Day 34 – The Yellowbrick Tracker

During the 118 days we have so far been rowing Doris on the Pacific there have been many frustrating moments. However I’m not sure any quite compare to the feeling of rowing as hard as you can for two hours with the sole purpose of trying to make the boat go as slowly as possible. In the last week or so we have been battling an easterly current of up to 2.2 knots and mainly southerly winds of up to 15 knots. Given that Samoa is to the south west of our current position both of these are incredibly unhelpful. Despite all of the dead lifts Alex made us do before we left and all of the calories we piled on, we are still not strong enough to row South west in these conditions. Some days, like today we are able to make slow progress South but at other times the best we can do is try to slow down our progress in the wrong direction. Doing this though is only slightly more depressing than the sessions where two hours hard rowing results in a small amount of progress South with a South easterly course, only to lose all that South ground during the change over of rowing pairs no matter how efficiently we do it, due to the strong current and/ or wind. Once we have crossed the equator and escaped from the equatorial counter current we will need to make up the ground we have lost to the east.

I feel the need to explain why it may look like we are going the wrong way because you can all see our progress on the ‘Where’s Doris?’ map on our website. The map is updated via our Yellowbrick satellite tracker, which automatically sends position reports that show up as the dots on the website. I was introduced to Yellowbrick while working for True Adventure. Each of our school expedition teams carry one with them so that we, in the operations room, as well as their family and friends can see where they are. I used to enjoy getting the world map up when we had lots of teams away and zooming around the globe checking that everyone was where they were meant to be. When leading expeditions in Nepal, Tanzania, Peru and Brazil our Yellowbrick lived in the top of my rucksack, letting everyone back home know where we were, every four hours while we trekked up mountains, worked on our project sites and canoed through the flooded rainforest. The Yellowbrick team kindly agreed to sponsor our expedition by providing us with a tracker for the duration of the row so thanks to them, you our followers will always know where we are.

You can set the Yellowbrick to send position reports as often as you like, but ours is set to send one every 4 hours. This is the reason why the number of miles our chart plotter tells us we have travelled is more than the number of miles our website tells you we’ve travelled. While the website map draws a straight line between each four hour report, our chart plotter is constantly drawing our route, and as a result shows every wobble in our course, every loop the loop and every back track that happens during changeover. It’s probably for the best that Tony can’t see our sometimes interesting track, especially when at the end of a frustrating shift the only consolation is seeing that you have drawn a face or an envelope among other amusing pictures. However if Tony does need to get a better idea of how we’re progressing or wants to monitor our course more regularly as we leave or approach land, he is able to access our tracker remotely from back home and change the frequency at which it reports. This ability to change the frequency of tracking also provides yet another level of emergency backup should we ever need it. If you hover over the dots on the website you will also be able to see the speed we were travelling at when the report was sent. We’re still hoping that one day it catches us as we’re surfing down a wave at 6 knots!

When Nats asked me the other day what my favourite piece of kit on Doris was I answered the iridium Go! which allows me to send this blog but my second favourite is definitely the Yellowbrick which allows people to follow our progress. It is comforting to know that it is not just us who check everyday our track and whether we are getting closer to Samoa.

UPDATE: Last night Bertie’s cousin Bill the boobie joined us for a few sessions perched upon our bows. In the sunrise shift Nat and I enjoyed a lengthy freshwater power shower which has then been repeated in each of our subsequent shifts so we are feeling very clean.

