Another thing that kept us entertained during the crossing was the radio.
‘We were on it the whole time,’ said Niki. ‘Janette was the only one who’d actually done her radio exams at that point, so she knew what we were meant to say. But us two were just chatting away to people. I was surprised we didn’t get arrested when we got to Holland actually, because we were using the main channel for just chatting to people. “Oooh, there’s a boat over there, let’s give them a call.” We’d get on the radio: “Hello! We’re an ocean-rowing boat…” Janette had even written out the protocol for us, but we ignored it. It’s not until you go on the course that you understand why you have to keep the channel clear, instead of tying it up with general conversation. I was the naughty one because I like to talk. But they don’t like to acknowledge you, because for bigger boats it’s a protocol issue. They have to do their paperwork – anything on Channel 16 (the main channel) has to go in the log. But we were also making sure they knew we were there and they’d seen us. But there probably is a better way to do it than how we did it. Apparently everyone could hear us flirting with other boats. When we got to the other side they picked up all the transmissions. They could’ve given us a bollocking for not using the correct protocols. God knows why they didn’t.’
But after a while even flirting with passing ships began to pall, and the exhaustion of continuous rowing and no sleep combined to create a very odd cocktail. ‘The sea plays tricks on you,’ said Niki. ‘I started to hallucinate. A light would rush towards me and then I would see men working. They were from the turn of the century. They’d have flat caps, like you’d see on people rolling beer barrels in those old pictures. They were working on a boat or a very big buoy. Then eventually the light would shoot back and I’d be able to get an idea of the distance again, but I saw it a few times. I think it was just the lack of sleep, the sensory deprivation at night. My brain doesn’t deal well with monotony. It needs to be stimulated. And there just wasn’t anything there.’
By now the row was beginning to really take its toll: our backs were agony, our hands were blistered and the initial adrenaline had all but run out. And we still had another eight or so hours to go. Rowing for an hour, resting for 30 minutes. By now the shipping lanes were rammed, and by the time we passed the Hook of Holland and the entrance to Rotterdam, there were some 10 tankers lining up waiting for their opportunity to come into the channel and head for the harbour. We had to time our crossing of the shipping lane to perfection for fear of being run down.
Finally, having already spent one night at sea, we were at last heading towards the Scheveningen harbour in the pitch black. It was gone midnight, we could not see a thing and the tide was very firmly against us.
‘It was really, really hard and we didn’t know where the hell the port was. And when you’re exhausted, you can’t concentrate. Frances and I were looking at the navigation screen, thinking, “What have we done wrong? Where have we gone wrong? Why aren’t we going to the port?”’ said Janette. ‘There were boats all around us, my heart was beating like crazy and we had no idea where we were. It was impossible to tell if we were going one way or another.’
It became clear that amid the mad scramble to leave Southwold and all the questions we’d answered on the beach, we had forgotten to put the last waypoint into the GPS and we were heading not for the port of Scheveningen, but directly into the harbour wall.
‘We were heading straight for it and we had no idea,’ said Niki.
‘I suddenly realised what we’d done,’ said Janette. ‘And I yelled to Helen, “I know you’re sick but you have to get out of there, out of the cabin, and help us. We’re close to the harbour wall and the tide’s pushing against us, the wind’s pushing against us and we need three people up rowing and the rest of us are knackered. We’re not going to get into the port unless you get out of there.” And to be fair to her, she did get out and row.’
And we rowed hard. Harder than any of us has ever rowed before. Every muscle was screaming, every sinew straining. ‘I could feel them all losing confidence,’ said Janette. ‘It was like they doubted we were ever going to get there. I said, “Right, let’s get this fucking boat into that port now, girls! Come on. We can do it. We can get there.”’
And we absolutely rowed our hearts out. Janette was shouting, we were swearing, we had reached the pain barrier and we were going beyond it.
