Battling the Oceans in a Rowboat by Mick Dawson

Author:Mick Dawson [DAWSON, MICK]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sports & Recreation / Extreme Sports
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 2017-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

STORM!

WE NOW HAD TO GET Mos’s boat ready for sea again. She’d been lifted out of the water and partially dismantled and was now waiting to be packed into a container and shipped back to England. We needed to set off as soon as possible if we were to have any hope of catching up with the rest of the fleet. The clock was ticking.

There was, of course, another problem, the fact that of all the boats in the fleet, the soon-to-become Charmed Life was maybe the worst set up. She was well built, safe, and surprisingly fast, but had there been time I would have changed or replaced almost every system on her.

It wasn’t a lack of will on Mos’s part but simply a lack of knowledge. If I’d had my boat from the start of our Atlantic race in front of me, I’d have found almost as much to criticize. As I looked at Charmed Life on the quayside, though, that didn’t make the situation any less frustrating.

The first thing I noticed was that the oars were the wrong type. They were great for flat-water rowing, but on an ocean row they would be vulnerable to snapping. They simply weren’t robust enough for an ocean row. Unfortunately it was too late to replace them. We’d eventually arrive in Antigua with only one of the original eight oars still intact. The only other working oar was damaged and had been repaired, and, as it turned out, just forty-five minutes away from joining its seven predecessors by breaking in two when Mos took a friend for a spin in the harbor after we’d finished. I had expected some breakage, but nowhere near that level of attrition.

The water maker, an obvious essential for any ocean voyage, was the cheapest and worst option available. That said, it was identical to the one Steve and I had used on our Atlantic crossing. Although it worked to the best of its ability for the whole of our Atlantic voyage, that was rarely the experience other rowers had. For Mos and me, it struggled to supply enough water for drinking and cooking, let alone for any other jobs on board. At best it could produce six liters of water an hour. For my Pacific rows I used a Spectra water maker, which produced almost 25 liters an hour.

That kind of water supply transforms an ocean row. It means that not only do you have plenty of water to drink and cook with, but you can wash regularly. You can also rinse the salt off the boat, particularly the seat covers, which easily become saturated, causing sores and making life at the oars deeply uncomfortable. Crucially, it’s also less of a drain on the precious battery power.

The useless water maker had been fitted in the boat when Mos had bought her, and it would have cost several thousand pounds to replace it with a better system. In any event, he had decided against it. That was an understandable financial decision—unless you’d ever rowed across an ocean.

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