Four Mums in a Boat

by Janette Benaddi, Helen Butters, Niki Doeg

  Our adrenaline and our determination at the beginning was immense. We had, after all, spent over two years trying to get here – this was the dream, what we’d been aiming for during the dark days of trailing Rose around caravan parks, the hours spent writing letters, or clocking up miles on the water rowing machine while watching Lewis with the sound off. No one wanted to be the weak link. We were a team, and as a team we were going to get there.

  Even Helen, who was crippled by chronic seasickness, doggedly continued to row.

  For the first few days Helen didn’t actually speak. Not a word. Just the rowing and the puking and the lying prone while trying to keep down the few little slurps of Ultra Fuel that Niki so kindly and diligently made for her. We had always known that the first few days would be terrible for Helen. We’d seen quite how debilitating her seasickness could be on the North Sea. We’d talked about it. We expected it. She’d stocked up on Stugeron and Queezibics, though she decided against the eye patches, which had not been so terribly successful in training. But we had no idea the sickness would carry on for so long.

  ‘I felt so ill, throwing up every half-hour, but the Ultra Fuel kept me going. I was determined I was going to row after the North Sea debacle. And I did, I just kept going. I didn’t change my clothes, I didn’t brush my hair, I didn’t clean my teeth; I just used to row and then collapse and then get up and row again. I didn’t look after myself at all; I didn’t have the energy. I just rowed and was sick. When it was my time to change shift I knocked on the hatch door, waited for Niki to come out and then I’d throw up while I was waiting for her to come out, and then throw myself into the cabin and lie down. I knew I wouldn’t feel sick then. And it gave me some comfort, knowing that I could get away from feeling sick if I lay down.’

  Helen’s seasickness lasted for four days. Before leaving she’d had a conversation with Ben, who had suffered such chronic seasickness on a voyage he’d done the year before that he’d ended up in hospital in Spain on a drip, until he was well enough to return to his boat and continue the voyage.

  ‘I had Ben’s voice in my head saying, “You’ll be sick until you can’t be sick any more. You’ll be throwing up until you’ve got nothing inside you, and then slowly you’ll start to feel hungry and then you’ll start eating something and then you’ll start eating something else and then you’ll feel better again.” And all I could think was, “Surely I’ve reached the nothing-inside-you bit by now? Surely I’m done now?” Not even Janette pointing to a couple of dolphins that were swimming alongside the boat could raise a smile. I couldn’t even look at them. I could only look at the horizon. I remember thinking, “I don’t give a shit about some sodding dolphins.”’

  But oddly, Ben’s prediction came true. It was exactly what happened. I did start to feel a bit hungry and I fancied baked beans. Not the sausage and baked beans in the all-day breakfast packets that Niki had chosen, but just the baked beans. I started eating a few baked beans and I knew then that this was going to be fine. I could see the light at the end of the very long, dark tunnel. It was such a relief.’

  It was a huge relief for the rest of us as well. As Helen stood at the bow of the boat, her hair all over the place, her T-shirt stiff with vomit, and quietly announced that she was ‘a little bit peckish’, Janette punched the air and Frances let out a cheer. Niki might have applauded had she heard above the sound of the crashing waves, and had she not been out of it on diclofenac.

  Like an expert waitress, Janette ran through the list of culinary delights that were on offer on board ship, from chicken curry to beef stew, from macaroni cheese to shepherd’s pie, but Helen was not tempted. She had her eye on the beans and only the beans would do. Cold or hot? Janette was only too keen to facilitate this miraculous recovery as she rushed around the boat, sparking up the Jetboil and sorting through the piles of packed food we had stored below deck. Eventually, cold beans it was.

  ‘We had so much food,’ said Janette. ‘Charlie told us off for having our boat so low in the water when we left La Gomera. He said we must have a tonne of grub on there as our boat was only just above the water line. He reminded us that we had to row the thing across the Atlantic, but we were certainly over-stuffed. I was very keen to get rid of any of it.’

  Meanwhile, at the other end of the boat, in what we glamorously called ‘the office’ – a 1.5-x-0.9-metre-square compartment with a ceiling height of 0.9 metres, which contained all the navigating and communication equipment we needed on our voyage, hence the rather self-aggrandising name – things were a little better, as neither Janette nor Frances had fractured their coccyx, nor were they suffering from chronic seasickness, although they could barely squeeze into ‘the office’ together at any one time.

  ‘I was very relaxed,’ said Frances. ‘I’d had such a stressful couple of years at work before getting to the race; it felt totally stress-free on the boat. It felt like a huge weight had been lifted because all I had to do was eat, sleep, row and look after these three women. I didn’t have to worry about my job or any decision-making. I didn’t have to worry about Mark or the children. I was in a really peaceful place.’

  Janette, as captain, was a little less relaxed and peaceful and was constantly checking the charts, making sure we were going in the right direction. We’d decided, like a few crews before us, to head south out of La Gomera before effectively taking a right, or rowing west, across the ocean to Antigua, hoping to pick up some helpful currents and handy trade winds to aid and abet our crossing. It would mean a longer journey in terms of miles, but hopefully we would find it a little easier to get there.

  In the first few days, when Janette was not rowing she was hunched over all the equipment in the office. She was checking our speed, following our progress and talking on a daily basis to Ben who was watching the weather for us and seeing how well we were doing on Yellow Brick – a website that monitored all the Talisker boats, giving their longitude, latitude and speed, predicting exactly when they might arrive in Antigua.

  ‘I was very conscious of being the only one talking to my husband,’ said Janette. ‘I would check in every day to see what the weather was doing and where we were in the race. I was very aware that I was the only one talking to their other half every day. I suppose the others could have done so, but they didn’t. Ben was the linchpin in the land crew and he was the point of contact for everyone else. Everyone else’s husbands, children and family. But I was also very conscious when talking to him. I was only ever upbeat and jolly; I didn’t want to worry him. I was always positive. So the conversation was very brief; it was only about the weather and where we were in the race.’

  Not that any of us really minded where we were in the race. By the end of the first day, our early advantage was waning fast, as indeed was our sight of land. Although not as quickly as we’d thought or hoped. Actually, it took two days for the land to disappear. We kept on spotting the volcano on Tenerife, which was a little annoying. It seemed that we’d rowed our behinds off for two whole days and nights and we apparently hadn’t got very far. But when the land eventually did go, it went fast.

  ‘It just disappeared,’ said Janette. ‘And it didn’t really bother us. We’d been on our own before on the North Sea, so we were not overwhelmed by a sense of panic, like other people had been. What you worry about on the ocean, and what you don’t worry about, is something you can’t predict. What you think will be scary is not what you think. In fact, nothing is quite as you think.’

  We thought we understood the water a little, having crossed the North Sea, but the wind and waves and the constant motion of the boat was something we were not expecting. We knew the Atlantic was big and we thought we might encounter a storm or two, but those first few days were relentless. The big waves didn’t stop and the rocking of the boat was so much worse than we expected and our ability to achieve anything was extremely hampered.

  ‘The first lesson we had to learn was patience,’ said Niki. ‘The idea that you could multitask,
that you could make yourself a cup of tea while taking your wet-weather gear off and having a chat, plus keeping an eye on the speed of the boat, was a joke. You could only do one thing at a time and that would take three times longer than you’d thought. We all got used to walking like crabs, legs wide apart and holding onto the side, taking one baby step at a time.’

  We spent most of the days attempting to row, but almost every time we put an oar in the ocean, it was ripped out of our hands or it would flip back with the brute force of the water and hit us in an extremely painful place. And on the worst night shifts, we did not even attempt to row, we’d sit out on watch, dressed head to foot in our wet-weather gear, teeth chattering, insides shivering, being consistently and persistently drenched by the freezing-cold sea.

  ‘Everything was wet,’ said Frances. ‘We’d take off our damp clothes, get into our sleeping bags, naked, and then put our cold, damp clothes back on again two hours later. We would knock on the cabin door 10 minutes before the other person was due out on the blades, and there would be a terrible 10 minutes of transition, where I would lie there and think, “I don’t want to get up, I don’t want to row, I want to lie here and sleep.”’

  Not that we slept that much. By the time we’d managed to take our wet-weather gear off, eat some sort of food and crawl into the claustrophobic cabin, it was almost time to wake up again. And we’d have some very odd dreams.

  ‘I used to have a regular dream about being in a car,’ said Janette, ‘going along an extremely bumpy track, and every time I woke I was so deeply disappointed to find myself on a cold, wet boat.’

  But woe betide anyone who needed the toilet. We’d all had a pee on the North Sea but had held on until we reached the hotel for anything else. So the first time any of us had a poo on the bucket in front of the others was on the Atlantic. The first couple of times were excruciatingly embarrassing, mainly because the bucket was so close to the person rowing. The person going to the loo was almost sitting on the lap of the person rowing. Add in the huge waves and it was a recipe for disaster. Tipping, falling, spilling, sloshing were all regular occurrences. Eventually, we would stop rowing when anyone announced they wanted the lav. Frances would sit on the bucket with her arms around the person next to her, trying to keep herself steady. Helen, once she could talk, gave us a running commentary on her business. Niki kept a firm eye on the horizon. And Janette? Well, the less said about that the better. In short, it could not have been any more intimate. And it was worse at night.

  ‘I’d be in the office,’ said Frances, ‘in all my wet-weather gear, desperate for a wee and knowing that I had to get down the length of the boat, get covered in water by a huge wave, take off my salopettes, sit down and hold on, with my bare arse out in the cold, then wee, use one of my biodegradable wet wipes, hoping it didn’t blow away in the wind or I didn’t get doused by another wave, before pulling my salopettes back up again and making my way back to the other end of the boat. It was no wonder I went to the loo as little as possible at night.’

  And poor Niki had to do all that with her damaged coccyx. No wonder she took so many painkillers.

  But it wasn’t long before we were all fighting her for them. It was just days before the sores and the blisters kicked in. We’d been warned: we had our chafe-free pants and pots and pots of nappy-rash cream. However, the combination of sitting down for two hours at a time and rowing and rubbing in clothes damp with seawater is a terrible combination for the skin.

  Niki was the first to develop sores. She was sitting so oddly on her seat, she developed a pressure sore on her behind.

  ‘I was only leaning on one cheek, so it didn’t take long before the rubbing became unbearable and the whole thing opened up into a large wound that had to be dressed and padded every day.’

  Which sounds fine when written down. But in reality, it was an undignified nightmare, which involved Niki (with a fractured coccyx) peeling off her pants, bending over, as one or other of us would attend to the wound while being rocked by the waves on what was effectively a giant seesaw. The rest of us were not long in joining her, and soon we developed a routine where we’d come off shift and douse our buttocks in surgical spirit, and then wait for it to dry before slathering on the Sudocrem. The only problem was that if the surgical spirit went anywhere else other than your backside, you’d soon hear about it on the boat.

  ‘My fanny! My fanny!’ would be screamed even louder than the sounds of the waves.

  ‘I used to lie on my side, put surgical spirit on my bottom and then add on the Sudocrem. And then, with my arse out, I would chew my way through a Peperami and think, “This might look a little weird. You’d have to find a very specific website for this sort of picture!”’ said Helen.

  But it wasn’t just our backsides (and frankly our fannies) that were beginning to really suffer; so were our hands and feet. We had blisters upon blisters on our hands, and our feet were always so soggy in the water and so cold it was difficult to stop the skin from splitting and cracking. And we’d been at sea for less than a week.

  SHIP’S LOG:

  ‘One thing that we were really good at on the boat was not beating ourselves up when things went wrong or we couldn’t get something quite right or we couldn’t get a piece of equipment fixed. We just thought maybe there is another way we haven’t tried yet, and we kept trying. We were getting there a bit at a time and we were a work in progress. It was always okay to be a work in progress.’

  (JANETTE/SKIPPER)

  CHAPTER 12

  Christmas

  ‘When they first saw the star, they rejoiced exceedingly with great joy.’

