The rowing girls with lots of bottle!
Champagne comes in handy after marlin skewers transatlantic boat
THEY are usually used to Christen a new ship.
But an enterprising transatlantic rowing crew have used an empty bottle of champagne to plug a hole in their vessel – after it was attacked and holed by a marlin.
The fish skewered the trio’s boat during a 3,000-mile challenge called the World’s Toughest Row, puncturing the craft three times and breaking an oar.
Crew member Maddie DifazioWright, from Bath, England, said the incident on New Year’s Eve was ‘utterly terrifying’.
‘I saw the fish coming at the boat and then we heard a crunch,’ she said. ‘It happened so quickly and our training kicked in. We tried to utilise what we had on board to save our journey.’
She said the champagne bottle was left over from Christmas Day ‘so it was just instinct to use it to mend the hole’. ‘The poor marlin fish must have got a massive headache,’ she added.
Ms Difazio-Wright, a brand manager for a property company, and crewmates Grace Gilbert, a chartered surveyor from Oxford, England, and teacher Grace Pybus, from Newport, Wales, had no rowing experience and met up online to train for the challenge.
The annual charity race sees competitors row more than 3,000 nautical miles from La Gomera in the Canary Islands across the Atlantic to Antigua, and attracts 20 to 40 teams of up to five rowers from around the world.
The women, who entered under the Vibe the Wave moniker, set off on December 12 and expected to take up to 50 days to complete the crossing. They were making good progress until New Year’s Eve, when they realised they were rowing over a school of fish being pursued by a 10ft-long marlin.
In an incident captured on the crew’s GoPro camera, the fish rammed the boat with its spikelike snout, then returned for another attack. A team spokesare man said it left ‘three notable holes’ – one inside the hatch with direct exposure to the ocean.
The crew spent nearly three hours fixing the damage, and managed to patch up the boat enough to continue rowing, but they are still taking on water and currently just under a month from the finish line in Antigua.
‘We are still on track thankfully and making good progress on our journey,’ Ms Difazio-Wright said.
The women are equipped with dehydrated food rations and a water desalination unit, to make sea water safe to drink. During the crossing, they expect to row 1.5 million strokes and face waves up to 30ft (9m) high.
There are several different species of marlin, with the largest being the kind which attacked the women’s boat – the endangered Atlantic blue marlin. It can grow up to 16ft in length and weigh three-quarters of a ton.
The tradition of breaking a bottle over a new ship’s bow for good luck dates back to the Vikings, who would use blood from a sacrificed animal.
‘The marlin must have a headache’