FORCE 10 fallouts!
Never mind the three-day Atlantic hurricane that nearly killed them all. Just as stormy were the blazing rows between the school-gate mums who left husbands and children to embark on a 3,000-mile odyssey of a lifetime
YESTERDAY, we described how four mothers decided to swap their cosy domestic lives — to row the Atlantic. They told how they practised on the local river, then raised sponsorship for their custom-made boat, Rose. Here, in the second extract from their brilliant book, they start the voyage, spend Christmas tearfully without their children — and struggle to survive a terrifying storm that tests their will, and friendship to the limit . . .
WE wErE just three days into our voyage across the Atlantic and things were already going wrong. Nothing could have prepared us for the violence of the winds and the huge, unforgiving waves, or the constant, relentless battering of the boat.
It was far, far worse than we’d expected — a world away from the gentle rivers of Yorkshire we’d left so far behind.
we’d rowed out of La Gomera, in the Canaries, on December 20, 2015, on a tide of euphoria and adrenaline. This was the dream we’d devoted the past two years to achieving: the long days of trailing our boat rose round the country drumming up sponsorship, the hours writing letters begging for funds, or clocking up miles on the Ouse.
But Niki had fractured her coccyx and was out of it on painkillers, while Helen was so crippled by seasickness she couldn’t speak for days. ‘I felt so ill, throwing up every half hour, but I was determined to keep going,’ says Helen. ‘I didn’t change my clothes, I didn’t brush my hair, I didn’t clean my teeth. I just used to row and collapse and then get up and row again. It was terrible.’
within days we were all fighting Niki for the painkillers as the sores and blisters kicked in. we’d been warned, and we had our chafe-free pants and pots and pots of nappy-rash cream with us. However, the combination of sitting down for two hours at a time and rowing in clothes damp with seawater is a terrible one for the skin.
Niki was the first to develop a huge pressure sore on her behind. ‘It didn’t take long before the rubbing became unbearable and the whole thing opened up into a large wound that had to be dressed and padded every day,’ she says.
This was an undignified nightmare, which involved Niki (with a fractured coccyx) peeling off her pants and bending over so one of us could attend to the wound while being rocked by the waves on what was basically a giant seesaw.
The rest of us were not long in joining her, and soon we developed a routine where we’d come off our rowing shift and douse our buttocks in surgical spirit, before slathering on the nappy cream. It could not have been more intimate.
we spent most daylight hours trying to row, but almost every time we put an oar in the ocean it was ripped out of our hands by the brute force of the waves.
AT NIGHT we did not even try. we’d sit out on watch, in wetweather gear, teeth chattering, insides shivering, being drenched over and over again by the freezing cold sea.
‘Everything was wet,’ says Frances. ‘we’d take off our damp clothes, get into our sleeping bags, naked, and then, because we’d arranged to row in two-hour stints — two hours on and two off — we’d end up putting our cold, damp clothes straight back on again.
‘By the time we’d eaten some sort of food and crawled into the claustrophobic cabin, it was almost time to wake up again. And we’d have some very odd dreams.’
‘I used to have a regular dream about being in a car,’ says Janette, ‘going along an extremely bumpy track. Every time I woke I was so deeply disappointed to find myself on a cold, wet boat.’
Janette, as captain, was constantly hunched over the charts. we’d decided, like quite a few of the 25 crews in the race, to head south out of La Gomera before effectively taking a right turn across the ocean to Antigua, hoping to pick up helpful currents and trade winds. It would mean a longer journey in terms of miles, but hopefully we would find it a little easier to get there.
Not that any of us really minded where we came in the competition — for us the challenge was simply to get across in one piece. It seemed, nonetheless, a depressingly long time before we lost sight of land — it was two days before it disappeared completely. we kept spotting the volcano on Tenerife.
It had not been a great start. As Christmas approached we’d made hardly any progress, were covered in sores and blisters, and we’d been at sea for less than a week.
IT wAS Christmas Eve when we were told to expect a phone call from BBC Breakfast, as they had planned for all our husbands and children to be on a sofa at Niki’s house in York the next day to wish us Merry Christmas. It was the loveliest thing in the world.
‘Hi!’ came all the children’s voices down the satellite phone as we tried to cram into what we euphemistically called the office — one of our boat rose’s two minuscule cabins.
