Four Mums in a Boat: Friends who rowed 3000 miles, broke a world record and learnt a lot about life along the way

Frances was in her element. Having been at university in Southampton, she was right back there, loving every minute, reliving her student days. Normally quite reserved, she was now talking to all the competitors, thriving on everyone’s positive attitude. Of course we were all going to make it across! Of course it was possible! Of course! Of course!

There was the small matter of passing our scrutineering test first. We knew the race organisers would not allow a boat into the water until it had passed this very intensive check. Every tiny piece of kit, from survival suits to safety lines right the way down to the number of plasters in the medical kit, had to be laid out in a particular format next to the boat and checked off the 11-page list of mandatory kit. The day of our final scrutineering was nerve-racking. It took us nearly the whole day to lay everything out by Rose. Would we have all the kit? Were the ropes the right diameter? Did we have the right splint in our medical kit? Will our daily food packages have enough calories in them? All the other crews were obviously in the same boat, so when someone was missing something or needed something there was a lot of sharing – things were flying from one boat to the next and the sense of community spirit was fantastic. Everyone was willing to help out others. It was inspiring.

However, keeping occupied while Lee from Atlantic Campaigns slowly and methodically went through the kit was a nightmare.

‘Shall we just pace up and down on the quayside?’ suggested Helen.

‘Go for a cup of coffee?’ asked Frances.

‘I’m too nervous,’ said Niki. ‘What if we’re missing something?’

Eventually we took it in turns to answer Lee’s questions, otherwise the two or so hours he spent going through each tiny item of kit would have been excruciating. Our hearts were pounding. Our mouths were dry. Eventually. Finally. At last. We passed! Never before has a group of four working mothers been so thrilled to have sourced 35 sticky plasters in their lives! We were race-ready and could launch Rose. We booked a slot the next morning to get her into the water.

We were on a high. Nothing could hold us back now.

However, our first practice run out with Rose was a different story. The rules of the challenge stipulate that you must have at least 24 hours of sea experience in the boat before heading off, and even though we had already ticked that box, we were keen to know what she felt like in the Atlantic. How would she handle? How would she feel? It was also a good idea to run through a few manoeuvres – like getting the watermaker going – while we still had time to make any adjustments on the luxury of dry land. Anything that went wrong once we’d started the race would have to be fixed at sea. And we all knew how difficult that would be. So any problem we identified now would, in theory, be a bit of a bonus.

Less than an hour outside the harbour wall the first fly in our ointment became apparent: Helen. The seas were big, the waves were choppy and coming at us from all angles, and the boat was bouncing around like a ping-pong ball in a Jacuzzi. We’d been warned that for the first few weeks out of La Gomera the sea would be fast, furious and terrifying, but we had only just left the harbour and already the ocean was throwing us around like a toy.

‘I’m going to be sick,’ announced Helen as she deposited her breakfast down the side of the boat.

‘And again.’ She hurled.

Poor Helen suffers from chronic seasickness, which is not an ideal affliction in an ocean rower. We all knew she suffered from it and we had discussed it many times before. She wasn’t the only one. Frances was not immune to the odd vomit either, but the difference between the two of them was that when Frances was sick, she felt better and was able to continue rowing. She would simply pause mid-stroke in order to throw up over the side of the boat and then carry on. Whereas Helen was out cold. Helen could not move, she could not row, she could not get out of the cabin. All she could do was lie there, making strange lowing noises like a cow about to give birth, unable to sit up, speak or swallow.

And she tried everything: pills, potions, ginger pegs… She’d even been given, in case of great emergency, a seriously strong anti-emetic, that a doctor friend of ours, Caroline Lennox, had suggested we pack should we desperately need it. Helen had shown it to the handsome, God-like race doctor, Thor Munsch, who advised against taking it. His counsel was simple. She was going to be sick; she should go with it until it was out of her system, and then she would be fine. But Helen was desperate to find a remedy. Today she was trying out a special pair of ‘travel shades’ that blocked vision in one eye, which the company who had provided them said might do the trick.