Day 30 – A realisation

During the first leg I remember always feeling like we were in a little bubble of the Pacific. On a clear day we can see approximately 10 miles in every direction and we could have been 100 miles from shore or 1000 miles from shore and never known. Despite the occasional ‘Oh my God we’re actually doing this’ moment, the expectation that there was land or other boats just out of sight across the horizon didn’t go away. However since leaving from Honolulu something seems to have changed for me. One night, two weeks ago, I was on the oars with Nats under a beautiful starry sky with waves lapping at the side of the boat, when all of a sudden I was struck by the realisation that we are a tiny 29ft boat, an insignificant pink dot, almost 1000 miles from the closest land mass in the middle of the worlds largest ocean. What’s more this immense ocean is an insignificant body of water on a single planet in the universe I was staring up at in the sky. I have no idea how it took me over 100 days at sea to finally have this realisation but it happened again yesterday on the oars with LP in a calm early morning shift. Surrounded by a gently rolling, silky smooth ocean I suddenly realised that we really are surrounded by water for hundreds of miles in every direction with nobody else around. We haven’t even seen another boat since our first week out of Hawaii. We are out here with no choice but to accept and deal with anything the great Pacific chooses to throw at us. You might think that this would be an intimidating thought but I actually felt a magical sense of freedom and independence, embracing and enjoying the feeling. Out here on Doris we have everything we need to survive for the (hopefully only) 60 days it will take us to reach Samoa. Our 29ft pink mobile home can ride the waves, keeping us safe and dry when necessary or letting us experience the elements in all their wild glory on the oars. We have food, water, the ability to communicate with home, the ability to know where we are and where we are going and great company to keep us entertained. Before we left the UK I remember answering the question ‘what are you most looking forward to?’ with ‘the feeling when we lose sight of land and it is just us and Doris out on the ocean on our way’. I think this is the feeling I am finally appreciating that we are out here self sufficient and unsupported (not counting our amazing support team back home). Our experiences in the first leg in all kinds of challenging conditions has built our confidence in Doris and each other and I think maybe it is this confidence which has now allowed me to think about and appreciate the scale of exactly where we are. So onwards we go towards Samoa battling the crazy weather and strong currents of the ETCZ the five of us out on the ocean.

UPDATE: The sky is blue, the clouds are like white and peach candy floss on the horizon and the temperature is high. After our last rowing shift I feel like a baked potato – roasted on the outside and squidgy in the middle. Last night was another dry and calm one under the stars. The moon is back lighting the way for most of the night but our Mahi mahi escort last night was only a single solitary fish so I think we might be leaving their stomping ground. On the oars Nat and I talked trees and flowers. If Nat was a flower she’d be an orchid and if I was a flower I’d be a bluebell.

For Nat’s blog the other day she asked us what on Doris we couldn’t live without. With the everyday items tweezers, sudocreme and sunscreen making the list it got me to thinking about the other simple things we have on board which we wouldn’t want to be without.

1) The ziplock bag. Our daily snack packs are packed into large ziplock bags which are stored in the deck hatches and on a daily basis we grab one out to add approximately 1500kcal to our daily energy intake. This grabbing out of a new snack pack happens with more or less rummaging for particular favoured items depending on who is looking and what time of the day or night it is. Each snack pack contains a portion of mixed dried fruit and a portion of mixed nuts and these are both packaged in their own small ziplock bags. These snack packs usually head out with us on to the oars at the beginning of a session along with a second ziplock bag containing additional items such as sunscreen, lip balm, a long sleeve top, an iPod and a hat or buff. This passing out of the bags to each rowing seat is often accompanied by a chorus of ‘To the back, to the back. Everything Nat owns in a ziplock to the back.’ The uses of the humble ziplock bag don’t end there though…. When giving kit briefs in my previous life as an expedition manager I always extolled the virtues of the ziplock for keeping precious or smaller items in within a rucksack. Within our individual pockets in the aft cabin we each have our clothes split into separate ziplocks to keep them dry from the condensation and general damp of the cabin. Our electrical items, diaries, bird book, matches and any other items we need to keep dry are also ziplocked and placed in their hatch. The final use of these amazing bags is to put the empty freeze dried food packets in. Once they are full they are stashed in the rubbish hatch.2) Tupperware pots. To prepare the freeze dried expedition foods which make up most of our daily calorie intake we pour the dried food into our individual Tupperware containers, boil some water using our trusty Jetboil and then add water to food, mix, leave for 10 minutes and then eat. Making the food up in the Tupperware means that the food packets stay dry and don’t collect wet food in them which would then begin to smell when we store them as rubbish. All good except it means we have to do the washing up after each meal. We tried to make sure that everything we packed on to Doris had more than one use and the Tupperware is no exception. We have also used them to sterilise our water bottle caps, to wash our hair and to bucket shower

3) Car windscreen shades. Now I have never actually owned one of these for a car although considering that I have also never owned a car with air conditioning I will definitely be purchasing one when I get home. During the sunny daylight hours we put these sun shades up in the hatches to prevent the direct sunlight from hitting us in the face and heating up the cabin any more than it already is. We also have one to cover our water containers in the footwell of the aft cabin and to cover the jet boil and gas canisters in their deck hatch.

