‘Mums know their daughters,’ agreed Janette. ‘Warts and all!’
By the end of lunch, they were all onside. Janette’s dad was interested in the route, and all of them concerned that she came back safely.
‘I could understand their reservations,’ said Janette. ‘If it were my children telling me that, I’d be the same. I’d encourage them and support them, but I’d also worry a lot.’
There were a few others who were less keen to come round and made it clear they didn’t share the same ambition. There were some older women who looked at our adventure as a flight of fancy. The idea that we had not settled for our lot, that we still wanted to do something else beyond our careers, bringing up children or being good wives was something they found quite difficult to comprehend. There weren’t that many of them, but those who disagreed with what we were planning were actually quite vocal. Maybe it was an age thing. They had never been allowed to express dissatisfaction; they had never been allowed to dream about doing anything else. They had not been allowed to go on their own journey. Perhaps it was jealousy that we were trying to do something new, something for ourselves. One thing is for sure, we would often get accused of being selfish. Sometimes it was expressed as concern. More often it was simply a bald statement: this was not a trip a mother should do. We should leave it to the men and be satisfied with what we already had.
But what if what we’ve got is not enough? Marriage, jobs, children – we were all incredibly lucky, that much we knew. We’d all worked extremely hard to get where we were, but… but… Was there something else? The wind in our hair? The rain on our face? Deep, intimate friendship? A challenge? Risk? Adventure? An opportunity to test ourselves to the absolute limit? To stretch ourselves and see just how far we could go? And, most crucial of all, to see what, or who, comes out the other side. The idea that there is a bigger, more inspiring world out there, crammed with opportunities, excitement and experiences, was too great to resist. It was all for the taking.
In the words of the American endurance swimmer Diana Nyad, whom Frances was fond of quoting: ‘What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving them.’
Or as Helen would say: ‘It’s only three months! In a lifetime, that is nothing. Three months to be out of an office, out of a nine-to-five, Monday-to-Friday, month after month, year after year job. Who would not give anyone three months? Look at the bigger picture, not the three months. Who doesn’t benefit? The children get to see a different part of life that is steeped in positivity, something they would never experience anywhere else. They absorb it and it’s in them forever. The idea that they can do anything will stay with them all their lives. Just three months, that’s all. And if I listened to the naysayers and said, “Oh, I can’t do that. That’s three whole months. I’ll just stay at home at the kitchen sink,” what an opportunity missed for everyone!’
January 2014
By the time the boat club dinner came around in January we were all quite excited. It was the one-year anniversary of our decision to enter the race and the four of us were now committed to entering and rowing those 3,000 miles. Niki and Helen had yet to pay their registration fees, but Gareth was on board now and Richard could see that Helen was going whether he liked it or not, so he’d decided he was beginning to like it.
Dressed in our finery, we settled down at what now appeared to be our usual table towards the back of the room. This time it was just the eight of us and everyone was in a good mood. It was also the anniversary of our husbands actually meeting, and so much had gone on, so much had happened in those last 12 months, that it seemed right that we were all here together again.
Ben poured the wine, Janette regaled the table with stories of the handsome polo-playing boys in La Gomera, Frances and Helen talked training, Richard and Mark chatted about their Christmases, while Niki and Gareth were just enjoying their first rowing dinner experience.
We were all slightly on tenterhooks. At the drinks beforehand we’d been talking to other parents, telling them a little about our trip, spreading the word, hoping that we might pick up some sponsors or donations or just some encouragement. Which we did. Everyone was so enthusiastic about the idea, and obviously the boat club people there already knew about us.
So during the dinner we waited for the speeches. We listened attentively to the rundown of the school’s sporting achievements. We were waiting, our hearts pumping slightly, riding a small wave of adrenaline and expectation. We were going to row an ocean – would they say anything? Would they salute us? Toast us, even? Wish us bon voyage and say that they were delighted and proud of our intention? We held our breath, straining our necks, peering over from the back of the room. And then, suddenly, the speeches were all over.
We looked at each other.
No one had said anything at all. No one had mentioned us. No one had said a word about our challenge. But then, why on earth should they? It was a school boat club dinner, where all matters to do with the school and the boat club were discussed. Our adventure and our plans had very little to do with them. It was our trip and our obsession. And the Guy Fawkes’ Boat Club is only a satellite of the main rowing club itself.
But… And then it suddenly dawned on us as we sat there, nursing our glasses of wine, that perhaps no one actually took our idea seriously. Or worse, they didn’t want to make a big fuss of us or mention it just in case we failed. Maybe they thought we’d never make it to the start line in the first place.
We didn’t win any raffle prizes that year, and the night ended rather soberly. It was a harsh reminder about how hard we were going to have to work that coming year – about how far we still had to go.
SHIP’S LOG:
‘Don’t get discouraged; there will be doubters. There is risk in pursuing a dream or a goal. Each step forward is a step in the right direction. Don’t let anyone stop you from taking the step.’
(JANETTE/SKIPPER)
CHAPTER 7
Rose
‘Start by doing what’s necessary, then do what’s possible, and suddenly you’re doing the impossible.’
