4 June 2006
Fancy an Atlantic Row?

Our friend Roz Savage set out from the Canaries to row single-handedly 3000 miles across the Atlantic. She arrived in Antigua 103 days later, on March 13 this year. She writes today's dispatch.
 
"We've just seen this woman on TV who's going to row across the Atlantic in a 23-foot boat. She's obviously as mad as you are. You ought to give her a call.'

This was the first time that Adrian Flanagan had ever heard of me. It was his parents on the phone, and they thought Adrian and I might have something in common. They were right.

I first met Adrian last summer, when I was living in Emsworth and he was just along the coast in the Hamble. We were both up to our eyes in preparations for our respective voyages, but still found time to have dinner together occasionally. We talked about our hopes and fears, what we would miss, what we were looking forward to, how we thought we would cope. We bemoaned the trials and tribulations of the sponsorship drive, discussed what foods we would take, and compared notes on marine technology.

I was there to see him off from Hamble Point on that gusty day back in October 2005, just days before I left for the Canaries and the start of my rowing race. It was an emotional moment for me, feeling the buzz of expectation amongst the press and assembled onlookers, watching Adrian turning this way and that to pose for photographs, and wondering what was going through his head behind that professional and poised appearance. We had a final brief opportunity to wish each other luck and then went our separate ways to face our separate solo challenges.

Adrian came to play a larger role in my project than I'd envisaged. My weatherman let me down - the forecasts dried to a trickle and then stopped altogether. Emails and phone calls went unacknowledged. My shore manager (i.e. my mother) did her best for a while, but she had a disconcerting habit of calling easterlies westerlies, and vice versa, which led to a few momentary panics. She already had a lot to contend with, having to provide emotional and administrative support to an errant daughter undertaking her first big adventure just 18 months after we had lost my father, and on top of everything else the weather duties were more than she could handle.

So she and I were both relieved when Adrian stepped into the breach. He would request the GRIBs for my bit of ocean as well as his own, and then pass on his reading of the information to me. When he became otherwise occupied (rounding the Cape or some other such lame excuse) he passed me over to his weatherman Ricardo Diniz, who provided sterling service until my satellite phone packed up a month before I reached Antigua, leaving me totally out of contact for the remainder of my journey.

As well as giving me weather information, Adrian also provided much-needed moral support. I was finding the row much harder than I had ever envisaged, despite having talked to every ocean rower I could find.

It was the grinding relentlessness of it that was getting to me - feeling trapped on a tiny boat on a huge ocean, missing the freedom of my life on land, and having to row, row, row. I would think of Adrian and envy him - his boat with its mast and keel would only tip forwards and back, not constantly side to side as mine did, making even the most mundane of my tasks laborious and difficult. He was higher above the waterline than I was, so he wasn't constantly getting saltwater over his skin, in his dinner, in his bunk, in his clothes. I was constantly drenched, and the saltwater boils that developed on my thighs and buttocks were miserably painful. And when he hit favourable conditions he could sit and read books or make videos or send emails, whereas I had my hands fixed to the oars for 12 hours a day, with only my thoughts to entertain me after my amplifier packed up.

On the other hand, he was having to contend with a much longer period of solitude than I did (at least 9 months compared with my 3.5 months). He has to cope with extremes of temperature, from the sweltering equator to the frozen poles. And toughest of all for him, he has to cope with being away from his two boys, Ben and Gabriel, and knowing that they will be doing so much growing up while he is away.

But I wasn't thinking about his issues at this time. I was too busy feeling miserable and utterly sorry for myself. For me the only thing worse than carrying on was to quit - having got myself voluntarily into this situation I was determined to get through it, despite all my struggles.

Again Adrian came to the rescue. He sent me an email, in which he wrote:

'When you come to look back on it, the voyage will seem to have been over very quickly. Remember, it doesn't have to be fun to be fun. And it will have been fun once you are among the elite few who have single-handedly rowed an ocean.'

This really hit home. Even though my life at sea didn't become any easier, from that point on one of the main things that kept me going was the faith that it would all be worth it in the end. I spent days imagining myself back on dry land, revelling in my reception in Antigua, basking in the afterglow of my success, regaling people with my boring seafaring stories, lapping up the respect and admiration of all.

Of course, my dreams didn't necessarily come true, but the dreams themselves were enough to keep me going, dragging myself out of my bunk and back to the oars day after day after day.

And eventually I did make it to Antigua, and yes, it really did all feel worthwhile. And even more strangely, even though those 103 days felt endless at the time, they have now condensed in my memory into the blinking of an eye. Adrian was so right.

When I spoke to Adrian on the phone today (from his shore manager/ex-wife Louise's house) he asked whether I'd felt different when I got back to dry land. 'No,' I said, 'disappointingly normal. In fact, I'm having to work really hard to try and remember what I learned out there on the ocean, and to bring the best of that back to life ashore.
This is the ultimate challenge. This is when I determine whether those
103 days on the ocean were a life-enhancing experience, or just a very alternative way of spending a lot of time and a lot of money. It all comes down to how I choose to use that experience (or not) to make myself a better person.'

As somebody wiser than me said, 'It's not what the vision is, it's what the vision does'. It's not what the experience is, it's how I make it work for me.

Not many people would have understood what I was talking about, but Adrian did. There's a common understanding among adventurers, and among seafarers, especially the solo ones. There's an understanding among people who have faced the elements and felt the frustration, the anger, the awe, of being such a puny entity in an uncaring, dispassionate and yet glorious natural world, a world that can't be reasoned with, argued with, reckoned with.

Why do we go out there? Why do we do it? For me, and if I may be so presumptuous, I think maybe for Adrian as well, it's to try and come back a better person, to know that we have an inner strength of character that we can draw on in times of trouble.

They say, 'Worse things happen at sea.' When you've faced those worse things, and survived, you can take on the world.

To read more about Roz Savage and her future plans including a bid to be the first solo woman to row the Pacific, go to www.rozsavage.com.