‘Hi!’ their voices came again. ‘Happy Christmas, Mum!’ we were missing them desperately. Niki’s eyes immediately filled with tears.
How we wished we could have seen them, sitting there, all dressed up no doubt, smiling on the sofa.
It felt unbearably strange to be so far away from our families, all soggy and blistered, when we should have been there with them, right at the heart of the celebrations.
Poor Helen could not cope at all. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said, covering her mouth with her hand as she rushed out of the cabin on to deck. ‘I felt so awful,’ says Helen. ‘I was the only one who didn’t speak to their children. Even now I find it very upsetting to think about them, waiting to hear from me, and I just couldn’t talk to them. All I wanted to do was be sick.’
we were all quite downcast after the phone call. what should have lifted our spirits had only served to underline quite how lonely and isolated we were, sitting in the middle of a vast, unforgiving ocean.
All we knew was that Ocean reunion, a team of superfit young men, were powering away from the rest of the pack, while we seemed to be rowing flat out just to keep still.
Christmas was only day five of the journey and there didn’t seem much to celebrate.
But Helen was starting to eat some solids and we were, we’d just been told, currently seventh in the race. what’s not to celebrate? So celebrate we did.
‘Let’s play some music,’ suggested Janette. ‘And crack open the mango gin!’
we’d brought it for emergencies, and this clearly was one. It was delicious. Sweet and alcoholic, it slipped down a treat.
Combined with The Best Christmas Album In The world . . . Ever, it was enough to put even Scrooge into the festive spirit. we sang like no one could hear us and danced like no one could see us — because they couldn’t. For the next hour and a half we laughed and crooned and warbled our hearts out. we also shared out a segment each of a Terry’s Chocolate Orange that Niki’s mum had sent us all. Never had anything tasted so wonderful.
It was divided up with great ceremony, with the rest to be saved for further emergencies. It was, in the end, a Christmas that none of us will ever forget.
BOxING Day was a different story. The wind picked up, as did the waves. The antlers and festive specs were firmly stored in the hold and we were suddenly battling all the elements that the ocean could throw at us.
It was pouring with rain and the tide was taking rose in the wrong direction.
Helen had been on the oars for two hours, rowing through heavy water and was finally making her way to the loo — or, to put it more accurately, the bucket.
But, suddenly, as wave after wave pounded the boat, slamming into the side, rose spun in the wrong direction and it looked as if she was about to roll or, worse, capsize.
Niki and Frances were battling at the oars, pulling hard to the right, and Janette was struggling at the helm.
‘Helen!’ shouted Janette. ‘You have to get back to your seat! we have to turn this boat around!’
‘I have just done two hours!’
Helen barked back. ‘I am not getting back on again.’ ‘Get back on there!’ ‘I need to wee.’ ‘I don’t care!’ Janette went puce with fury. ‘You need to get back on your seat now!’ Janette shouted back. ‘And you need to f ***** g row!’
Eventually, Helen did stagger back to the oars and together all of us managed to turn Rose around and avoid what was potentially a very great disaster.
But relations between Helen and Janette were frosty to say the least, and neither of them spoke to each other for the rest of the day.
Finally, it was Janette who apologised. ‘I shouldn’t have shouted at you,’ she said.
‘I shouldn’t have sworn at you. I could have done that in a much better way. I don’t think you realised quite what danger we were in and I should have communicated that better.’
‘We learned from that,’ said Helen. ‘I learned I wouldn’t rebel again. I am quite tough and if you cross me, I fight back.
‘Everyone thinks I am a princess, but I’m not. And I don’t cry. Not that there is anything wrong with crying — if you watch any of the YouTube videos of Ben Fogle and James Cracknell rowing the Atlantic, all they did was cry.
‘They cried all the way across. So I thought: “I am not crying. At all.” So I didn’t. Not once.’
‘There were some stressful situations on the boat that did sometimes bring out the worst in all of us,’ says Janette.
‘Each one of us had a moment — you can’t possibly avoid that on a 3,000-mile row across the Atlantic, no matter how great a person you are. What was important was how we managed the situations. Our values, luckily, kept us on track.’ IT WAS Janette’s husband Ben who told us that a hurricane was on its way — the first in the Atlantic since 1955. It’s probably lucky that none of us really knew what to expect as the skies began to darken on January 12.
