What can you do to avoid the one in a million chance, or perhaps in ocean rowing terms one in 50 or 60 chance, of something going drastically wrong? What action or item of equipment turned a potentially dangerous incident around and what made your boat a safer place to be during an ocean rowing crossing? Possibly even more importantly what would you add to a future row?
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:
We didn't have anything too bad really, the worst bits of trouble were
caused by very sudden and violent changes in the weather. You just cope
with these - it never ever ceased to amaze me how much punishment these
little wooden boats can take. When we were holed up in the cabin on the
sea anchor we got repeatedly engulfed, and I guess technically sank
quite few times, but the little boat always bobbed up again. We were
meticulous (some said anal....) in our preparation of the boat, and this
repaid us many times over in that nothing broke at all, some stuff like
seat wheels wore out quite often but we anticipated this and just
replaced them as and when.
Other problems involved some near misses with cargo vessles, and we had
a very close call with an inquisitive fishing trawler in a force 6
squall who thought we were a liferaft and wanted to rescue us!
