5-11 Sep

The big news this week was that we’ve got celebrity opposition! I had known for a while that Ben Fogle (of TV’s Castaway programme a few years back, and various bits and pieces since) had entered the race, and that he had a “big celebrity” partner. There had been rumours as to who this was, but nothing was confirmed until the Monday’s Telegraph had a big picture of him with James Cracknell on the front.

This Cracknell chap is quite a good rower. For those of you who don’t follow rowing, he won gold in Sydney with Redgrave, Pinsent and Tim Foster, and then repeated the feat in Athens with Pinsent, Ed Coode and Steve Williams. He is generally held to be the most intense rower in the GB camp, hyper-competitive and ultra-focussed. In short, he’s not the kind of person I’d want to be racing over an Olympic 2000m race.

Happily, this isn’t a 6 minute race - it’s over 40+ days, and that blunts his advantage. I’m already savouring the prospect of beating a double Olympic champion at his own sport :) I’m not kidding - Dan and I honestly think we can beat them, for two main reasons. Firstly, Ben Fogle is not up to James’ standard. I’m sure he’s a great guy, he coped very well with a year on a remote Scottish island, and has since run the Marathon des Sables, a 151 mile race across the Sahara. But by his own admission he’s not a rower, and we’re not sure how he’s going to cope. We also think the difference in motivation between the two of them will cause tension - not the best environment for a winning performance.

Secondly, their article in the Telegraph speaks about how James needs to teach Ben how to row, how they need to take various courses in preparation, and how their boat is currently being prepared. This suggests to us that they’re not so well-prepared. We have been preparing for this challenge for a year now, and in some ways we’re still behind where we’d like to be. It would seem to us that Ben and James are simply not going to make the start line in a state to make a really swift crossing. But all credit to them for taking on the challenge - like the rest of us they’re going to have a very hard time, and I’m looking forward to having a beer with them when they finish.

For our own part, things are now really starting to ramp up. There’s about 4 weeks until we ship our boat, and we’re now bringing it all together in terms of getting the equipment sorted. We’ve ordered a bunch of stuff from the US to finish off our kit list, had a good go at the electrics which now seem to be working well, and made some tweaks to the steering system.

The last really big job was to give the boat a new coat of paint, which was the allotted task for this weekend. Ed Jones was hugely helpful in coming up with a new colour scheme that would make us look great, and we enlisted the help of a few friends in order to get it all done in a weekend. We’ve ordered a bunch of new stickers for our sponsors’ logos, and the boat should look fantastic within a few days - which is a good job as we have a photoshoot organised for this Friday.

One word of advice for any budding sailors out there - have some good shampoo and shower gel ready if you ever sand down a boat ready for new paintwork. I could quite easily have been a member of that Blue Man Group by the time I’d finished, and I still look like I’m wearing eyeliner. Who says that this race doesn’t put you in touch with your feminine side?