Weather strikes a blow to rower
Oarswoman drops try at record Farallones trip — this time
The Pacific Ocean was just a little too much on Tuesday for a 37-yearold British woman, her rowboat and her packets of cold spaghetti.
Lia Ditton, adventurer and motivational speaker, shoved off from Belvedere at daybreak, intending to be the first person to row from San Francisco Bay, circle the Farallon Islands and return.
She passed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge around 10 a.m., heading west. Almost immediately, nature began to show who was boss.
The weather and wind, which were supposed to let up, didn’t. After about 15 miles of rowing — much of it in the wrong direction — Ditton decided to give up. She had been stuck rowing northwest along the Marin County coast, which is not the prescribed route to the Farallones.
“If the marine layer had burned off, I could have made it,” she said, over her mobile phone from outside the Golden Gate. “It didn’t. It’s disappointing, but I’m ready to give it another go.”
Over the phone, Ditton was laughing and in good spirits. She said she would have kept going except for her proximity to shore.
“If I could take a nap, I’d rest and then continue,” she said. “But I’m too close to the rocks to take a nap. I’ve been pinned to the coast and there hasn’t been any letup.”
Ditton said she had planned to make the 70-mile round trip in three days, eating cold spaghetti for breakfast and cold oatmeal for dinner, and part of the time wearing no clothes, in order to prevent chafing.
The trouble with rowing only as far as the Farallones, Ditton said, is that it’s really too short a distance to row naked. Too many passing vessels, big and little. When she rowed across the Atlantic
“If the marine
layer had burned off, I could have made it. ... It’s disappointing, but I’m ready to give it another go.” Lia Ditton, would-be record-setter
Ocean in 2010, other boats were few and she was naked much of the time. It’s just common sense to row naked, she said.
“You eliminate chafing and you eliminate the need to do laundry,” she said.
Ditton said the Farallones trip figured to be one of those things that the Guinness Book of World Records takes note of, in addition to highest jump on a pogo stick (11 feet, 1 inch) and most hard-boiled eggs eaten in eight minutes (141).
“There aren’t that many things left that haven’t been done before,” said Ditton.
Of her unusual diet, Ditton said that freezedried meals rehydrated with cold water are best, because when you’re all alone on a wave-tossed rowboat, naked or otherwise, a pot of boiling water can be as challenging as whatever the Pacific Ocean has in mind.
What most people would consider too much time in a rowboat, Ditton was calling a “little jaunt” to prepare to row a boat from Japan to San Francisco next year. First she needs to find a sponsor with $500,000 in order to cover the cost of four months’ worth of cold spaghetti and red gummy bears, along with a new high-tech rowboat.
Two people have rowed solo across the Pacific, she said, but both rowers got a smidgen of help from tow boats as they approached the West Coast. Ditton said she hopes to set an asterisk-free record.
As she headed back to San Francisco at 2 knots, Ditton said she bore no hard feelings toward nature and that she was ready to try the Farallones trip again — perhaps as early as Wednesday, depending on the weather.
”Next time I think I’ll go anti-clockwise,” she said. “Clockwise was a mistake.”