‘I was completely out of it because I’d OD’d on seasickness tablets,’ said Helen. ‘I’d been throwing everything down me in the hope that something would work. And then Janette yelled that I was needed on deck. I crawled to the oars. I felt terrible and we rowed and rowed against the current, trying to get into that harbour. I basically rowed for two hours non-stop without anything inside me. I was absolutely determined to get there.’
‘For the last hour Janette and I swapped and I steered us into the harbour and she took over the rowing, but it was literally like you were rowing for your life against the tide, hour after hour. More and more. Again and again. You went forward two metres, back a metre and a half, and then forward two metres. It was awful,’ said Niki.
‘All of a sudden I saw the boys, Team Essence, going into the port and I could see the lights on their boat just in the moonlight and I thought, “Bastards! They’ve got there before us.” They must have been a mile or so, maybe a bit more, away from us. If only we had not messed up our navigation we might have beaten them, but as it was we were the last in,’ said Janette.
Crawling into the harbour, we were totally exhausted. We’d been rowing solidly for 45 hours on the world’s most congested sea, but we had made it.
‘Congratulations!’ shouted Charlie, applauding along with the small crowd and the TV crew who had gathered in the port at about ten past four in the morning. ‘That’s amazing!’ he repeated as we scrambled ashore. ‘You are the first women to ever row across the North Sea. It’s a record! You’ve got a world record! Hip hip hooray!’ he declared, just as Janette teetered towards him, collapsed on the floor and threw up at his feet.
‘When we moored up there wasn’t enough room for us to have a separate mooring,’ said Frances. ‘There were four other boats ahead of us that we had to climb over to the pontoon, and as we did so we realised they were all covered in vomit – the smell was absolutely disgusting. Now, Janette and the smell of somebody else’s sick – she can’t cope with it at all, which is reassuring for someone who was a full-time nurse! So she just smelt that, saw it and then just went completely.’
‘To be fair to Janette, it really was awful,’ said Niki. ‘Honestly, those Marines, Team Essence, were just sick everywhere. Although, in a way, that was quite reassuring, because I thought, “Actually, do you know what? Obviously everyone’s sick. It’s not just Helen and Frances.”’
But the following day, after we’d crawled out of bed and, by way of congratulating ourselves, gorged on hot baths and room service, including several mugs of hot chocolate, we sat down to a meeting. ‘We had quite a frank conversation in the hotel in Holland with Helen about her seasickness, where we sort of said, “We need to fix this and we need to see that we can get it fixed,”’ said Niki. ‘It was never mentioned that Helen wouldn’t row. But it was obvious that this was serious.’
‘They were completely right,’ said Helen. ‘But I learnt a few things on the North Sea. Firstly, if I lay down I’d feel okay, so I knew I could get some kind of respite. It wasn’t going to be continuously terrible. If I lay down and ate something I’d feel better still. But it was certainly a cause for concern. Actually, a massive cause for concern!’
And then, just as we’d finished our cups of coffee, Helen turned around and spotted a little old lady in a scarf in a nearby café.
‘Do you know what?’ she said. ‘Last night, when I was rowing my heart out, I saw this little old woman just sitting on the boat with her headscarf on. She was just like that one over there. I was hallucinating, but I wasn’t scared or anything. I’m not sure if
it was the rowing or the seasickness drugs, but actually she was quite comforting, just sitting there.’
‘What did she look like?’ asked Janette.
‘Little, with a scarf,’ said Helen.
‘Really small?’
‘Tiny.’
‘Oh my God, that’s Great-Aunty Rose!’ declared Janette, searching in her pocket for the rosary. ‘She used to wear headscarves and she was tiny.’
‘Well,’ said Helen, ‘I think Great-Aunty Rose was actually with us.’
‘My mum prayed for her to help us on the boat,’ said Janette.
‘And I saw her, sitting on the deck of our boat!’
