival suits to safety lines right the way down to the number of plasters in the medical kit, had to be laid out in a particular format next to the boat and checked off the 11-page list of mandatory kit. The day of our final scrutineering was nerve-racking. It took us nearly the whole day to lay everything out by Rose. Would we have all the kit? Were the ropes the right diameter? Did we have the right splint in our medical kit? Will our daily food packages have enough calories in them? All the other crews were obviously in the same boat, so when someone was missing something or needed something there was a lot of sharing – things were flying from one boat to the next and the sense of community spirit was fantastic. Everyone was willing to help out others. It was inspiring.
However, keeping occupied while Lee from Atlantic Campaigns slowly and methodically went through the kit was a nightmare.
‘Shall we just pace up and down on the quayside?’ suggested Helen.
‘Go for a cup of coffee?’ asked Frances.
‘I’m too nervous,’ said Niki. ‘What if we’re missing something?’
Eventually we took it in turns to answer Lee’s questions, otherwise the two or so hours he spent going through each tiny item of kit would have been excruciating. Our hearts were pounding. Our mouths were dry. Eventually. Finally. At last. We passed! Never before has a group of four working mothers been so thrilled to have sourced 35 sticky plasters in their lives! We were race-ready and could launch Rose. We booked a slot the next morning to get her into the water.
We were on a high. Nothing could hold us back now.
However, our first practice run out with Rose was a different story. The rules of the challenge stipulate that you must have at least 24 hours of sea experience in the boat before heading off, and even though we had already ticked that box, we were keen to know what she felt like in the Atlantic. How would she handle? How would she feel? It was also a good idea to run through a few manoeuvres – like getting the watermaker going – while we still had time to make any adjustments on the luxury of dry land. Anything that went wrong once we’d started the race would have to be fixed at sea. And we all knew how difficult that would be. So any problem we identified now would, in theory, be a bit of a bonus.
Less than an hour outside the harbour wall the first fly in our ointment became apparent: Helen. The seas were big, the waves were choppy and coming at us from all angles, and the boat was bouncing around like a ping-pong ball in a Jacuzzi. We’d been warned that for the first few weeks out of La Gomera the sea would be fast, furious and terrifying, but we had only just left the harbour and already the ocean was throwing us around like a toy.
‘I’m going to be sick,’ announced Helen as she deposited her breakfast down the side of the boat.
‘And again.’ She hurled.
Poor Helen suffers from chronic seasickness, which is not an ideal affliction in an ocean rower. We all knew she suffered from it and we had discussed it many times before. She wasn’t the only one. Frances was not immune to the odd vomit either, but the difference between the two of them was that when Frances was sick, she felt better and was able to continue rowing. She would simply pause mid-stroke in order to throw up over the side of the boat and then carry on. Whereas Helen was out cold. Helen could not move, she could not row, she could not get out of the cabin. All she could do was lie there, making strange lowing noises like a cow about to give birth, unable to sit up, speak or swallow.
And she tried everything: pills, potions, ginger pegs… She’d even been given, in case of great emergency, a seriously strong anti-emetic, that a doctor friend of ours, Caroline Lennox, had suggested we pack should we desperately need it. Helen had shown it to the handsome, God-like race doctor, Thor Munsch, who advised against taking it. His counsel was simple. She was going to be sick; she should go with it until it was out of her system, and then she would be fine. But Helen was desperate to find a remedy. Today she was trying out a special pair of ‘travel shades’ that blocked vision in one eye, which the company who had provided them said might do the trick.
‘They are not working,’ she said, declaring the obvious as she held onto the side, retching. ‘All that is happening is that I’m being sick while looking out of one eye!’
She turned to look at Janette, who was steering the boat as Frances and Niki rowed. It was tempting to laugh. She was clinging onto the side of the boat, her long brown hair all over the place, wearing a pair of glasses with a patch over one eye. The effect was faintly ridiculous.
‘I’m going back to the Stugeron travel sickness tablets,’ she announced as she vomited again and disappeared back down into the tiny cabin below.
The problem with having a member of the crew completely incapacitated with seasickness is twofold. Not only do the rest of the crew have to pick up the slack, which is impossible when there is simply no room for passengers on a small boat in the middle of a race to cross the Atlantic, but also if the boat is in danger and all hands are needed on deck then our power to deal with a difficult situation and our capacity to row ourselves out of trouble are severely diminished.
And it wasn’t long before that happened. About an hour and a half into our practice