Riding the blue wobbly stuff

 
Christopher Dodd meets the women who've crossed oceans

It was raining an ocean as I parked my car behind the Albert Hall. Stepping out, an umbrella appeared over me, under which was an attractive blonde. Excuse me, but did I know where the Royal Geographical Society was? Sure, that's where I'm going. You must be Debra Veal, Regatta's recent cover girl, who had found her way from Tenerife to Barbados in a rowing boat but was lost in South Kensington. Philip Marlowe, glad to be of service.

The Royal Geographic is a humbling place, dressed in dark wood and decorated in the style of pioneer cartographers, its rooms and corridors resonating from great explorers and adventurers. Most of them men.

We were there to celebrate one of the world's most exclusive clubs, the eleven women who have crossed oceans in rowing boats. Kenneth Crutchlow of the Ocean Rowing Society had worked wonders in putting together such an unique gathering. Never before have so many ocean rowers been gathered under the same roof.

The evening began and ended with mingling in the spacious bar, a rarity among bars because the stories related there are seldom tall. 

There were Stephanie Brown and Jude Ellis who placed fourth in the 2001 Atlantic rowing race. There was Sylvia Cook, the first, who opened the bidding with an east to west Pacific crossing with John Fairfax. There was the intense Kathleen Saville who crossed Atlantic and Pacific with her late husband Curtis. There was the diminutive Nadia Rice, a speedy racer with her husband David in the 1997 Atlantic rowing race.There was Isabel Fraser who has married the man with whom she did the 1997 race. There was Jan Meek, another 1997 veteran who crossed the ocean with her army cadet son Daniel. There was Diana Hoff, the Scottish doctor whose solo Atlantic crossing ended on the fifth of January 2000 but started on the same day and from the same place as the American Tori Murden, who completed the voyage first. Murden was the only absentee, having stayed at home at the last minute to care for a sick relative. And there was Debra, the media queen of ocean rowing, who last year rowed the Atlantic in 111 days, 98 of them on her own after husband Andrew abandoned ship and disqualified her from the Ward Evans race. You could always spot Debra in the venerable gloom of the Royal Geographic because she was haloed by arc lights. The television crews recognised nobody else.

Sylvia Cook was the first to tell her story in the lecture theatre. She was disarmingly funny, showing slides of her Pacific saga with Fairfax. On April 26 1971, after several false starts, they left San Francisco in a boat designed by the canoeist and yacht designer Uffa Fox, and arrived at Hayman Island, Australia, 361 days later. They took lengthy stopovers at Ensanada in Mexico, Washington Island, Fanning Island and the Gilbert and Ellis islands. They steered by the stars and lived off the fish of the ocean, and Fairfax was bitten in the arm by a shark.

Cook shares with Kathleen Saville the loneliness of the ocean before the era of satellite communication devices, fresh water makers, laptops or title sponsors. The decks of their boats were stacked with drinking water containers; the most valuable tool was the sextant.

Kathleen and Curtis voyaged from Casablanca to Antigua in 89 days in 1981, and then from Peru to the New Hebrides in 189 days in 1984-85. Their motive for doing the Atlantic row came, incredibly, from Jimmy Carter. He forced the American Olympic team to boycott the games of 1980, and a head race in Canada for which the Savilles had entered was cancelled in protest. 'We decided to do something bigger,' Kathleen said. They moved in with her parents while they built their own boat in a barn, eventually living under canvas and then in the boat itself before taking it to Casablanca. Between their Atlantic and Pacific crossings, they kept in trim by rowing the Mississippi and the coast of Labrador.

On the Pacific row the Savilles got fed up, and thought about finding a way to quit without losing face. They thought about crash landing on an atoll north of Fiji. They thought about how it would have to be a place from where they could be rescued. 'We went to the edge and looked over. We wouldn't have learned that without each other.' Commitment, will, determination and friendship got them to the other side. The third crewmember, a Peruvian chicken who sat on their oar handles, went into the pot en route.