‘They are not working,’ she said, declaring the obvious as she held onto the side, retching. ‘All that is happening is that I’m being sick while looking out of one eye!’

She turned to look at Janette, who was steering the boat as Frances and Niki rowed. It was tempting to laugh. She was clinging onto the side of the boat, her long brown hair all over the place, wearing a pair of glasses with a patch over one eye. The effect was faintly ridiculous.

‘I’m going back to the Stugeron travel sickness tablets,’ she announced as she vomited again and disappeared back down into the tiny cabin below.

The problem with having a member of the crew completely incapacitated with seasickness is twofold. Not only do the rest of the crew have to pick up the slack, which is impossible when there is simply no room for passengers on a small boat in the middle of a race to cross the Atlantic, but also if the boat is in danger and all hands are needed on deck then our power to deal with a difficult situation and our capacity to row ourselves out of trouble are severely diminished.

And it wasn’t long before that happened. About an hour and a half into our practice the winds, the waves and the currents suddenly turned against us and we were heading towards the rocks just outside the harbour.

‘One! Two!’ Janette was urging Niki and Frances to dig their oars in deep to help turn the boat away from the rocks. The waves were slapping at the boat from all angles, drenching us. ‘Pull!’ she yelled, tugging on the rudder, trying to keep the boat from careering towards the collection of sharp black rocks just visible above the foam.

‘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 these!’

‘What size are they?’ shrieked Helen as we all laughed.

‘Medium,’ Janette replied solemnly. ‘They are a little tight.’

We all watched, laughing, as Janette wriggled and struggled, snaking her hips from side to side, as she tried to edge the teeny tiny shorts over her knees. But they refused to budge and stood firm.

‘Mmm,’ said Frances, looking her slowly up and down. ‘This is going to be quite a long trip.’

The next day we said farewell to our families. The tears flowed, the hugs were tight and the goodbyes were painful.

Niki, whose children are the youngest, was perhaps the most upset. It was obvious by her abject silence and the firm grip she had on Gareth’s hand that she was trying extremely hard to keep it together. Her teeth were gritted and the smile on her face was tight to the point of rictus.

‘If I speak, I will cry,’ she said very quietly to her husband as they slowly walked towards the ferry.

Aiden and Corby were also none too keen to leave. They’d loved the boats and the sunshine, and spending Christmas without their mum was going to be hard. Christmas really was their thing. Their magic time of year. Niki was queen of Christmas and now she wasn’t going to be there. ‘Bye, Mum. See you after Christmas. Good luck,’ they said, hugging Niki as tightly as they could. Having kept it together over breakfast and smiling as brightly as she could all the way to the ferry, this proved too much for Niki. The tears started to roll. Try as she might, she could not stop them.

‘It won’t be long,’ Gareth whispered in her ear. ‘We’ll be thinking of you all the time. And just think of how it will feel in Antigua. We’ll be waiting for you.’

They hugged one last time before they boarded the ferry. Niki waved cheerfully as the tears poured down her cheeks.

Meanwhile, Helen was desperately trying to be bright and jolly, endlessly talking extremely quickly about anything at all other than the row, and trying to say positive things to Henry and Lucy.

‘Don’t forget your GCSEs,’ she said to Lucy. ‘Keep working hard. It’s only seven months to go. They’ll fly by. You can do it. You can nail them, smash them… And you –’ She turned to Henry. ‘You can enjoy school and make me proud. I am already proud… even more proud… if it’s possible to be prouder…’

And with one final kiss to Richard and the children, Helen wished them all a Happy Christmas as she waved them onto the boat.

Frances’s boys were much less keen on making a fuss. After some strong, brave hugging, she simply kissed Jay, Jack and Mark and waved them goodbye as everyone boarded the ferry back to Tenerife.