ST FRANCIS OF ASSISI
It was the beginning of 2014 and we had precisely zero funds in our Atlantic bank account. We had attracted lots of interest. Everyone (well, almost everyone) was enthusiastic for us. But we did not have a single sponsor. Not one. Helen, as our communications director, had come up with some great ideas for attracting sponsorship deals. There were myriad options to choose from, starting with the £250 Club, which meant you could have your name plastered (6 x 4 inches in size) on the boat for £250, plus a profile on the still-to-be-built website. Then there was the Platinum Sponsorship deal at £10,000, for which you received kit branding, logo and brand recognition on all media, promotion and a 2 x 4 foot logo on the boat. Plus there was the ultimate ‘bespoke’ package that was available by negotiation, with more branding and profiling than you could shake an oar at. But there was one major problem with all of this.
‘We need the boat,’ said Janette one evening as she ponderously played with her pencil and sipped her coffee. ‘There’s no getting away from it. We’re nothing without a boat.’
‘She’s right,’ nodded Frances, leaning back in her chair.
‘No one is going to give us any money without one,’ confirmed Helen, leafing through all the sponsorship forms and ideas that Niki had just printed out.
‘Well then,’ said Janette, rubbing her hands together. ‘Let’s get one.’
‘How?’
‘I’ll buy one.’
We all looked at Janette. Was she seriously offering to buy an ocean rowing boat single-handedly? We all knew she was impetuous. She and Ben had once gone to the Boat Show in London only to come away with an order for a 40ft yacht (apparently it was the offer of six free cushions that sealed the deal), which they worked out how to pay for as they drove back up the M1. Janette is renowned for being a positive risk-taker; she weighs up the pros and cons and then moves. And
once she moves, she moves swiftly. She is dynamic, kind and very, very generous. The ultimate yes person. She always says she works out the worst-case scenario and usually the worst case is nowhere near as bad as you think. It’s all about gut instinct – the sixth sense, as she calls it. She thinks we should listen to it and trust it more often.
‘What?’ she said, looking from one shocked face to another. ‘You’re paying me back. I’m not giving you a boat! What do you take me for? It’s an investment. We want to row the Atlantic, we need sponsorship, and for that we need a boat. It’s simple. No boat means no sponsorship, and no sponsorship means no rowing across the Atlantic. So let’s get the boat and you lot can pay me back later.’
The going price for an ocean-going rowing boat starts at £33,000, and the only reason Janette had that amount of money to donate – sorry, loan – to our cause was because over the years of building the business she and Ben had been squirrelling away some money for a rainy day. And today was a rainy day indeed – bloody pouring!
Ben backed her decision, but there were a few who thought she was completely mad to put so much money into what looked like such a precarious project.
‘The coach at the boat club took me aside. He was very concerned. He said he’d heard that I was putting a lot of money into this. I don’t know how he got to know about it, but they talk, don’t they, at boat clubs? He said he was worried that the project wasn’t going to take off and I’d be left with this boat. He was worried that we weren’t even going to get to the start line and he thought I’d have this useless thing and the others would just walk off into the sunset, leaving me to it. He was mostly worried about Helen. Poor Helen. In his eyes, she was clearly rubbish. She did make a huge fuss when she was rowing in the river, squealing if a wave came along. But I told him not to worry. “She looks like a princess and she acts like a princess, but deep down she’s not. When the going gets tough she gets going,” I reassured him. Although the going has to get very tough for her to get going.’
We bought the boat from Charlie Pitcher, the world’s fastest Atlantic solo rower, who has a boat workshop called Rannoch Adventure in Burnham-on-Crouch, Essex. Bizarrely, we had first met Charlie at a lunch at the finance company Brewin Dolphin, in London, just before Christmas. It was something that Frances had organised after a chance meeting in the sandwich queue one lunchtime. She bumped into an old work contact, Martin, whom she chatted to about the row and he very charmingly invited all four of us to a lunch in London to meet the brilliant Sally Kettle – who’d rowed the Atlantic with her mum, Sarah.
It was one of those days when everything went drastically wrong and then suddenly very right. We were supposed to meet Frances in London, but for some reason we got on the wrong train and ended up in Hull. None of us was paying attention and we were all looking the other way, relying on someone else. Never a good thing. It didn’t matter, we said, if we were a bit late. It’ll be one of those big lunches with loads of people in a big room and we can just slip in at the back and no one will notice. We might have taken the wrong train, but we’d be fine.
Come 1.40 p.m., we crept into a private dining room on the top floor of the building to find lunch set for 12, our names on our plates and some very empty chairs. It was mortifying, made all the more so by the fact that the stunning Sally Kettle was waiting for us to arrive to start her talk about her experience on the Atlantic. We, of course, apologised profusely and took our seats as speedily as we could, before listening to her amazing story and her incredibly inspirational words. After the lunch we gathered around her, asking her all sorts of questions.
‘How cold was it?’
‘How big were the waves?’
‘How mad did the whole experience send you?’
It was extraordinary to meet a woman who had actually done what we were so desperate to do. And she was fantastic. She was reassuring, positive and motivating. She said how her mum (she was our age group, after all) had struggled and shared what she had found difficult, and then she asked us if we had a boat yet.
