Four naked) mums in a boat
They were school gate mothers who craved excitement and, after a few glasses of wine, decided to ditch their husbands, children and (for the sake of comfort) their clothes to go on a 3,000-mile odyssey. Their story is enchanting and achingly funny
The time was just after 7am when Frances Davies, a 4 5 - year-old lawyer, reached the traffic lights near her office in Leeds. That morning, as usual, she’d kissed her husband and two sons goodbye while they were still asleep and quietly closed the front door behind her.
She’d be one of the first to arrive at the office and one of the last to leave, often not getting home until well after 9pm.
But something different happened that day in May 2013. As she sat waiting in traffic, Frances watched an old man walking his elderly dog across the road, in exactly the same place as she’d seen them previously every morning.
‘Will this be my entire working life?’ she thought. ‘Driving 25 miles in and out of Leeds every single day? Am I going to do this for another 20 years and then retire?’
It was at that moment she made her decision. ‘That’s it,’ she said out loud, as she inched her car forward again. ‘I’m fed up with hearing how busy everybody is. I’m going to ask them again. They can only say no.’
Within the hour, Frances had emailed a group of close friends, all of them mothers from her sons’ school: From: Frances Davies Subject: talisker Whisky Atlantic challenge Good morning, Do you remember my suggestion at the boat club dinner in january? I know it sounds silly, but I reALLY think we could do this race. It’s quite pricey and would mean taking a couple of months out of our regular lives, but it would be amazing and life-changing, and we definitely wouldn’t want to go back to work afterwards! my husband thinks I’m ridiculous, of course. Have a think about it, F xx
Twelve minutes later, she’d had a reply. It was from 49-year- old Janette Benaddi, a company director and clinical researcher.
‘Life’s for living, so let’s really live,’ wrote her friend. ‘I am definitely up for it. J.’
And so a dream had been born—– one that would take us not only into the record books as the oldest women to row the Atlantic, but on a physical and emotional journey that would test the bonds of female friendship to the limits.
The four of us had met the previous year, in September 2012, at our children’s school in York. Not only at the school gates or in the car park, but at a social boat club run for parents and friends on Saturday mornings.
Our reasons for joining the club were different. For Janette, it was that her son was going through his adolescent phase, but he loved rowing boats.
She decided that if she, too, learned to row, then the two of them would have something to talk about — and she might lose some weight in the process.
For Frances, it was all about her inability to sit still. The group’s most sporty member, she had already done 10km runs and coastto- coast races, so signing up for the boat club represented a whole new challenge.
NIKI Doeg, 43, was already a friend of Frances — they were the only ones who had known each other before. So, why wouldn’t Niki want to escape from her normal routine and join us on a Saturday? In between running her finance business with her husband? And training to be a rugby coach? Oh, and looking after her family?
The fourth team member, helen Butters, then also 43, said she’d already been thinking of learning a new skill when she bumped into the rest of us in our tracksuits that first Saturday morning.
helen had been a stay-at-home mother for a few years before returning to her managerial job with the NhS. There i s only so much sitting around drinking tea with other mums that she can cope with, she said.
So there we all were, with no time for the social niceties, before we were lowering ourselves into a very thin, very unstable, very wobbly boat and putting ourselves at the mercy of a no-nonsense coach.
‘ Feather!’ ‘ Square!’ ‘ More on stroke!’ he shouted. ‘More on bow!’
‘What the hell’s a square?’ hissed Janette as she lurched about in the back.
‘ No i dea!’ hissed back helen. ‘What’s a sodding feather?’
The coach’s words meant nothing to us. he bawled, bellowed and pleaded, but we were hopeless. All we could think about was keeping ourselves out of the water as the boat listed precariously from side to side.
At the end of the two-hour session, we crawled up the muddy riverbank, exhausted. We had pink cheeks, sore hands and wet behinds — but we were alive with adrenaline, excitement and a profound sense of achievement. And that was it. We would meet every Saturday, come rain or shine (mainly rain), and row up and down the river Ouse — falling in, getting back in the boat, being shouted at.
And afterwards we’d go for coffee and talk about our husbands, our children, our jobs, our parents and our lives in general.
We were f our very different characters, but somehow we gelled, both in and out of the boat.
Janette is the go-getter and risktaker, always up for a laugh and completely unsporty. She’ll always choose the lift over the stairs.
helen is the cheerful one, while Frances is laid-back and calm — it takes a lot to rile her.