Later that day, as we prepared to leave the hotel and return to the UK, we had another conversation in the lobby. As we walked with our suitcases, our muscles so tense and exhausted that it was actually hard to move, we discussed who was going to captain us across the ocean. After what had happened on the North Sea, and our failure to put the waypoints in, plus the confusion of how to get into the port, it was clear we needed someone in charge. We had always thought we could manage to cross the Atlantic without a skipper, but less than 48 hours on the North Sea had made us realise our mistake.
‘We all said why we didn’t think we should be it,’ said Frances, ‘because I think none of us wanted to be in charge. I certainly didn’t because I was the boss at work and I didn’t want to be the boss outside of work as well. We all decided it couldn’t be Helen – including Helen herself. Helen is very confident about things she knows, but when she is out of her comfort zone she’s not so sure of herself.’
‘We couldn’t have Niki as skipper,’ said Janette, ‘because even though she does like to be in control and she’s a very good manager in the area that she works in, at sea she was very worried and anxious. She would say things like, “Oh my God, this is going to happen,” or “This isn’t going to work.” Which you can’t do when you’re skipper. You’ve got to have someone who is positive. Helen didn’t want to do it anyway; she didn’t feel that she knew the sea enough to be able to take command. And I think Frances was a bit too relaxed. And she didn’t want that sort of responsibility. She was doing this to get away from all that.’
So in the end the decision was unanimous. The woman to take us across the Atlantic would be Janette. It was Frances who asked her and Frances who insisted. She was the only one who had any knowledge on the water and she had really proved herself on the North Sea. She’d managed to get us into that harbour against all the odds. She’d rallied us and got Helen back on the oars. She’d flogged her guts out to get us in. She was the natural choice.
That night, as Janette lay on her bunk in the cabin that we all shared on the P&O Ferry bringing Rose back from Holland, she stared up at the ceiling, unable to sleep. ‘I knew that it was the right decision,’ she said. ‘I absolutely knew it was the right decision, but I wasn’t happy about it because I knew what a responsibility it was. I absolutely knew before we set off that it would be the most massive burden. I was the one who had to make sure that three mums actually got across the Atlantic. They had families, children. I felt sick.’
SHIP’S LOG:
‘If you see a problem or a challenge heading your way, look at it as one big adventure. That’s how we saw the North Sea. We just did not see it as a problem; we thought of it as something that could be easily done. It would be fun and great practice for our real adventure. It really helped to put a different perspective on it, even though we didn’t do that intentionally. Embrace the challenge. Look at it as an adventure.’
(JANETTE/SKIPPER)
CHAPTER 10
The Final Countdown
‘Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough.’
OG MANDINO
There is nothing like rowing a sea to make everyone realise you’re serious about rowing an ocean. When we finally got back to the UK, the reaction to our North Sea record was extraordinary. ‘We weren’t just four women who were thinking about doing something. We’d actually done something,’ said Helen. ‘And it did raise our profile.’
We went from doing small amounts of local newspaper press to Look North, Calendar and then finally BBC Breakfast. We were so excited about being on the show. This would be a game-changer for us and the charities we were supporting. And we couldn’t believe that out of all the crews who were now preparing to row the Talisker Challenge, they had picked us to interview. Niki had received an email the day before asking us if we were free. It was apparently Women’s Sport Week and fortuitously we were women, doing sport, and we were available, which is often all that is important when you are doing media interviews, apparently! We leapt onto the train and stayed the night in MediaCityUK in our own rooms – which made an extremely pleasant change from the hovels we were used to – and barely slept the whole night.
The next morning, in hair and make-up, dressed in our Yorkshire Rows tracksuits and trainers, we decided who would talk about what so that we didn’t end gabbling over each other in our enthusiasm. Firstly, Frances would explain how it all began, Niki would add that we had husbands and children so were good at compromising, Janette would say she was skipper and Helen would talk about rowing the North Sea and how violently sick she was.