As we put the para-anchor out to stabilise Rose [shaped like a parachute, it floats underwater attached to the boat], we could see the lightning and the driving rain coming towards us.
The ocean was beginning to stir as we battened down the hatches — Frances and Janette in the ‘office’, Niki and Helen in ‘first class’ — and hoped to God that this really was a self-righting boat.
The first waves were terrifying. Rose was lifted clear out of the water and then dropped from a great height over and over again, and we were thrown out of our small beds and spun around like socks in a washing machine.
Sometimes the rise and fall was so great we’d hit our heads on the roof of the cabin before being dropped back down again. Everything that was not pinned down or tied up flew about the cabin like an exorcist’s Christmas party.
The wind howled, lightning shot across the sky and the thunder sounded like an HGV lorry about to plough into the side of the boat. All we could do was lie there, gripping the sides of our bunks for 70 hours of pure hell. On and on it went. At least with some hideous fairground ride you can get off, have a rest and take a bit of air before going back to be shaken and bashed and thrown about again. We could not.
‘You’re locked in. No way out. Nowhere to go. You just have to sit it out and wait,’ said Janette. ‘You go through all sorts of emotions in the first couple of hours. I don’t know how we got through it.
Frances and I started to get terrible headaches due to dehydration and lack of oxygen. We were desperate to get some air into the cabin, but the waves were ramming the door so hard that we couldn’t open it. Eventually the water started coming in anyway, and the whole place was soaked through.’
Then it began to get hot. Extremely hot. After about ten hours of confinement, they took off all their clothes.
‘I got used to Frances’s bottom in my face,’ said Janette. ‘Then I remember moving one of her boobs, thinking it was a pillow, at one point. I was trying to shove it out of the way. But they are just bodies at the end of the day.’
It was then that the madness started to set in. Janette and Frances developed ‘cabin fever’ — an expression that can only be truly understood by someone who’s been locked in a minute space for three days.
They started to laugh hysterically at anything and everything, dissolving into fits of weeping laughter.
At the other end of the boat there was a separate kind of hell going on. Niki couldn’t bear being locked up for so long inside the cabin — she was claustrophobic and could not cope with being in such a confined space.
DESPITE the thunder, the lightning, the lashing rain and huge waves, all she wanted to do was get out on deck. And so she snapped. With Helen shouting at her to stay inside the cabin, Niki opened the door. ‘Stay inside, Niki!’ yelled Helen over the noise of the waves.
‘I have got to get out!’ Niki shouted back. ‘You’ll die out there!’ ‘I feel like I’m already dead!’ Niki yelled back.
‘Clip yourself on!’ screamed Helen as Niki disappeared through the tiny cabin door.
On deck, the waves and the swell were enormous. The wind was screaming and the rain was coming down at 45 degrees, like millions of sharp little needles.
In the middle of it all, dressed in her life jacket, with a double-clipped safety rope, sat Niki, gripping on for dear life as wave after wave battered the sides or swept over the boat.
‘It felt so much better to be out there. It was awful, awful, awful inside that airless, sealed unit — it was like a coffin,’ she says. ‘I didn’t mind the wild waves and the wind; I found them exhilarating. I enjoyed
the freedom of it.’ Helen said: ‘I think our experience was completely different from that of Janette and Frances.
‘Niki was really hating it, struggling with it all, and my iPod was not working, so I had nothing but the stories in my own head.
‘I tried to think about the nicest things — decorating my house, anything I could — and I took the opportunity to try to get some sleep.’
We all made occasional trips on to the deck in the end, braving the storm to get to the bucket, naked but for our life jackets and with a double lanyard securely tied on.
Our partners back in the cabin would keep an eye out for us.
And then, very gradually, the storm moved on.
‘We didn’t emerge blinking into the sunlight,’ says Janette. ‘We just shouted across at each other to see if it was worth giving it a go.
‘We picked up our oars and started to row. It was an amazing feeling as we dipped our blades in and out of the water, trying to make up the time we had lost.
‘No one said very much — we were all quite shocked by what we’d been through and just thankful to be alive.’