Four Mums in a Boat: Friends who rowed 3000 miles, broke a world record and learnt a lot about life along the way

‘I can’t believe I asked them to row the Atlantic with me and they said yes! Isn’t that great?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘It is not great. It’s not great at all.’ But then he paused and looked over at her. ‘But if you really want to go and you really want to do it, then it’s okay by me. However, I want you to know that the idea does not make me jump for joy. Not one little bit.’

Perhaps our partners were all hoping we’d forget about it, that the plan would simply disappear, like most plans discussed after a few bottles of wine. They expected it would evaporate along with the hangover.

And for a long time, they were right. We did vaguely discuss the possibility of rowing across an ocean the following Saturday over cups of coffee at The Grange. Helen told Niki the story and we had a laugh on the sofa at the foolishness of it all.

‘Rowing the Atlantic?’ she asked. ‘That’s a long way.’

‘I know!’ agreed Helen. ‘That’s what Richard said!’

‘We’d drunk quite a lot of wine by then,’ added Caroline.

‘Ben is positively encouraging me to go, the sod!’ said Janette.

Only Frances stayed silent, thinking. The problem with saying something like ‘I want to row an ocean’ and declaring your dream, revealing your innermost desires, is that it can’t be unsaid. And once the genie was out of the bottle, it was all Frances could think about. She was determined to do it.

It was fairly obvious what Mark thought about the idea, and indeed all the other husbands. Their surprised, incredulous faces that night around the dinner table said it all. Not one of them believed we could pull it off. Four mums rowing an ocean? It was clearly a ridiculous idea and, anyway, who was going to do the washing if we went?

But Frances mulled, she daydreamed, she googled the hell out of the event and she quietly would not give up. She kept mentioning it to Mark, as a way of getting him used to the idea.

‘I thought if I kept talking about it, slipping it into conversation, he’d believe that I was serious. That I really could do it. The seed that had been sown by reading all those books from the library years before was finally germinating. Why couldn’t I have an adventure? Does being a mother of two mean you can no longer dream? No longer do anything for yourself?’

So that Friday morning in May, she could not control it any more and she emailed them all. ‘It was the grey suits, the grey road, the grey everything, and I wanted a bit of sunshine and a bit of memory-making. I was feeling increasingly frustrated and underappreciated at work. I just kept thinking, “Am I going to do this for another 10 years and then retire? Is this it? My life?”’

Janette, of course, replied almost immediately. But the others did not. There was nothing but radio silence, so much so that Frances began to think that perhaps she’d misjudged the mood. It was, after all, her idea, her mid-life crisis! Maybe the others wanted nothing to do with it…

At least Janette was up for it. In fact, Janette was so up for it that she was ready to row that Christmas. She was a little disappointed to learn that the two of them weren’t taking off in six months’ time but in two years.

‘We’ve got to plan, we’ve got to train, we’ve got to get a boat – we can’t possibly be ready this year!’ explained Frances as the two of them trawled the Talisker website, working out how to register. And register they did. Just the two of them. It was 500 euros each. They were the first to register for the 2015 race. In fact, they were the only team to register for quite a long time. Whatever was going to happen, Frances and Janette were going to row an ocean. There was a small matter of some training and a boat, but they were on their way.

Janette immediately signed herself up to a five-day practical RYA (Royal Yachting Association) Day Skipper at Sea programme in Spain. Of course she did. ‘Well, I was definitely going to row the Atlantic, so I thought I should get started. Also we did have a yacht already, so we thought it was a good idea to do some sort of professional training!

She and Ben flew to Girona, Spain, where they were joined by an elderly chap from Australia who wanted to work on cruise ships in his retirement and a young girl who was keen to work on yachts, and that was it. For five days they learnt how to reverse, turn, hoist sails and get them down again.

‘To be frank, I wasn’t very good. I was rubbish. Ben was trying to help me so that I could pass the test. He was whispering things in my ear, telling me which way to go. At one point we were in a man-overboard situation where they’d thrown a fender into the sea to simulate a body, which I then proceeded to mow down. The skipper wasn’t pleased.’

‘Now, Janette,’ she said, ‘if that was a person, they would be dead by now.’

‘I also launched the 40-foot yacht headlong into the pontoon. I have never seen anyone move so fast in their life when she realised I was about to plough the whole boat into the dock. She grabbed the joystick out of my hand and plunged it into reverse.’

Both Janette and Ben got their International Certificate of Competence and another one in marine VHF (very high frequency) radio.

‘It was a bit of a joke, really, as I was completely incompetent, but the one thing I really did learn that week was the incredible power of the sea. It really opened my eyes. It gave me a flavour of what the ocean could do. We left port one day for a practice and we had to turn back because the weather was so bad and the seas were so big. I had no idea it could get that rough out there. I had no idea how strong and powerful the ocean could be.’

If Frances and Janette were fully signed up to the idea of crossing the Atlantic, the rest of us were most certainly not.

‘Have you heard that this lot are still going on about this ridiculous idea?’ asked Richard as we all sat down to dinner at Helen’s house one evening towards the end of June. We thought the rowing dinner had gone so well, we’d decided to get everyone together again for a plate of lasagne and some wine. Although this was not quite the feedback Frances and Janette were after! ‘It’s madness. You can’t row the Atlantic! I don’t know who you lot think you are. You’re a bunch of nutters!’

‘We are,’ agreed Janette, sitting down next to Richard and taking a mouthful of lasagne. ‘Total nutters!’

‘But we are going to do it,’ insisted Frances.

‘And you’re letting her go?’ Richard asked Mark, pointing at Frances with his fork. ‘Are you?’

‘It’s not for me to say yes or no,’ said Mark. ‘It’s always been her dream to go, to row across the Atlantic.’

‘Yes, but like I said,’ replied Richard, ‘if we all followed our dreams, where would we be?’

‘I think we’d all be happy, Richard,’ said Mark. ‘It’s utter fantasy,’ said Richard, shaking his head.

‘We all agree it is lunacy,’ added Ben, pouring the wine. ‘Total lunacy. But who am I to stand between my wife and her dreams?’ And the conversation moved on.

But then something very odd happened. Helen is always looking for signs in life, little indicators that the path you want to choose or the idea that you had is the correct one. And then, just at the right time, a sign appeared. It was the first week in July, 10 days after the dinner, and St Olave’s, the junior school to St Peter’s senior school, were having their prize-giving. Usually they would book some sort of dignitary, an after-prize speaker to talk to the parents for a bit and pad out the hour or so between the most improved and the best in show. But this year it was different. This year, unbeknown to us, they had invited along Alastair Humphreys.

An adventurer, blogger and motivational speaker, Humphreys, as well as completing a four-year cycle trip around the world, walking across India, competing in the Marathon des Sables and being National Geographic Adventurer of the Year, had also rowed across the Atlantic.

We weren’t sitting together in the hall that day as he started his talk. Actually, not all of us were even there. But those who were sat dotted around the room. Frances was near the back, Janette was to the side and Helen was closer to the front. Humphreys started to explain his new project – microadventures. A pioneering scheme that tries to encourage people to get outside, get out of their comfort zone and go somewhere they’ve never been before. He was an exciting speaker who exuded the sort of positivity that Frances was always talking about. He regaled the room with stories about his cycling trip around the world and about how he broke his foot in the Marathon des Sables. And then, in among his stories of his trips and his experiences, he said something that made our hearts skip a beat.

‘If anyone ever asks you to row an ocean,’ he said, ‘don’t hesitate. Don’t even think about it. Just do it. It is a chance in a lifetime. It’s a moment. And it is something that you will never, ever forget.’

Janette turned around to look at Frances and smiled. And Frances smiled back. And then, through the sea of neatly combed hair and smart jackets, Frances saw Helen turn around. She was beaming – she slowly nodded, a large grin all over her face. She then turned to look at Janette and did the same. Helen was in. She was going to be on that boat. No matter what.

SHIP’S LOG

‘Just say yes. If someone presents you with an opportunity in life, always say yes. You can figure out afterwards how you will manage it. If you say no straight away, the opportunity passes you by and you might not be asked again.’

(JANETTE/SKIPPER)

CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_2faf7ca0-8010-5289-b956-75473bfa2da8)

Making It Happen (#ulink_2faf7ca0-8010-5289-b956-75473bfa2da8)

‘If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place.’

NORA ROBERTS, TEARS OF THE MOON

If Helen was on board, Richard was still most adamantly not. Not unreasonably, he was worried. Worried that Helen might have to give up her job (the NHS would surely never give her four months off), worried about money and worried about what would happen to the children if Helen upped-sticks and launched herself on the ocean. While Frances’s and Janette’s husbands were being super-supportive, Helen found herself faced with a wall of silence. ‘He just would not talk about it. He would just say no. No, you can’t possibly leave your job. No, you can’t leave the children. No, you can’t do it. Just no. He was concerned about the money we would lose. About how we were going to manage to pay the bills and the mortgage. All very natural for him to be so worried. I’m glad now that one of us was!’

But Helen was convinced she was doing the right thing, and of course saw signs and inspiration everywhere. ‘Even on TV. I remember watching I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! with Melanie Sykes and watching her beating all the contestants who were younger than her. She is my age and I remember thinking, “Look at her, being all feisty and fabulous. I would love to do something that would test my limits. I would love to do something like that.” Then I realised that this challenge – to row the Atlantic – had come to me. I’d asked for it, and now it had come, so I just had to do it. Even if Richard was not happy about it.’

So Helen used the gentle art of ‘familiarity breeds acceptance’. Instead of giving up, she printed off the Atlantic Campaigns material and left it on the kitchen table. And there it sat for days, weeks, months, like a giant unanswered question or a very tacit challenge. Periodically, it would be opened and closed, but it never left the table. ‘Every time I went near it, Richard would walk out of the room, but he never actually threw it in the bin.’

Although Niki and Gareth had started discussing the challenge, the idea itself was a little problematic. ‘We’re very close; we have the sort of relationship where we talk about anything and everything. I don’t think he wanted me to be gone for so long.’

Emotional attachment aside, they also had a business together. ‘He has a very strong work ethic, so he also could not understand why I would want to take time away from our business or how it could work without me.’

Also, Niki’s children were younger than the rest of ours. Unlike Janette’s, who were fairly self-sufficient, Corby was 11 and Aiden was 7 at the time, and despite the fact that Niki’s parents – Bunny and Peter – lived right next door to them, there was still the question of childcare, the school run, homework and tea. But once the idea had been suggested, Niki found it difficult to let it go.