25-31 Jul

Some stuff about the boat. It’s built of wood, and is 23 feet long, 6 feet wide at its widest. It has a cabin at the back, about 6 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet; enough for one, very cosy for two. There’s a smaller cabin at the front for stowing large items, and a series of lockers under the deck for the rest of the kit. It’s equipped with a compass, GPS, a navigation light, a VHF radio, a desalinator, a radar transponder, a satellite phone (connected to a PDA), and speakers for a sound system to plug into. All of this is powered by a big 12V battery, which is charged by three solar panels on top of the back cabin. There’s a sea cooker, a para-anchor for the bad times, and a life-raft in case of really bad times. All the mod cons, don’t you know.

Sadly, some of this is not strictly true. Whilst we do have a light, desalinator & radar transponder, they’re in no way attached to the boat. And we don’t even own the sat-phone, PDA, speakers, para-anchor or life-raft yet! So an awful lot of our time is being spent trying to get the boat ready to cross an ocean.

This week was a prime example. We’d set aside the 23rd/24th as a weekend to change the seat and slide system. We knew this was a reasonably large task, but we hadn’t counted on the new law that seems to be currently ruling our lives: “everything takes 3 times longer than it ought to”. So come Sunday night we were maybe halfway through the change. But on Friday morning we were due to head to Devon with the boat for an Ocean Rowing Society weekend., so the boat had no option but to be ready. Cue a week of heading straight down to the docks after work, and drilling, filing, screwing, gluing etc. until the wee hours. The two nights of pouring rain didn’t help our spirits, although we did cunningly find that we could work by torchlight in the massively cramped space under the tarpaulin. Good practice for uncomfortable conditions I guess!

The effort for the weekend was worth it though. We got our boat on the sea for the first time in Tor Bay, and competed in the time trials across the bay and back. Aha! A competition! We duly pulled our guts out, and beat all the other pairs by a significant margin; the unexpected bonus was also stuffing most of the fours! We don’t expect the oppo in the race proper to roll over quite so easily, but it’s great to be setting the standards.

Also worth mentioning that ocean rowers are a very social bunch – I’ve already made some very firm friends in the few times that we’ve met up. Hence the weekend was just as much about meeting others, checking out their boats, swapping notes and drinking! In particular, I finally got to meet one Roz Savage, a solo entry in the race, and an ex-employee of CHP, the company I work for and our major sponsor. Presumably they must put something in the water in our building!