And then there’s Niki, the dependable one, who is never knowingly out of wet wipes, with a voluminous handbag to rival Mary Poppins’. By the beginning of 2013 we were fast becoming extremely good friends.
We didn’t go far to start with. Some Saturdays we’d head north from York to Poppleton — just six miles, but an ordeal of blood, sweat and swearing. Or we’d row south to Bishopsthorpe, another five miles of grunting and groaning that would afterwards send us on our hands and knees for coffee and shortbread.
BUT it wasn’t too long before we thought we might branch out and enter a few races. Not that we f ancied our chances: we all knew we were appalling. Though perhaps not quite as appalling as our first competitive event proved us to be.
With hindsight, it would have been better if we hadn’t invited our families to watch. Because no sooner had we all parked our behinds on the seats of our boat and set off than we ploughed straight into the riverbank.
‘Number 48!’ the umpire shouted through a megaphone. ‘Number 48! Watch yourselves!’
‘Is that us?’ asked Janette as we pushed back into the river and careered into another boat.
‘Number 48!’ the referee shouted again as we ricocheted off the boat and into the bank again. ‘I really think you need to come off the river! You are a danger to yourselves and to everyone else! We’re launching the safety boat!’
And so that was the end of our first competitive effort: towed off the river in disgrace in front of our families and friends. A disaster!
That is perhaps what made it all the more surprising when Frances, fuelled by a few glasses of wine, put her life-changing suggestion to us at a boat club social just a few weeks later, in January 2013.
‘I’ve got an idea,’ she said. ‘ Why don’t we do something together? A a challenge? Why don’t we row the Atlantic? I’ve read about this race — it’s called the Talisker Atlantic Challenge and it goes from the Canary Islands to Antigua. What do you think?
‘It doesn’t look that hard, honestly. It’s a real dream of mine to do something like this.’
‘A dream!’ chipped in Richard, helen’s husband. ‘honestly, if we all followed our dreams, where would we be?’
But no one was listening to him or to any of the other men present.
Why couldn’t four working mothers i n their 40s, with families and responsibilities and just 12 weeks’ rowing experience, and wildly varying levels of fitness, make it across the Atlantic?
We drank some more wine, clinked glasses and toasted our ambition.
‘Isn’t it a great idea?’ said Frances
happily to her husband Mark as they walked home.
‘No,’ he replied. ‘It is not great. It’s not great at all.’ He stopped and looked at her. ‘But, if you really want to do it, then it’s OK by me. I want you to know, though, that the idea does not make me jump for joy. Not one little bit.’
The other husbands felt the same. They were clearly hoping we’d forget all about it — that it was just one of those crazy schemes that seems a great idea after a few glasses of wine, but disappears with the hangovers the next morning.
But something had taken root that night, though the four of us didn’t talk about i t again f or months.
‘I kept dropping hints to Mark, leaving leaflets about the race around the place,’ says Frances.
‘Does being a mother-of-two mean you can no longer dream? No longer do anything for yourself?’
Niki agrees. ‘When you go through life, you are lots of different people,’ she says. ‘I’d been the child, then I’d been the wife, I’d been the career woman and I’d been the mum. It was about trying to understand who the real me was underneath all that. So I was not going to give up that easily.’
By then we were telling anyone and everyone about our plan as we tried to drum up the funding and sponsorship to buy the boat and kit and raise what we hoped would be a substantial amount for two charities, Maggie’s Cancer Care and the Yorkshire Air Ambulance. The reaction was mixed, to say the least.
‘There’s no way you’ll do that,’ said one bloke with a too tight shirt and champagne breath at a party. ‘You’ve only rowed on the river. What do you know about the sea?’
Quite a lot of people — older women in particular — accused us of being selfish.
This was not a trip a mother should do, they said. We should leave it to the men and be satisfied with what we already had. But what i f what we’ve got i s not enough, we asked ourselves.
Marriage, jobs, children: we were all incredibly lucky, that much we knew. But was there something else? The wind in our hair? The rain on our faces? Deep, intimate female friendship?
Telling the children was the hardest part. Though our husbands were more or less coming round to the idea, we were extremely worried about breaking the news to our children. We had eight between us — two each.
