3-9 Oct

Our last week with the boat in the UK - almost emotional. Almost. I did my last overnight row on Monday - have done a fair few of these now, but they don’t get any easier. I get to the boat for about 8pm after work, then row for 2 hours, sleep for 2 hours, row for 2, sleep for 2, row for 2 and sleep for as long as I have before I have to get up and go to work again. Means I’m pretty exhausted by the time I get back to work the next morning, but excellent training, and every bit of on the water time helps.

Dan did the same on Wednesday, and I’m pleased to discover that he doesn’t go massively faster than me. With his training background it’s no wonder that he does go faster, but if I can keep pushing myself to something like his level, we should go very quickly in the race. At least that’s the plan!

Had a small piece in City A.M. again this week - really good of them to keep mentioning us in there. The reporter I talk to seemed to think I was a bit of a loon doing this kind of training, and wrote that city workers should “spare a thought for Rich Dewire”!! Oh well, if it gets us some extra interest then it’s all good - part of the aim of the game during these final weeks is to get as much public interest as possible, with a view to getting CHP’s name mentioned as much as possible, and raising a heap of cash for charity. Speaking of charity - if you haven’t yet sponsored us then please do so - it’s dead easy to do through our website, and would be much appreciated.

The weekend was spent knocking off as many of the last few jobs as possible on the boat. We finally got our radar transponder and light mounted - these have to be at least 1.5m off the sea level, in order to get a good range, so we have a long aluminium pole sticking up from near the bows, with them attached. We think it looks pretty cool, although it’s almost a shame that we can’t use it as a mast.

The one thing that didn’t go entirely according to plan was our new rudder. Having snapped the old one in two during the Great River Race, we got Woodvale to make us up a new one. They sent it by ParcelForce on the Thursday, with guaranteed overnight delivery. However, it hadn’t shown up by mid-afternoon on Friday - cue lots of phone calls trying to track it down. I spoke to some of the most well-mannered but ultimately totally unhelpful people in the world that afternoon, and would certainly not recommend ParcelForce for any items that are important! Thankfully it managed to arrive in the depot on Saturday morning, so we picked it up ourselves. It didn’t actually fit the boat, but you can’t have everything, can you? I’m sure we’ll fix it…