‘You should talk to Charlie.’ She nodded towards a blondish bloke standing in the corner. ‘He’s a world-record-holding rower and he builds boats.’
So at the beginning of February a group of us woke up unreasonably early and set off in convoy to Essex, arriving just before midday.
Charlie was there to meet us all. Frances and Mark were there with their two children, Jay and Jack. Helen and Richard brought Lucy and Henry, and Janette and Ben came along too. It was a sunny morning and we were all extremely excited as we looked around the marina and were introduced to the rest of his Rannoch Adventure team in Charlie’s workshop. Just before lunch, we gathered in his office as he talked us through the plans for building the boat.
All of Charlie’s boats are handmade and bespoke, taking into consideration exactly who is going to be rowing them, and for what purpose.
It was the first time any of us had been confronted with the reality of what we were actually planning to do as Charlie talked us through the possibilities – we would need GPS here, a watermaker there, cabins for us to sleep in that had to be sealed at all times to guard against capsizing, though the boat was self-righting so we needn’t worry about that. We could all see the idea beginning to take hold.
Oddly, the person who was most enthusiastic at the Rannoch Adventure boat yard was Richard.
‘Then and there, he completely changed his mind about the whole thing!’ said Helen. ‘He went from being the most negative about the project to being the most positive. It was one of the quickest, most abrupt turnarounds in history. I couldn’t believe it. One minute he thought the idea was ridiculous and the next it was positively brilliant! But he likes facts and here was something that he could see. A boat. I also think that before he was scared for me, and of what could happen, because the whole thing was so very dangerous. But when he spoke to Charlie, he began to understand how the boat works, how it self-rights. He was reassured and he suddenly became really supportive, suggesting ideas and coming up with plans, offering to help raise some money through sponsorship. Also, at no point during our meeting did Charlie ever question our ability to row the Atlantic. Obviously he wanted to sell us a boat, so he wasn’t about to say, “What? You lot? What do you know about rowing an ocean?” But he made it seem perfectly possible: of course we could do the Talisker Challenge. Why ever would we not be able to?’
By the end of the morning we had a basic plan. We’d decided on a boat of just over 28 feet long, with two cabins with four of what would very generously be described as berths (known in the trade as ‘coffins’ – we couldn’t actually lie down flat in them with our legs outstretched, and it would be a tight, intimate, on-top-of-each-other squeeze to fit two of us in at any one time). We’d have an in-built watermaker, a GPS system, navigation lights, batteries, electrics, and as many bits of modern safety equipment as were available to make her as safe as we could and as easy to navigate and steer as possible. It was a lot of ‘bespoke’ for such a small boat, but we were going to say goodbye to eight children in La Gomera, and the conclusion was that if we scrimped on something now, we might seriously regret it later.
And the grand total? It was going to cost £67,000. Janette very gamely signed off on the down payment right then and there before she and Ben disappeared off back up to York, while the rest of us had lunch at the marina feeling, frankly, a little bit sick. The mood was very sombre as Frances, Mark, Jay and Jack sat down with Helen, Richard, Henry and Lucy.
‘It was a lot of money and it was hanging over us like a cloud,’ said Helen. ‘I remember sitting there, playing with my salad, thinking, “We’ve got to raise £100,000 from sponsors to cover the boat, the equipment and the 22,000-euro entry free for the race itself. How are we going to raise that sort of money for the trip, and then raise money for charity on top of that?” I don’t think Ben was so enamoured with the idea any more either, having just watched his wife write out an enormous cheque! I genuinely felt very a
nxious and stressed. It was a lot of responsibility. Frances was very cool about it, but then she always is. She kept saying it would be fine, that she knew lots of people who would be falling over themselves to support us. I remember crossing my fingers under the table and praying that she was right.’
But now at least we had a boat. Well, it was being built. We looked a little more like we meant business. It made us look a lot more credible than just walking into an office in our tracksuits saying: ‘Hi, we’re four mums and we are going to do this challenge. Can you give us £2,000, please?’ If we had a boat, we looked like we were a ‘possible’ to make it to La Gomera and, at the very least, during a tricky pause during the sponsorship pitch, they could always ask us a few questions about the watermaker.
With Janette so drastically out of pocket, we really had to start making some money. She insisted she was fine about it, saying if she played golf she’d be paying fees to join a club, but she rowed so she needed a boat. But we were so anxious not to let her down. Our increasingly worked-out behinds were up against the wall. We spent night after night sitting around Niki’s kitchen table or drinking coffee at Helen’s, writing endless letters to corporations, big businesses and anyone who had any connection with the rowing community, anyone who supplied transatlantic rowing boats for any sort of money, support or free supplies. But it was all fruitless. Mostly no one replied or even acknowledged our letters, and the cheques most certainly did not come pouring in.
By April we only had one member of the £250 Club: his name was Geoff, and Helen and Janette had a meeting with him in a very posh hotel near Wakefield. We were introduced to him through a friend of Helen’s, one of the mums at St Peter’s, and he ran a company called Involved and was a semi-professional adventurer.
Four Mums in a Boat Page 9