4) Water bottles. We each have two Camelbak water bottles which we fill up and take out on deck with us when we are rowing. We fill them up back in the cabin and make sure we are drinking as much as possible to keep us hydrated in the heat. We couldn’t survive without them in the burning heat of the day but as with everything else they also have a couple of extra uses. The bottles with sports lids are often used as a kind of jet wash for washing up the Tupperware after dinner. On days where we are getting splashed by the waves we use them to give our selves a quick rinse to get rid of the salt before entering the cabin. They have also been used for hair washing and to give us a cooling spray during a particularly hot rowing shift.

5) Travel towels. We definitely couldn’t live without our towels. Apart from the obvious use to dry ourselves after we have washed we also use these to sit or lie on every time we are in the cabin to stop our sweaty selves from sticking to the mattress covers. In any particularly hot sleeping shifts we’ll sleep on them to avoid getting our silk sleeping bag liners soggy with sweat. At various times they have also been used as seat covers out on the oars and worn as skirts to protect our thighs from the sun.

UPDATE:
– We are caught in the equatorial counter current (ECC) which is pushing us East. This is despite our best efforts to row hard in every session and means that we are not currently making many miles towards Samoa.
– Last night when LP and I were on the oars in a beautiful starry night shift a huge (approx 3ft long) sailfish landed on Doris hitting LP on the way. Luckily the tongs were at hand to get him back in the water quickly where he swam off but it nearly gave both of us a heart attack, woke LP from her sleepy state and woke Nats and LV up from their sleep in the cabin.
– This afternoon LP and I headed out from the sweaty cabin to go rowing. I complained that I was hot and hadn’t even started rowing so Mother Nature kindly provided a squall of cold wind and torrential rain with a accompanying tornado twister lasting over an hour to cool us off. Later the sun came out and a pod of dolphins then came past on a visit.

Day 22 – ‘Sometimes the journey is more important than the destination.’

Last night the sunset was incredible with the sky burning red between the moody black clouds and the reflections turning the rest of the sky shades of pastel pink and purple. We took a moment as a team to stop and appreciate where we were, sitting out together on the deck and admiring the view. All four of us totally in the moment enjoying the beauty of our surroundings and each other’s company. Shortly after Lizanne and I started rowing again she asked me where I would want to be if I could be anywhere in the world right now? I couldn’t think of any better answer than right now.

This morning the sky was grey, the sea was mauve, the waves were choppy and the fore cabin was too hot to sleep. I sat on the oars in our first day time session and I was definitely not in the moment. I was missing home, wanting to see my friends and family, wanting a long sleep in a bed that doesn’t move and the space to stretch out all my limbs without touching anyone else. I could have thought of about a hundred places I’d rather be. Fortunately the joy of living your life in 2 hour chunks means that nothing lasts for long and by the end of the shift I had rowed out of my negative head space and was back in, if not the moment then at least the boat.

When I was 17 I bought a t shirt at a regatta. On the back was a rower in the distance at the end of a line of puddles made by her oars. Under the picture was the quote ‘sometimes the journey is more important than the destination’. Lizanne and I started discussing this last night and I pondered on it as I rowed today. Although Cairns is our destination and our expedition will not be a success until we reach there, it is the experience of getting there that is important. My grandad has offered on a couple of occasions to buy me a plane ticket to Cairns to save us the effort of rowing there, but he knows this isn’t the point. We wanted to take on this challenge to give ourselves a taste of adversity and to see how we respond. The women supported by our two charities Breast Cancer Care and Walking With The Wounded don’t get a choice or a timeline for their biggest challenges and so when we are having a tough time like I was this morning then we can use them as an inspiration. It is supposed to be hard, it is supposed to be pushing us to our limits and it is supposed to be a challenge. If it was easy then everyone would be rowing oceans and it wouldn’t be teaching us anything. In Hawaii, Sarah Moshman asked each of us in her interviews for the documentary she is creating about our journey, what we had learnt about ourselves as people so far. I think she was disappointed with our answers. I think it is too early to say if this journey will change us or teach us lessons we didn’t already know but for me it has definitely already highlighted a few things. The strength there is in a team who share and live by their values, the importance of family and friends, the importance of living in the moment and the majestic beauty of Mother Nature. The journey so far has also involved the acquisition of many new skills, many new friends and many entertaining adventures. I don’t know what the next few thousand nautical miles have in store but I am sure that Oceania has plenty more tricks up her sleeve for us and that the journey is indeed going to be the important thing.

