‘Helen!’ yelled Janette. ‘Helen! We need you! We’re heading for the rocks!’
Then, ‘Helen, will you get on those oars, or we are going to crash into those rocks!’
And, ‘Helen, if you don’t come out now and help us, we’ll all die. Row or die!’
There was a seriousness in her voice. The idea that we could have come all this way only to smash the boat to pieces, or at the very least severely damage the hull, before the race had even started would be such a waste.
‘Helen!’
Helen hauled herself out of the cabin, looked up from the back of the boat, glancing over the waves towards the black rocks beyond. She swallowed, still wearing her patched glasses; she could barely speak.
‘We’re fine!’ she managed to mumble over the sound of the surf. ‘Suicide Steve is over there and he’s much closer than we are. We are nowhere near them!’
‘He’s much closer to the harbour wall, where there’s much less wind. If you took that damned patch off your eye you might be able to see!’
As we made our way back to port with Helen still lying prone on deck, she and Janette looked at each other. Helen had always insisted, despite her chronic seasickness, that she could do it. She would not let anyone down. She would be the trooper who’d carry on rowing no matter what. But in that moment, there was a look of doubt in her eye. Fear, even. Could she really do this? There were plenty of stories of strapping rowers who’d had to be rescued off their boats due to extreme dehydration. All it took was a few days of copious vomiting to reduce a powerful 17-stone professional rower to a useless, quivering, weeping wreck. Could Helen – all 9 stone 3 of her – really make it across? And how on earth was she going to do it if she couldn’t last an afternoon in the Atlantic? There were 3,000 miles to go.
‘I’ll take the Stugeron tablets,’ she reassured the rest of us as we moored up next to Row2Recovery. ‘I’ll eat the Queezibics. I’ll get through it.’ As we all watched her slowly move her still-shaking body off the boat, we prayed she was right.
A few days later our families arrived, along with our eight children. Met by the lovely Ron from Halifax, they arrived in La Gomera on a wave of unconditional support and excitement. It was fantastic to have them there; they were a welcome distraction from the growing nerves and anxiety surrounding the race. And to show them around the place was a moment we had all been waiting for.
We were hoping that our idea to row the Atlantic would rub off on them. In a world that is full of Instagram negativity and cynical Snapchat, we really wanted to show our children the power of positivity. That if you wanted something enough and you worked hard enough, anything is possible. And there’s nothing more positive than hanging out with a group of rowers, all about to cross the Atlantic. With all sorts of creeds, colours and different backgrounds among them, each having been dealt a myriad of different hands in life, they were all here for the same purpose. There’s a saying that we’d heard a few times on our journey to the Canaries: ‘If you ask the question, “Why cross the Atlantic?” then you won’t understand the answer.’ The answer, of course, is, ‘Because it is there.’ And everyone sipping beers at night in The Blue Marlin understood that. As did all the crews packing their ready-meals, fiddling with their equipment and making anxious jobs for themselves as we all waited around for the start of the race.
Our families also made themselves useful. Ben, and Niki’s dad, Pete, were fantastic at doing the heavy lifting, lugging around the rudder and packing the giant para-anchor and endlessly giving us instructions on how to use a power tool or fix the watermaker. Memorably one evening, Ben very kindly went through the logistics and intricacies of the watermaker as we sat down in The Blue Marlin nursing our gin and tonics. He was very specific about how many times we should change the filter and how exactly we should do it. (Check it once a week and change it if it turns yellow, apparently.)
‘Yes, absolutely,’ declared Janette, taking a sip from her glass.
‘Great,’ nodded Helen.
‘Of course,’ said both Frances and Niki.
Later we were to realise that it would have perhaps been helpful if at least one of us had listened.
Our other husbands, Richard, Gareth and Mark, had a lot of corralling to do, keeping their eye on our gang – Helen’s two kids, Henry (13) and Lucy (16); Niki’s Aiden (9) and Corby (12); Janette’s Safiya (14) and James (18); and Frances’s Jack (13) and Jay (14). Although some of the children, due to their ages, were more useful than others, going backwards and forwards to the supply shops to pick up last-minute scissors or coils of rope, the others did what we’d always hoped they would – they mixed with the crews, heard their stories and came back all shiny-eyed and inspired. They were, of course, most fascinated by the collection of spare limbs left on the dock by the boys from Row2Recovery. They found it extraordinary that a group of men could overcome so many obstacles to row an ocean. They were the embodiment of the power of positive thinking.
However, much as we loved having our families with us, there were also a great many moments when we felt torn. The plan had been to fly them out on the Wednesday and Thursday before the race and for them to leave on the Sunday, with the race itself starting on Tuesday. With so much to check and go through, most of the days were spent with Rose, and it was only in the evenings that we really got to see our children.
We’d discussed many times how we wanted to leave the harbour on the day of the race, what our exit strategy would be, and we had all agreed, except Janette, that we would rather be rowing towards our children in Antigua, rather than away from them in La Gomera. So we didn’t want a send-off. We didn’t want to watch weeping nine-year-olds on the quay, frantically calling out their mothers’ names as they disappeared off into the distance. Equally, we also didn’t want to be waving and crying and shouting ‘I love you!’ right back across the waves as our families became small dots on the horizon. And, as Niki pointed out, none of us wanted to say the wrong thing. It would be difficult enough to say goodbye without saying something we would regret over the next three months, stuck on the ocean, with plenty of time to ruminate, churn and analyse from every angle what was said or not said. It was also psychologically smarter that every stroke we took would be one step closer towards them, rather than one step further away.
So it was decided that the majority would leave on the Sunday, taking all our luggage with them. (Janette’s family, being a little older and more used to her travelling abroad and being away for long periods of time, were staying until 1 p.m. on the Tuesday to wave us all off for the start of the race. They were keen to give us a send-off and Janette waskeen to have them around.) We would only have a small plastic bag of toothbrushes, toothpaste and two pairs of chafe-free pants (Janette won the argument!), which would see us through the next three months until we got to Antigua.
The Saturday before everyone left, there was a party in a cave behind the harbour with some dubious-tasting crabsticks and a seafood-flavoured Swiss roll and quite a lot of beer. We all talked about how we were feeling about the row, what we wanted to get out of it and how we thought it might change us.
‘I don’t want to worry as much,’ said Niki. ‘I want to be less organised – enough of the OCD.’
‘I want to be much MORE organised,’ said Helen. ‘I also want to prove that being a working mother doesn’t stop you from living your dreams.’
‘I don’t think I’ll change at all,’ declared Frances, taking a sip of her beer. ‘I shall probably come back exactly the same. The journey to get here has changed me already.’
‘I want to live in the moment,’ said Janette. ‘And’, she added, presenting a very small pair of turquoise shorts with green fluoro piping around the legs, ‘I am determined to fit into