It was an odd feeling as our families left. The sadness was balanced by fear and the excitement of what was about to happen. All the waiting, the focus and the hard work was about to come to fruition and we were ready to go. We wanted to get out there and get on with it. It was then, when we got back to the marina, that we discovered the race had been cancelled. Not cancelled as such, but delayed, and delayed by a whole five days. It was a huge shock, but there was nothing to be done. The southerly winds were too strong – they’d blow us all back into the Canaries, or worse, and we wouldn’t stand a chance of getting to Antigua no matter how hard we rowed. The harbour master and the race officials were adamant we would have to wait for a better weather window before they would allow us to leave. We might have been desperate to get going, but the ocean clearly had other plans.

Most of the crews took it quite well – nearly every other race before us had suffered some sort of delay, so it was not unexpected. Except we, of course, had not quite thought that possibility through and found ourselves turfed out of our ‘deluxe’ Spanish apartment with only a plastic bag of toothpaste and pants to our name. Fortunately, Janette had a plan. As her family was staying on a little longer, she’d managed to find a hotel up the hill. The Parador – a five-star, no less – where they viewed us with deep suspicion as we shuffled into their smart reception area, wearing nothing but our rowing vests and black Lycra shorts, swinging our carrier bags.

The delay sadly meant that Janette had to say goodbye to her family too before the start of the race. They had their flights booked to leave on Tuesday after we were supposed to have set off. There was talk of Ben, Safiya and James staying on, but in the end it was decided that they, too, should leave. The start was currently five days delayed, but it could change. There was no point in them waiting in limbo, especially this close to Christmas. So they said their goodbyes, with Janette keeping it as light as possible.

‘Good luck, Mum,’ said Safiya, with a wave.

‘Watch out for the sharks!’ joked James. Janette hates sharks, so much so that she almost never swims on holiday.

‘No! I’m not setting foot in that ocean!’

‘Don’t take too long,’ smiled Ben.

‘I won’t!’ laughed Janette.

‘Row hard and you’ll get there sooner!’ he suggested.

‘Never thought of that!’ quipped Janette.

‘Bye!’ they waved.

‘Bye!’ she waved.

Janette carried on smiling and waving as they boarded the ferry, before walking around the corner and collapsing against the wall of the ticket office, where she promptly burst into tears.

So now we were alone. Just us and Rose. Occasionally a giant cruise ship would dock in the harbour and we’d hear people shouting.

‘Look, that’s them! The Yorkshire Rows. There they are. With their tiny little boat.’

It seems our little stint on the telly with James Cracknell had been a bit of a hit back home.

‘Good luck!’ they’d yell, waving at us. ‘We’re thinking of you!’

It was wonderful to think that we had some support out there. We were, after all, trying to raise money for charity, so any interest we gained along the way was incredibly helpful. But it was an odd time, sitting around and making jobs for ourselves, waiting to hear when we were going to set off.

So the arrival of Wayne and Tracy was a welcome relief. Close friends of Janette’s, they had been on a trip of a lifetime to go and see the Northern Lights in Iceland for the past 10 days. They had never flown before and were first-time owners of a passport. They had been gutted not to be able to see Janette off in the first place, as they were away. However, having read about the delayed start to the race, they decided to change planes in London (they were clearly ‘liking the flying thing’) and come to La Gomera. None of us believed they would make it until we saw Tracy tottering down the pontoon towards us, waving frantically, still wearing her Northern Lights outfit.

‘Yoo-hoo!’ she yelled, picking her way past the boats in her fur boots and heavy jacket, with lots of blonde hair. ‘Here we are!’ She was followed by Wayne, who, a few years younger than Tracy, was also dressed for the frozen wastes of Iceland. ‘We’re here!’ he grinned. ‘We had to come and see you off!’

And they did. Come race day they were the ones waving and shouting goodbye as we slowly edged our way out of the port.

SHIP’S LOG:

‘Prepare and prepare again. Whatever you do in life, throw yourself into it, learn everything you can and be ready for the ride of your life. Believe in yourself and believe in the special people around you, because they believe in you.’

(JANETTE/SKIPPER)

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