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

Not that any of us really cared about that. We’d seen each other in all forms of undress in the build-up to the race. We had shared more dodgy hotel rooms with badly plumbed bathrooms than we cared to remember. So performing on a bucket in front of the group was not the problem; staying on the bucket was. And keeping the contents of the bucket from flying back into the boat after you hurled it overboard or avoiding spilling it all over your fellow rower was something of a challenge. Also, remembering to fill it with a little water before sitting on it was clearly trickier for some members of the crew than for others. Helen was always the one having to scrub out her bucket after being surprised by her sudden need to go to the loo.

Despite the huge waves and the strong current, we were sticking to our plan of rowing two hours on, two hours off. We were on the oars in our pairings of Frances and Niki, and Janette and Helen, keeping to our schedule and pointing the bow towards Antigua, 3,000 miles away.

Even Helen. Every two hours she would come out of the diminutive cabin she was sharing with Niki and she would throw up, get on the oars, throw up, either row or not row, throw up. And she would remain there for the next two hours, being battered by the waves and throwing up, before it was her turn to go back into the cabin. Then she would get off her seat, throw up, knock on the cabin door to get Niki out of bed, throw up again, before dragging herself into the cabin, where she would lie, without moving, until she was called back up on deck again two hours later.

The only two things that kept Helen going during those first few days were mugs of Ultra Fuel (an all-singing, all-dancing liquid meal-replacement drink, developed from extreme sports) and Niki. Every time Helen came off shift, Niki made her a mixture of Ultra Fuel and water, which Helen would sip in tiny mouthfuls, while lying motionless, for the next two hours. Oddly, Helen was not sick when she was lying down, and those precious minutes allowed her to metabolise the nutrients in the drink and prevent total dehydration. And dehydration on the ocean can be fatal, or at least fatal to your ambitions of finishing the race, as once it kicks in it is extremely difficult to combat. Which is exactly what happened to poor Nick Khan in the Latitude 35 team – after 10 days of chronic seasickness, he had to be medivacked off the boat when he was found deliriously shouting at the sea and saying he wanted to die. He had no choice but to leave the boat (along with another crew member who’d decided it was no longer safe for him to continue), leaving the remaining pair to row the four-man boat without them.

So we all kept an eye on Helen. Well, Niki did. Sympathy, or indeed empathy, is not something that courses freely through the veins of either Janette or Frances. They are more Yorkshire than pudding, and their suffering of fools and vomitus is limited to say the least. But what neither of them could fault Helen on was her absolute determination to keep on going during those first 72 hours. She was not so much ‘eat, sleep, row, repeat’; more ‘puke, sleep, puke, row, puke, repeat’. It was impressive. Her eyes were glazed, her conversation was non-existent, but still she managed to row. The waves crashed against the side of the boat and Helen stood firm. ‘Just a few more days,’ we all kept on thinking; just a few more days and we hoped Helen would be able to crack a smile and keep down the all-in-one breakfast-in-a-bag.

But it was about 2 a.m. in the morning on the third day when disaster struck. The boat was lurching from side to side in the huge waves, the few lights we had on board were flickering and it was Helen’s turn up on the oars.

‘Five minutes!’ yelled Niki, knocking on the door to the sealed cabin.

‘What do you think?’ asked Janette through the darkness, sliding back and forth on her seat. ‘Do you think Helen is any better?’

‘A bit,’ said Niki, holding onto the boat while trying to slip out of her wet-weather gear. ‘She is being very brave. Stick to the Ultra Fuel and I’m sure she’ll pull through, eventually.’

Just then a huge wave hit the side of the boat, sending Niki flying. With one leg still in her trousers, she didn’t stand a chance as she was hurled against a metal peg that sank hard into the base of her spine.

‘Oh my GOD!’ she screamed in the darkness. ‘Oh my GO-O-OD!’

‘Are you okay?’ Janette leapt off the oars.

Niki was writhing around in the water at the bottom of the boat, screaming and clutching the base of her spine. Both Frances and Helen appeared, from either end of the boat.

‘No! NO! I am not!’

‘Are you hurt?’

‘Yes! My bum, my bum –’

Niki was shaking and stammering with cold and pain.

‘Have you broken anything? Cut anything? Is there blood?’ asked Janette, scrabbling about in the darkness.

‘No. I don’t know… my back, my coccyx, my pelvis. It’s agony… Aaaah – this is worse than childbirth! Worse… than… bloody… child-birth!’

‘Here,’ shouted Frances, staggering towards her. ‘Here’s the medical bag.’

‘Okay, okay,’ said Janette, leaning over and grabbing the bag. ‘On a scale of one to ten. One to ten, remember. What is your pain?’

