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| South, South, South, South are you sure? |
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| Written by Lin & Rachel at sea | |
| Wednesday, 23 January 2008 | |
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It’s been like Groundhog Day on Barbara Ivy lately. We’ve had five days that we thought would never end, fighting with the weather and waves not to go too far South only to find that we have another five days of blasted NE winds pushing us South. Thankfully we’re not the only ones and we’ve discovered we’re not the furthest South too but it doesn’t take away from the fact that it’s a real struggle rowing against the waves and wind all day.
We spent some time this week just drifting and decided to do a row test with the steering fixed Vs drifting and found that we could move the boat marginally faster but it’s really hard work. So we switched to rowing 1 hour on 1 hour off during daylight hours only and sleeping at night. This worked really well on the first day but over night we had drifted 7 miles South, which took us further South than we need to be to get to Antigua – we hear Barbados is equally as nice this time of year! The reason we’ve switched to 1 hour shifts is because it is physically exhausting rowing against the wind and waves. We’ve found it has put enormous strain on our hands, wrists, shoulders, backs and knees. We can almost feel the bones parting in our hands when we pull on the oars. For our dragon boating friends – it’s 10 times worse than paddling at Peterborough! Switching to 1 hours shifts also means we don’t get so much rest and certainly not enough time to sleep, which is why we’re sleeping at night and drifting. So today it took us 11 hours to claw back 2 miles of the 7 that we had drifted last night. Now we’re about to get our heads down, we know we’ll be worrying about how much we could drift overnight but we can’t do anything about it so we’ll crack on again tomorrow clawing back the miles and hope the weather changes soon. We did think about asking you all to will or pray for the weather to change in a Uri Geller kind of way – shall we say noon on Thursday 24th by whatever means you think will work, please try to will us better weather!!!! One of the things that keeps us really motivated is counting down the miles and now we’re getting close to 900. The next big milestone is 1/3 to go which is 850 n/miles. It’s great having all the updates from you telling us the miles we’ve got left to go. These are different to what we work on in the boat because they are working on miles made good to the finish – we don’t always seem to head directly to the finish so the miles we calculate aren’t often the same as the race HQ ones so your feedback really helps us. A few days ago we had a visit from support yacht Kilcullen and we believe they took a number of photos that can now be seen on the Woodvale race site. Messages:- Huge congratulations to Unfinished Business who finished today – fantastic that the business is now complete! Also congratulations to No Fear and Gquma Challenger – Bill & Pete we’re sorry we won’t be in Antigua before you leave to meet up for a drink. Guess we’ll have to come out to East London then! Bill & Hilary JW – thank you for passing on the message to Joe & Andrew, we spoke to them today. How exciting that you’ve now booked your flights – wish we could tell our family to do the same but not quite there yet. Jo – Thank you so much for sorting out the leaking roof on my house. Glad to hear all the plans for you all coming to Antigua are all in hand – you are a complete star. To all our dragon boat friends – You’re the best, you always know what to say to motivate us and concentrate on the job in hand. Thanks for all your support and keep the messages coming. To all at Breast Cancer Care – thank you all for your support and most of all for believing in us right from the start. We hope we’re doing you proud. Great news about Arsenal wanting to cover our story again when we get back – it’s such and honor to be in the match programmes alongside information about the team. Love & hugs, Lin & Rachel. |
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| Last Updated ( Thursday, 24 January 2008 ) |