  MATTHEW 2:10

  24 December 2015

  It was Christmas Eve, and we’d been told to expect a phone call from BBC Breakfast. They had apparently planned for all our husbands and children to be on a sofa round at Niki’s house to wish us ‘Happy Christmas’ as a surprise. So when they did call on the morning of 24 December to shout ‘Surprise!’ it was the loveliest thing in the world.

  ‘Hi!’ came all the children’s voices down the satellite phone as we all tried to cram into the office. There was only room for two at the very most, so it was the tightest of squeezes.

  ‘Hi!’ their voices came again. ‘Happy Christmas, Mum!’

  We missed them all desperately. Niki’s eyes immediately filled with tears. How we wished we could have seen them all, sitting there, undoubtedly all dressed up, smiling on the sofa. It was an odd feeling to be so far away from our families, all soggy and blistered, when we should have been celebrating with them, stuffed fatter than Christmas geese with mince pies.

  Poor Helen could not cope. She felt so sick in the cabin, her head was still swimming and her mouth was as dry as sandpaper as she tried to stop herself from hurling all over us.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said, covering her mouth as she rushed out of the cabin, gasping onto deck.

  The rest of us continued shouting out questions.

  ‘How are you?’ said Janette.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Frances.

  ‘What are you eating tomorrow?’ Niki wanted to know.

  The replies were garbled and mixed, with everyone talking over each other, with plenty of time delays. Safe to say, there was much shouting of ‘I love you,’ ‘I miss you, Mum!’ and ‘Happy Christmas!’

  ‘I felt so awful,’ said Helen. ‘I was the only one who didn’t speak to their children. Even now I find it very upsetting to think about them, sitting there, waiting to hear from me, and I just couldn’t talk to them. I could barely speak. I was still ill, so all I wanted to do was be sick.’

  We were all quite downcast after the phone call. What should have lifted our spirits had only really served to underline quite how lonely and isolated we were, sitting in the middle of this unforgiving ocean. All we knew was that Ocean Reunion were powering away from the rest of the fleet, while we were rowing flat out just to keep still.

  Christmas Day was only day five o
f the journey and there wasn’t necessarily an awful lot to celebrate. The sea was still being unkind, it was choppy and confused, and it was almost impossible for us to make headway. But Helen was eating some solids again and we were currently seventh in the race, apparently. What’s not to celebrate? So celebrate we did.

  On our packing list, along with the ‘1 spoon, 2 water bottles, 1 bikini, 1 head-torch, chafe-free pants x 2, personal hair accessories, i.e. hairbands…’ we had been told by Janette to bring a Secret Santa gift, costing no more than £5 and weighing less than a feather, or thereabouts.

  So as dawn broke on Christmas morning, what followed was an exercise in delayed gratification. We carried on with our shifts, wishing each other ‘Happy Christmas’ every two hours as we met on deck for our changeovers.

  ‘It’s like New Year already!’ said Frances, having wished Janette ‘Happy Christmas’ about six times since 6 a.m. that morning. ‘And still not a present in sight!’

  We’d decided that we’d wait until the afternoon before having our ‘party’ where we’d exchange our Secret Santa gifts. At 4 p.m. precisely, we put down our oars and pulled on Santa hats, antlers or festive glasses and handed around our secret Santa presents – a pair of socks from Helen, National Geographic sea-life playing cards from Frances, a rowing mug from Janette and a keep-yourself-cool towelette from Niki. Janette got the playing cards and was so half-hearted in her thanks that we all stopped and gave her a lesson in being grateful. Frances got the mug, Helen received the towelette and Niki was given the socks. It transpired that we’d given each other the present we really wanted ourselves. Helen was desperate for the socks, Niki very much had her eye on the towelette – so they swapped straight away. Janette blithely declared she had no interest in anything, so Frances was the overall winner, bagging the mug and the cards.

  Then, just as we had run out of nice things to say about socks, cards and towelettes and were contemplating getting back on the oars, Janette told us all to sit down.