North & South

This is a tale of how two New Zealand boat crews rowed for 40 days and 40 nights, finished a trans-Atlantic race within nine hours of each other and came to despise their fellows. In one corner there’s Team CRC — rowers Steve Westlake and Matt Goodman. In the other there’s Holiday Shoppe Challenge — Kevin Biggar, Jamie Fitzgerald and campaign manager Rob Hamill. It’s a densely complicated story, so first, a little history.

Tenth in his first Coast To Coast, second at the world dragon boating champs, Australasian “Police Olympics” winner, outstanding at the World Police and Fire games, built like Baywatch beefcake, driven and a full-on fitness junkie, 33-year-old constable Steve Westlake would seem a born athlete. He’s bitten off some meaty challenges in his life, not the least of which has been the 2900 nautical mile rowing race across the Atlantic Ocean.

Sergeant Phil Stubbs was the man who inspired him to do it. Stubbs had won the inaugural Atlantic race in 1997 with Olympic rower Rob Hamill. Stubbs had also been Westlake’s instructor at police college and got to know him through surf lifesaving.

Stubbs and Westlake became training buddies, travelling companions and, towards the end of 1998, a novice pairs crew on the 2000m flat water rowing scene — real rowing — in preparation for a new assault on the Atlantic in 2001.

Stubbs told media he wouldn’t have considered rowing the Atlantic again with anyone but Westlake. He and former rowing partner Hamill were chalk and cheese personalities: although victors, their relationship had buckled under the intense pressure of 40 days locked together in a very small boat. But Stubbs never got the chance to row again. He died, aged 37, in December 1998 when his light plane nosedived into Karekare beach.

From then on Westlake was doing it for “Stubbsy”. On he rowed. In his first go at the national rowing championships (1999), he was fourth in the pairs. ...