UPDATE: Today’s hilarious Doris moment is brought to you by listening to Lizanne try to teach Nats and Laura to beat box. Today’s weather has been brought to you by precipitation. Today’s happy moment was brought to you by Laura’s discovery of 4 chocolate pots in the breakfast and desert hatch.

Day 18 – The grass is always greener…

Like the good British citizens that we are, aboard Doris we spend an unreasonable amount of time talking about the weather. Is it hot? Is it cold? Is it splashy? Is it raining? Is it windy? These are all regular questions passed out through the aft cabin hatch in the 5 or 10 minutes before changeover time, especially at night. Discussions on the oars include debate over what we think the wind speed is and whether it matches our latest forecast from Tony. In the cabin we pore over the forecast text messages. In 45 mins it should be changing from 9-12kts to 12-15kts, do we think it already has, is it still north easterly? Discussion of the currents are also included with info coming back from those on the oars to say we have sped up or slowed down and it is easier or harder to hold our course so we must be into or out of a current.

In the last few days we have been enjoying hot and still conditions with barely a breath of wind and changeable currents which have made our speed variable. The temperature has soared again and it is now a relief to get into the cabin after a daytime row shift to escape the burning sun. Rowing now includes a healthy stream of sweat running off the eyelashes and chin and down the back. Often the sight of distant rain clouds gives us hope of a cooling shower. Hope slowly fades as we watch them dissipating as we row slowly in their direction. The nights are also much warmer now with no extra layers needed and a good sweat being worked up on the oars. These conditions have led to fond reminiscing about the times in the first leg when we were cold all the time and lived in our thermals, full wet weather gear and beanie hats. I know which I think is worse between shivering in a sleeping bag at night and losing feeling in my feet for days at a time or waking up on a sleeping bag liner wet with sweat in a sauna of a cabin, but a happy medium wouldn’t go amiss. It seems that the grass is always greener as back in leg one we dreamed of hot sunshine and the day we could roll out of our sleeping bags onto the oars without the hassle of putting on our wet weather gear, where as now we would all swap our yoghurt coated raisins for a cool breeze or some cloud cover.

However the hot and calm conditions have meant that we have all enjoyed swimming in the Pacific over the last few days. I can add the feeling of swimming in water so clear and blue where you look down and see the Mahi Mahi fish swimming below you and despite the amazing visibility know that you can’t see even close to the bottom, to the list of things I wish I could send you all a slice of. We have also been lucky enough to have had a couple of incredible nights with burning red sunsets giving way to bright starry skies with a hundred shooting stars giving us a show as we row. We are all looking forward to reaching the equator and the halfway point of both this leg and the entire expedition and sometimes it feels like a long time coming. After all for three of us this is our 102nd day at sea. However under the night sky or the setting sun I can’t help but feel like the luckiest person in the world.

Leg 2, Day 14 – Autopilot versus Hand Steering

The route from San Francisco to where we are now, just over 500 miles south of Hawaii has not been a straight one. For those of you who have been monitoring the map on our website you will have seen a few wobbles and the occasional loop the loop in our track as we get challenged by unfavourable winds and currents. Looking at the track on our chart plotter is even more entertaining as you can see every twist and turn, the times we go backwards when we change pairs, the times we went the wrong way when LP and Nat were perfecting their dance routine and the times the currents made our track draw a picture of a face. We have two methods for steering Doris, the autopilot and hand steering. The autopilot tiller can be attached to the rudder and shunts to and fro moving the rudder the required amount. Using the chart plotter we can either set it to stick to a particular heading or put in a waypoint that we want to reach and navigate towards that. With the hand steering we move the line attached to the rudder and jam it off in a cleat at our right hand side, adjusting it as necessary to hold a course. There are positives and negatives to both of these options and I thought I’d tell you about them so you can understand what we are dealing with next time you think we are rowing in the wrong direction.

AUTOPILOT

Pros: – The tiller does the work for you and all the rowers have to worry about is the rowing. This makes for very happy rowers.

