Annie and Mel Atlantic Crossing: Blog 11 and 12
Monday 22nd February 2010: The Doldrums…..Well this is not what it said in the sales pitch of ocean rowing I can tell you: “Once you get south enough and start heading west towards Antigua, your pick up the trade winds and be zooming along at 25 knots“. Erm well we’re here, so where are these allusive trade winds?
Woodhousen described the sea as “a big watery desert” and Pete the skipper of Ocean Planet our support yacht says in all his years of sailing (and judging by the look of him, that quite a lot) he has never seen this part of the Atlantic so calm. Well that’s just great. This calm is predicted to stay with us for practically a week, and who knows after that. We are managing to get 2 knots out of Explore at best but only with the non-existent wind behind us. We might as well be trying to row through freeze dried porridge! And the temperatures are scorching, and with no wind to cool us down we are slowly being spit roasted here.
We have done all we can to think of how to boost our progress from redistributing the weight in the hatches, to rowing with a longer lighter set of oars more suitable to these conditions.
Mentally though we are fairly positive and determined to make the best of what we’ve got even though we do have a few crews overtaking us, which is not good but they are young-ish male pairs and to be honest they should overtake us and if they didn’t over take two old broads like us they ought to be d be ashamed of themselves!
Anyway all this plodding gives you a lot of time to reflect and concentrate on other things, such as pain in Mel’s case – she most definitely wins the biggest pain in the arse award. Mine is fairing considerably well, no doubt in thanks to Margaret and Maureen. A peeling nose is my biggest complaint at the moment, so life is pretty good it has to be said.
Obviously these arduous conditions seriously threaten our UK record attempt, but if we can still bag the UK record at the end of all of this we should be jolly proud of ourselves.
We celebrated 1000 miles to go a couple of days ago with some miniature bottles of champagne. Once the lovely contents were consumed (which took approx 30 seconds) I wrote a message and threw mine overboard. What’s the betting that bottle gets to Antigua before us?
Annie xx
Mel – Fri 19th February. Getting to the ‘bottom’ of it…
So we’re in 12th which is disappointing and isn’t ideal for us but is indicative of the battle that has emerged between Explore and two or three other boats. Ocean Summit (from the West Country) and Reason Why, (also from Bristol) and ourselves have been trading places and I find it unbelievable that after 45 days rowing the race is so close and that there are just 2 or 3 miles between us. But it does tend to focus the mind and makes it more exciting for us and everyone following us back home.
We have been off the pace last couple of days, but we’re not really sure why. It’s easy to plod along averaging 1.5 knots without really analysing what your doing. But I have become obsessed with what the other crews are up to. Some are performing similar to us but a lot are doing a lot better: we were one of the top performers but are now very much near the bottom.
So we have been asking questions of ourselves and the boat trying to figure out where it’s going wrong. We think there are two main reasons On the bottom front we are both suffering from pressure sores which are extremely painful and caused by sitting and rowing for 12 hours a day. It makes every stroke painful and must be slowing us down as we’re not giving it as much beef because of the pain. Our attitude has been, we just need to get on and do it but we now think that if it’s affecting our performance then we need to do something about it. So the serious painkillers are out and we’re hoping our bottoms get a rest and we can get back on form. It seems to be working so far so we hope it improves our speed. Last night I had an almost pain free row so our mileage should improve. However, we will have to ration the pills as there are not enough to last the rest of the trip. We’ll take them for a couple of days for now as things could get much worse later in the race.
The second thing is that we have retrimmed the boat again. As we eat more and more of our rations, the weight distribution changes, so we’ve moved more from the bow to stern – mostly the endless supplies of freeze-dried food which seems to go on and on. The idea is to keep the bow up and not digging into the water. It immediately feels lighter on each stroke optimising our speed – so we hope in the next 24 hrs we’ll be back on track. At the moment we’re off the British record pace, but are getting close to it again so are pressing hard.
The weather has been good but is predicted to be changeable meaning light and probably from the east. It should affect the northerly boats more and we are south. My decision to stay south might have worked – who knows. Whatever happens I don’t think there will be any 60 mile days in next few days.
The next milestone when we pass the 1000 miles to go mark tomorrow. We’re going to have a big party and get through more Christmas pressies and food. It feels as if it will all be downhill from there although it will still be a few more weeks to go. There is a psychological barrier here though, knowing there are just hundreds of miles to go rather than 1000s
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