It was over in a flash. They used some dynamic footage of the Talisker race with some seriously dramatic music, which frankly looked terrifying, and some photos of us in our onesies, which were equally terrifying and not something any of us were particularly keen on seeing again. But we didn’t make fools of ourselves. The presenters, Naga Munchetty and Bill Turnbull, were extremely charming. We talked about wanting to inspire our children, to get mothers to think of themselves in a different way and challenge their perceptions, to break out of their comfort zones and stretch themselves, and suddenly it all felt very real. Not only that, but the phone did begin to ring. At last. After a period of truly struggling to get anywhere in terms of sponsorship or offers of help, the wind had changed.
‘I think people didn’t want to back what they thought was a sure-fire loser,’ explained Frances. ‘And we had no track record of anything. No one for one minute thought we were plausible. We were some women who had a dream, an idea, a plan that had been hatched after a few glasses of wine and that was it. We’d sent out so many emails and so many letters and had received very little in return. In the beginning, it was clear we needed personal introductions, as they were the only ones that got us anywhere. The only people who really gave us money were friends and family. But after the BBC Breakfast interview, not only did people take us a little more seriously, but we also had a few more offers of help.’
The sponsorship offers didn’t exactly fly in, but we were given multiple pairs of chafe-free pants, Holland & Barrett offered to help with our snack packs, and Helen was sent numerous pills and patches and devices to conquer her chronic seasickness. It was such a relief to finally be getting somewhere – anywhere. It had been a little like trying to row into Scheveningen harbour.
We had spent months touring Rose all over Yorkshire and beyond for little or no return. ‘It was heartbreaking sometimes,’ said Janette. ‘We’d look in the newspaper to try to work out what events and shows were happening – a car show in Harewood, Selby Rugby Club, Toulston Polo Club, a shopping centre, a racecourse. And then we’d call them up and ask if we could come along and fundraise. Mostly, places were full or they were going to charge us a fortune to be there.’
‘It was hard work taking the boat out because you had to get her there, and only Janette or I could drive her,’ said Niki. ‘But we’d try to get as many of the rest of us there as possible. Sometimes there would be all four of us, and often one or more of the husbands would come down and help out, just to talk to people and shake buckets. Or the children would come – they were quite happy going out, talking to people and giving buckets a shake in front of people. Actually, people gave money to the kids more easily, especially the younger ones. It is quite hard to say no w
hen a child under 10 tells you they are raising money for an air ambulance.’
But a lot of the time it was fairly depressing pickings. We’d make £40 here, £120 there. And we were very specific about what the money was for. Cash raised from the public was always going to the charities. Anything that we raised for the row was from sponsorship alone.
On outings where we had been invited to show Rose by various sponsors, we found other things to keep us amused. Naturally, Helen kept seeing feathers everywhere. Even the waiter who served her coffee at one point in Leeds Commercial District added a feather motif to her cappuccino and was genuinely called Cherub: she screamed, he screamed, they both screamed.
Meanwhile outside, Janette was chatting to a lovely old lady who made little metal angels, and she gave us hers, which she was wearing, to wish us good luck on the Atlantic. We carried Angel Isabella all the way across the ocean – along with our rich collection of crucifixes, crystals, St Christophers, rosary beads and, of course, the Holy Mary we received in La Gomera – mainly because we were too scared not to!
A week later, on another outing to a holiday-home park where we were invited by one of our sponsors, we were busy shaking buckets and raising money when a woman caught Helen’s eye. ‘She had this tiny little dog and I just felt I wanted to talk to her. There was something about her that drew me to her. And as she was chatting away I realised she was probably a little bit psychic. She said something to Gareth first, which he disagreed with, and then she said to me that “great things were going to happen”. She told Richard, “You’re going to have to be strong.” To which Gareth laughed and joked, “Well, that’s you two getting divorced then!” Which really upset my son, Henry. And then she said to Janette that being the skipper was going to be “very tough” for her. We hadn’t even told her that Janette was the skipper! It was all very odd. She said, “You will have some decisions to make, and they’ll be tough decisions, but you need to be firm. Firmer than you’ve ever been.” It was like she really did know something that we didn’t. She promised to think about us on our trip.’
Four Mums in a Boat Page 14