Nadia Rice stood away from the microphone which towered above her to deliver her message. 'I am not in the same class as Cook or the solo performers,' she said. 'We raced across the ocean. We were our resources. We had no communication equipment. We had to fix it. We worked together as a team. I was fourth in the pecking order, after my two sons and a cousin turned down the offer to join my husband. I was 50 when I did the race. I'm an ordinary person who did something extraordinary.'

Sponsors didn't want to back old buggers like us, she said. 'At the end of every day I thought of three good things that had happened that day - things like seeing a bird, David saying something nice to me. I never allowed myself to enjoy the thought that I had done it until we got to the end.' They did Tenerife to Barbados in two hours over 55 days in the 1997 race.

Isabel Fraser and Jan Meek were also in that 1997 race. Fraser and her partner Richard Duckworth took 84 days and one hour to bring out the best in each other on the ocean. 'We did it as a couple to make or break the relationship.' Now they are married. Meek and son Daniel took 100 days and 18 hours. Each day they stopped for a G&T at sunset. Meek's definition of G&T, however, is 'guts and tenacity'.

'I'm unique because I did it with my little boy,' Jan says. 'I was a couch potato into reading and classical music. I rowed across the Serpentine when I was eight. I was 51 when I did the race. It took me 18 months to get fit. You have to be fit,' she said, physically and mentally.

Jan told her story well. 'There was a book out on us in Tenerife before the start', she says. 'My fear was failure.' Sometimes the ocean was like Lake Atlantic, sometimes it was waves the size of your house. She couldn't remember who first said it, but she agrees that 'there's no such thing as an atheist in a force 9 gale'.

She had her own dolphin, her own whale. What she learned was that if you want to, you can do it. While you're doing it you'll hate it. When you've done it you'll remember it for the rest of your life. She concluded by quoting from The Last of the Windjammers: the sea is the maker of men. It has no use for slackers, fools or the timid.

Diana Hoff rowed at university and had sailed round the world with her family before she got the Atlantic rowing bug. Her daughter Elizabeth attempted the ocean before her, but had to stop after 10 days. Diana set off from Los Gigantes, Tenerife, on the same 1999 day as Tori Murden. Murden got to Guadeloupe in just over 81 days, 3333 miles. Hoff got to Barbados in 113 days, 3025 miles, making her the second solo woman to cross an ocean. She took a dip every day, and a glass of red wine, and listened to a lot of books. She said that the ocean is full of life, and that was exciting.

One form of life that Debra Veal found after Andrew left was a sea turtle called Barney. Turtles are the slowest swimmers in the ocean, and Barney could keep up with her. She began to worry that Barney's back scratching on the hull would scrape a hole in it, so she had to raise the rate. Barney did not stay the pace for 111 days.

Throughout, these extraordinary, ordinary people gave their large audience funny and frightening incidents, wondrous moments and flashes of courageous people facing themselves in the mirror. Winners all. Last came the fastest, the Kiwis Stephanie Brown and Jude Ellis who did the 2001 Tenerife to Barbados race in 50 days and 7 hours, averaging 53 miles a day. Stephie was born a Geordie, sister of Regatta cartoonist and former GB international Roger Brown, and has spent 11 years in New Zealand.

There was no question of their motivation. 'We had personality profiles done, and basically we are both ambitious bitches,' Jude said. They worked as a team with race winners Steve Westlake (Stephie's partner) and Matt Goodman. They took to the Atlantic to race. 'Jude had a rowing background, I had an adventure background,' Stephie said.

Jude described the Atlantic scenery as 'lots of blue wobbly stuff'. They didn't benefit by finding trade winds, so they expect their 50 days to be beaten easily - but not by themselves. 'I want to do future adventures where there's scenery, ' Stephie said.

When I emerged, enlightened, from this extraordinary evening at the Royal Geographic, the rain had stopped. The South Kensington horizon was beautiful, bathed in the sheen of streetlights at dusk. I won't be going for anyone's record.