– If you send Doris to a waypoint our very intelligent autopilot can read the waves and position us in the best place on them leading to a more comfortable ride.

– When sending us to a waypoint you also get a countdown of how many miles you have left until you reach it which is a good way to chunk time.

Cons:

– The autopilot is very noisy and so it keeps us awake at night. This is especially bad if you are in the position where you head is directly under the autopilot shelf in the aft cabin.

– Sometimes we loose AIS or GPS signal briefly in the Pacific and when we do an alarm sounds and the autopilot looses where it is and needs to be reminded which waypoint to head for. This is especially annoying at night.

– We can only use the autopilot when we are travelling consistently 2kts or more which means that it is fairly rare that we get to enjoy it.

HAND STEERING

Pros:

– This is a much quieter way to steer and leaves the aft cabin a lot more peaceful.

– Hand steering doesn’t use power from the batteries therefore leaving more energy for playing music through our deck speakers.

– Hand steering works when travelling at any speed.

Cons:

– On a good day it is easy to hold a course using hand steering but on a bad day you can be moving the rudder every few strokes.

– Moving the line in and out of the cleat can leave you with steering blisters on the right hand index finger.

– On a bad day hand steering can lead to frustration and anger of the rowers. I do not use bad language often but the steering has led me to it on a number of occasions.

Day 10 – Ladies glow, men perspire, horses sweat….?!

I think the quote goes ‘Ladies glow, men perspire and horses sweat’. I can categorically state this to be untrue! Aboard Doris we most definitely sweat. A LOT! Yesterday on the oars with Lizanne I was reminiscing about the last time I consistently sweated this much. During my PhD I had always promised myself that when it was finally completed I would reward myself with an adventure before settling down to a proper job. As such in January 2013 I headed off to the jungles of Belize for 12 weeks to complete an expedition leader training course. A group of 9 of us (with me being the only girl) lived in hammocks and completed courses in wilderness medicine, incident management, survival skills and water safety among others, as well as trekking through the jungle and completing an 180 mile canoe race (the most time I’d ever spent in a boat at one time before getting aboard Doris). It was awesome fun and my first true experience of the simplicity of expedition life. I had only been back in the UK for a week when I found out about the row and the getting a real job using my hard earned PhD was quickly replaced by planning a Pacific crossing in a 29ft rowing boat and getting a job I loved working for True Adventure a company who organise school expeditions. This job lead me to the rainforest again, this time the Amazon in Brazil with 7 Qataris and a film crew (this is a whole other story!) Anyway to get back to the point I was thinking about the stark differences and yet strong similarities between sweating on Doris in the middle of the worlds largest ocean and sweating in the jungle.

Exercising in heat on Doris involves being on the deck of the boat where you are exposed to the burning sun. We have to be so careful to lather on the factor 50 sunscreen and cover up during the hottest part of the day and our feet get singed if we exit the cabin in bare feet in the middle of the day. Luckily the breeze outside usually makes this less uncomfortable than spending time in the cabin. In the jungle exercising leads to dripping in sweat and is accompanied by being bitten by copious mosquitos and sand flies. Being sweaty and itchy is very unpleasant! However since you are mainly under the cover of the trees sunburn is much less of an issue although sunscreen is still needed. On Doris sweating sunscreen into our eyes leads to tears and inability to see to steer whereas in the jungle this is replaced by mosquito repellant to the eyes. In the jungle I became a pro at wiping the dripping sweat off my chin onto my shoulder as we dug holes for football goals or lugged palm trees along narrow tracks. On Doris I am leaning to embrace the sweat dripping from my eyelashes as I try to blog in the cabin.

Sleeping in the heat on Doris involves being inside our small cabins. In the jungle it involves being in a hammock. I personally find my hammock incredibly comfortable to sleep in, much more so than Doris. It also has the benefit of being a solo sleeping arrangement. On Doris if you move too much from your allocated sleeping position you find yourself pressed up against anothe sweaty rower who is radiating heat. Also in a hammock you know that any pool of sweat you find yourself in is your own… Both of these sleeping arrangements involve a lot more movement than your standard bed, something that I am not adverse too except in stormy conditions aboard Doris where we find ourselves slammed into the walls or each other every time you nod off into dream land. The night times in both the jungle and on the ocean do offer relief from the heat of the day although getting up to row every 2 hours is still not my favourite thing. To be honest middle of the night incident management scenarios in the jungle weren’t either.

Food sweats were something we got used to accompanying every meal in the jungle. We had a very limited selection of food and depending on whose turn it was to cook determined how good it tasted so we added chilli sauce to almost every meal. Aboard the good ship Doris we try to leave hot meals to cool for as long as possible, then sit on our towels to absorb the sweat as we try to think cold thoughts while eating. The meals that don’t require boiling water have quickly become everyone’s new favourite and we are hiding our chocolate stash in the hatches below the water line in an attempt to stop them from completely melting.

The wildlife out here on the Pacific is pretty special and we count ourselves lucky that we have seen so much sea life and so many birds keep us company. However the general background noise is the lapping or crashing of the ocean depending on the conditions. In the jungle there is wildlife everywhere you look and the night time chorus is ridiculously noisy. If you can avoid the biting wildlife safely inside your mosquito net one of my favourite things was being woken up by the sound of howler monkeys in the trees above me. On board Doris I have a ‘sounds of the jungle’ track on my iPod for the moments I find myself needing some time out from the ocean.

Although you couldn’t get two more different extremes than the jungle and the ocean the joy of both is the simplicity of life when you take away the stresses and worries of normal life and learn to exist with only what is really necessary. Mindfulness and living in the moment are things that I struggle with in real life where I am much more likely to overanalyse and overthink situations. However when at one with nature in these wild and beautiful places is it easy to sit and watch the waves or listen to the noises of the jungle and I hope that when we finally reach Cairns and return home that this is something I will be able to take with me. I wish I could send you all a tiny slither of the feeling of watching the colours of the sunset reflect on our bubble of the Pacific or rowing into the path of the moon but for now you’ll have to make do with reading about it.

UPDATE: this morning we had an interview with Radio 5 Live from the ocean and were suprised and very excited to find our 6th team member Meg also on the line! Such an awesome suprise and great to catch up with her. We are still waiting for the appearance of whales or phosphorescence on this leg but we have seen some new black and white stripy fish and have been watching the frigates diving for fish today.

How is it only day 6!?

I am exhausted already. Every shift on the oars getting soaked by huge waves and battling in the wind wipes me out and every shift in the cabin I can barely force myself to do the essentials like washing or eating before falling asleep. I am more tired after a week on dry land where we managed to get less sleep than we do on Doris than I was after 68 straight days at sea. The mighty Pacific has been throwing everything she has at us with big swell and strong winds. We spend all day and night crusty wih salt from the waves breaking over our heads which makes the skin sting and the scalp itch. I am too scared to attempt getting a brush through my matted and salty hair. When we’re in the cabins the exertion of eating or trying to wash off the salt leads to profuse sweating. I can’t believe we’ve only been out here for 6 days and haven’t even covered 200nm yet!

However despite all of this the ocean seems to know when we need a pick me up too. Last night’s sunset shift was one of my favourites ever. Nats and I were on the oars together. We had Nat’s chill out playlist on the speakers, there was the least splashing that had happened all day and the sunset lit up the sky in orange and fluorescent pink. The colours reflect off the water turning the ocean more colours than you would think possible. We spent most of the 2 hour shift with grins on our faces and I fell in love with ocean rowing all over again.

For now we are still pushing South trying to get free of a westerly current in the hope we will pick up some more speed once we are out of it. Samoa still seems a long way off so we return to our trusty chunking routine taking each day one shift at a time and trying to stay in the moment and appreciate as much as we can of our time at one with the beautiful Pacific!

Leg 2, Day 2 – The return of the sea sickness

After a hectic 8 days back on land we are back aboard our 29ft home Doris. You would think that after 68 consecutive days at sea it would take more than a week for my body to forget how to live on the waves. But no, i am seasick again along with Lizanne. The best way I can describe it is like being horribly hungover but without the fun night before. We are headed South towards Samoa which is currently 2225nm away on a straight line so we are settled in for another couple of months afloat. Our first night was a beautiful one with calm waters and a really bright moon. The mahi mahi fish are back with us and the sun is cooking us gently both on and off the oars. Our newly installed cabin fans are working a treat though. We also had a couple of friends who had departed the Hawaii Yacht Club this morning pop over to say hello on their way past in their sailing boat. Next stop Samoa!