Andrew Giles - By profession I am a mechanical engineer. I had some prior experience of endurance events such as 1000 mile push bike races, various marathon distance running races etc, but had zero rowing experience before embarking on the challenge. All that changed quite rapidly once we were committed to the 2003 Woodvale race! I completed that race with Faye Langham in 56 days and 4 minutes.
Andrew Wrote: Your bank balance will develop a haemorrage and your girlfriend/wife
will probably leave you!!!!
Amongst the other physical effects sea sickness is very common due to
the size of the boat and the way it gets thrown about. I suffered
seriously for the first 3 days, Faye suffered for about 2 weeks on and
off. It gets worse when you take your eyes off of the horizon and
concentrate on a task such as updating the charts or logs, or even worse
fiddling with the watermaker! By incredibly luck at the last moment we
decided to take loads of oranges with us at the start. These turned out
to be literally the only things we could keep down - we couldn't even
keep water down, so the oranges were indispensible while we were
suffering with sea sickness.
Everyone loses weight, we both lost about 2 stone, although I wouldn't
advise particularly bulking up before the event - we were training so
hard that we could eat anything and still not put on weight!
You get your sea legs pretty quickly, such that you can move around the
boat in a heavy sea like an agile cat, but as soon as you get ashore
you're all over the place! This especially amused the onlookers at Port
St Charles when I got out of the boat onto a pontoon, tried to walk
straight across it to the jetty but made a diagonal drunken beeline for
the edge of the pontoon and then the water had someone not grabbed me!
This is due to your leg muscles literally wasting away because you're
not doing any walking and it leads to some very achey moments back on
land when you're building them back up again.
But all in all so long as you eat well there's no problem. Having got
off the boat I walked the 2 miles to our apartment in Speitstown (albeit
aided by my girfriend a bit) because I had waited so long to be able to
walk. We'd been rowing non stop for the last 26 hours because we were
racing two other boats, but after four hours kip we were in the pub
sinking some Bank's Beer and bathing in glory! We then went for a 10
mile walk the next day so the physical aspect can't be too bad all in
all.
The old bum takes a bit of a hammering though, so be prepared for some
pain in that department. After every shift we used wet wipes and talcum
powder and that was great. As things progressed we moved onto Sudacream
which was also excellent. We took plenty of cushions of differing
thickness so that we could vary the pressure points on the bum and try
and ease the pain. Sheepskin is great for absorbing some of the moisture
without going salt encrusted we took a whole hide with us and replaced
the bits we were sitting on when they got too horrific looking. You
never can escape the pain altogether though and I've still got one blood
encrusted sheepskin on my mantlepiece as a souvenier!
Other effects? Well while you're at sea you'll sometimes be miserable
and swear never to do this again, but a year later you'll be plotting
and planning on how to afford to do it again!