We’d planned to enter the 12-week race starting in December 2015, which meant we would be away over Christmas — a subject we slightly glossed over. As it turned out, though, the children were all remarkably sanguine.
Janette recalls: ‘Mine didn’t really bat an eyelid when I told them I was going to row 3,000 miles across one of the most dangerous oceans in the world. They just said “Cool!”, as if it was some kind of everyday occurrence.’
‘I’m fine with my mum being away,’ said Jack, Frances’s younger son. ‘But will Dad cope? I worry about him not being able to find my school tie.’
CORBY, Niki’s eldest, was delighted. ‘ Take- away every night!’ he said. It was only 14-year-old Lucy, Helen’s daughter, who seemed to really get what we were doing. ‘It’ s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and it can never be taken away from you,’ she said.
‘When you are really old and grey, you will still have the story about how you once rowed the Atlantic. And you will probably never stop telling it!’
We met the fifth member of the team, our beautiful purpose-built boat, in the autumn of 2014.
We christened her Rose. We needed a girl’s name, of course, and we are all proud Yorkshirewomen. It was the perfect choice.
Rose made her maiden voyage on the river Crouch in Essex, watched by Charlie Pitcher, the world’s fastest Atlantic solo rower, who runs the nearby boat workshop where she’d been made.
Dressed in our mismatched bobble hats, baggy leggings and granny cardigans, we must have looked quite a sight as we climbed on board. But then something amazing happened.
Sleek and elegant, Rose was like a cross between a spaceship and a rowing boat, and super stable. Being in charge of her was like nothing we had ever done before. It felt fantastic.
The freezing wind might have been blasting our scarlet cheeks, our noses might have been running, but after two years of hard slog and endless trips up and down the Ouse, everything suddenly came together and we were at last working in harmony.
Our oars dipped in and out of the water as if powered by one person. ‘Hey!’ shouted Charlie across the water. ‘You ladies can row!’
‘Yes, we can!’ replied Janette. ‘Yes, we bloody well can!’
By now time was ticking on, and soon we had just over six months to get fit and ready. For some it was a little easier than for others. Janette is probably the least inclined towards any form of exercise.
‘I had one of those stretchy bands that you’re supposed to tie to a doorknob,’ she says. ‘But I’d have a glass of wine and think “I should really do 20 minutes on the band” — but I’d end up doing emails instead.’
Fortunately, the rest of us were more conscientious. Helen worked out constantly, doing sit-ups or squats or knocking out a few star jumps while waiting for the pasta to cook.
‘I was multi-tasking — something mums have done for centuries,’ she says. ‘If you don’t have time, you make time. It is extraordinary what
you can actually fit into a day.’ We had mental profiling done to find out how each of us would react under pressure.
And a doctor friend put us through our paces on the medical front, even teaching us how to stitch each other up in the event of an injury. We practised on a pork chop — another memorable evening, to put it mildly.
But we didn’t just rely on science. On the spiritual front, we had an ‘angel reading’ done by one of Helen’s friends. Over shepherd’s pie and Prosecco, she told us we were going to make it. It was going to be tough, she said. There would be moments when we would be miserable, missing our families and desperate to get off the boat, but we would all pull through.
Fortified by her positive predictions, we toasted our sure-fire success.
We were nearly there. After months of trekking round with Rose on a trailer, publicising what we doing, we had just one more trip to make — to the Isle of Skye, to meet the organisers, Talisker, the whisky distillers.
This is where our team bonding moved into a whole new league. It had to. There was only one bathroom and loo at our B&B for the four of us.
At 6pm, Helen took to the pink bath, computer in hand. While she was in there, Niki and then Janette decided they needed the loo. ‘Come on, Helen!’ they shouted.
‘I think you should all come in!’ announced Helen from the bath. ‘I think you should see me starkers and you all need to be able to go to the toilet in front of me.’
‘I have no desire to see your private parts!’ said Janette, opening the door. ‘Why not?’ asked Helen, flashing her boobs. ‘We’ve got to get used to it. When we’re on the boat, we’ll mostly be naked.’ ‘Speak for yourself,’ said Janette. ‘She’s right,’ agreed Frances, joining the gang in the bathroom.
And getting used to each other naked would prove invaluable, as we spent much of our crossing in nothing more than life jackets, as soaking clothes were more uncomfortable than soaking skin. Back then, I don’t think any of us had any idea quite how cosy our life on board Rose was going to be.