‘Oh, Jesus Christ!’ spat Niki. ‘Once a nurse, always a bloody nurse.’ Janette was indeed once a nurse.

‘It’s a ten! Of course it’s a ten!’

‘Okay, okay,’ said Janette, fumbling through the bag in the darkness. ‘How about… paracetamol? No.Tramadol? Or…’ She strained to read the label in the dark. ‘Diclofenac?’

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s a painkiller and an anti-inflammatory.’

‘What will it do?’ gasped Niki.

‘Make you go… um, diclofuckit?’ suggested Janette.

‘I’ll have two diclofuckits,’ said Niki desperately.

‘Two,’ nodded Janette in agreement.

‘And I don’t know what you’re looking at,’ said Niki, lying flat at the bottom of the boat, staring up at Frances as yet another wave crashed overhead. ‘It’s all your fault we’re here!’

‘Yeah!’ agreed Helen, speaking for the first time in 24 hours. ‘This is the last time I listen to any of your bright ideas.’

SHIP’S LOG:

‘We were holding on, yet at the same time we were letting go. The first 24 hours of our row were about letting go – letting go of life enough so that we could venture into the unknown. Each of us had to eventually stop looking at the outline of the land and turn instead towards the vast open ocean. That first stroke of the oars away from the shore was our first step into an unknown world. It takes courage to let go of what you are familiar with. Once the step has been taken, there is no knowing how the ride will go – and that’s the fun part.’

(JANETTE/SKIPPER)

CHAPTER 3 (#ulink_83e126d3-bb3d-599f-8105-be879a51b4f7)

The Beginning (#ulink_83e126d3-bb3d-599f-8105-be879a51b4f7)

‘A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.’

YOKO ONO

3 May 2013, Leeds

It was just past seven in the morning as Frances Davies, a 45-year-old lawyer from York, was driving down Whitehall Road, Leeds, listening to Stan Graham, a favourite folk singer of hers.

She’d been up since 5.30 a.m., as she had been every working day for the past 20 years. As a busy mother of two, it was the only time when she could have a moment to herself. The house was quiet and her husband, Mark, and their two children, Jay and Jack, would be asleep, so she would potter around their Victorian terraced house in the centre of York, listening to motivational TED talks on her computer, soaking up the words and ideas of Diana Nyad, who, at 60, was the only person to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark cage. Either that, or Frances would sneak in an extra chapter of a book, with her yoghurt and fruit, reading about ex-headmistress Anne Mustoe’s account of cycling around the world at the age of 50. And then she’d kiss everyone goodbye while they were still asleep in their beds, get into the car and drive the 25-mile journey to the office and the job she’d had for the past 13 years.

Sitting at the traffic lights that morning, dressed in her grey suit and white shirt, with her chin on the steering wheel, she watched the same old man walk the same elderly dog across the same road at the same time as he did every day. She looked up the road towards her looming office building and across at all the other commuters sitting in their cars. She thought of Patrick Swayze from one of her favourite films – Point Break – and those ‘dead souls inching along the freeways in their metal coffins’.

There were only a few lights on in the office – she’d be one of the first in, again, and one of the last to leave. She’d miss school drop-off and pick-up as usual. She’d probably have to stop for a drink with a client at the end of the day and wouldn’t be home until well past nine that evening.

‘Who knows what’s around the bend? A brand-new start or the bitter end?’ sang Stan Graham in Easy Street.

Frances glanced at the radio, her palms feeling clammy, her heart beating harder in her chest. A brand-new start? Or the bitter end? The bitter end. ‘Will this be my entire adult working life?’ she thought to herself. Wearing the same old groove? Going on the same journey 25 miles in and 25 miles out of Leeds? Every. Single. Day?

‘That’s it,’ she said to herself, pushing herself back in her seat. ‘I am asking them again. They can only say no.’ She put the car into gear. Her mother had died at the age of 58 from breast cancer. Frances was 28 years old at the time and her mother’s passing left a huge hole in her life. Her mother had lost her battle with cancer when she was little older than Frances is now. She had not lived long enough to meet Mark or her grandchildren – a loss that Frances had always felt very keenly.

‘We are only here once,’ she reasoned. ‘We should make the most of our short time here. I’m fed up with going to things and hearing how “busy” everyone is. I don’t care who is “busy” or who is not “busy”. What is admirable about being busy? I don’t care about any of that. I want to get out and do something else.’

One of the things about the death of her mother that had always inspired Frances was how she never gave up – she always carried on fighting. For years she battled cancer with a serenity that was humbling. Her courage against all the odds was overwhelming.

So, after refuelling with a weak, tepid coffee from the office kitchen, she sat down at her desk and wrote this email: