I’m the oldest woman to row the Atlantic — but I nearly died doing it
She thought it would be a distraction from turning 60. But DIANNE CARRINGTON didn’t know the price she’d have to pay...
bility, too, especially at night, when visibility was non- existent, and flying fish would slap on to the deck, attracted by lamp light.
They agreed to stop rowing at sunset and sleep at night, settling into a rhythm of two hours on, two hours off in daylight.
They were covering a good 50 miles a day, but the constant wetness and violence of the sea began to take its toll — their skin blistered. The heavy oars caused painful ridges on their thumbs and open wounds on their shins.
Di got a black eye from a stray oar. It was impossible to stand up in such constant rough motion, and so each adopted the gait of an animal to get from one end of the boat to the other.
The muscles in their calves and backsides began to wither. During the day it was hot, and Di eventually jettisoned her clothes, so sore was the rubbing of cloth against salt-crusted skin.
After a while, she became adept at feigning a confidence she didn’t feel most of the time — but instead poured out her fears to Brian daily via a satellite phone.
‘Those calls started off being two minutes long, and ended up at 20 or 30 minutes. I got more emotionally fragile as the time went on. There were times when I’d say to him, I’ve no idea how I’m going to get through this and I’d be in tears and he’d calmly keep me going.’
All three were physically depleted in various ways when they faced what would be their final and most terrifying test, right at the end of the voyage. Just 37 miles from Antigua, they suddenly found themselves in the middle of a ‘red zone’, a patch of extreme weather.
‘We were lucky to survive, says Di, bluntly. ‘It was like the aftermath of a hurricane. The waves were monsters. They were coming in sets and we’d hit what’s called the Caribbean shelf where waves get steep anyway. I’ve never known anything like it.’
At all times on deck, the women were ‘clipped on’ for safety (‘you’d die if you weren’t, you’d be washed away within seconds’) and when the boat capsized for the first time, it took Sharon and Elaine round and underneath it, ‘like ragdolls’.
Di was in the cabin. ‘I was rolled around inside, hitting the walls, with everything falling over me.’ The boat was designed to right herself, and as she came round, the two others pulled themselves back on, badly shaken but OK.
An oar was broken, and it took half an hour in howling winds to get a screwdriver and set up another oar — when suddenly the boat went over again.
‘This time I was on my way from the deck into the cabin and the door was open. That was scary because the water just gushed into the cabin.
‘Had I not been able to close the door quickly the cabin would have filled up and then the boat wouldn’t have righted. As it was, it trashed the sat phone and everything else inside. I remember looking out through the door and seeing the others being pulled back on board.
‘Elaine’s leg had a huge bump on it — I was sure it was fractured — and she’d injured her hip, too. She was sobbing her heart out. Sharon had just gone silent, which was almost worse. She had a pain in her chest and I wondered whether she’d popped her sternum.
‘We were able to pick up short wave radio, so I spoke to the duty office, who told me we may need a helicopter to get Elaine off.’ But Elaine was determined to stay on board, and in any case, the waves were too high for a helicopter to reach them.
‘I knew the rescue was a no go,’ says Di now, slowly. ‘I do remember a kind of inner turmoil, but I think one of the things I’ve learned about myself is that I don’t panic.’ She laughs. ‘I wasn’t making quick decisions because I was so tired, but I was staying calm.’
The first priority was to keep the boat upright, so Di decided to unspool a 150 metre tow line from the back, to stabilise it. That plan backfired when they got a radio call from the rescue office, who were tracking them by radar, to say the line was forcing them to drift too far north. They were in danger of missing Antigua altogether.
There’s a great deal of heroism in what happened next. Despite serious soft tissue injuries and a terror of capsizing again, Elaine resumed her place at an oar, while Sharon, who couldn’t move her arms to row, took over the steering. Di rowed too and together they gritted their teeth, refused to give in and pushed on through the storm.
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voyage would have been quite an achievement, even without the near disaster. More people have been into space than have rowed the Atlantic — and only 122 women in the world have ever rowed any ocean at all.
When they finally reached the shore there were celebrations with flares and champagne, but the prevailing emotion was relief. For Di, there was a meaningful hug with Brian and the greatest luxury she could think of — a dry cushion to sit on.
‘We staggered around on wobbly legs like drunks for five days,’ says Di. ‘Then something weird happened: I was on the beach with Brian, but at the sound of the waves lapping, I backed off, scared. I’ve always loved the sea, but right now I have no desire to jump in it, or be near it.’
Yet the plan to distract herself from her milestone birthday was a definite success. All three women have raised thousands for charity — in Di’s case, for an organisation called Relapsing Polychondritis UK, which fundraises for greater understanding of a little-known but devastating autoimmune disease suffered by a close friend.
‘I’m certainly more confident than I was,’ she says, ‘ and stronger mentally, too. I’ve rowed the Atlantic. I don’t think much could phase me now.’
The prospect of another birthday certainly holds no fear. Pleasingly, her belated 62nd celebrations were held at a fancy bar on Antigua, looking out on the Caribbean with the treacherous ocean safely out of earshot. They enjoyed a very large gin and tonic.
Fast and scary. the words rang in Dianne Carrington’s ears as she and her two crewmates stepped into their sevenmetre rowing boat and began their record-breaking — yet almost catastrophic — 3,000 mile voyage across the atlantic Ocean in December last year. If she succeeded she’d be the oldest woman to have rowed this epic ocean.
‘the weather was terrible, and the start [from the Canaries] had already been delayed for two days,’ says Di now. ‘the organisers said it was going to be fast and scary — those were the precise words. the wind was so strong, the sea was just white. the waves were very high and we were constantly sick, which drains you physically. at night it was especially frightening.’ the conditions were so bad that, in the first ten days, four boats had to be rescued — all of which were manned by young, semi-professional athletes.
Calling themselves the atlantic Ladies, Di’s crew, by contrast was the oldest all-female team ever to take on the annual talisker Whisky atlantic Challenge race, with a combined age of 171. at 62, Di is a retired nurse and health manager from shrewsbury; 55-year-old sharon Magrath is a midwife, also from shropshire, and Elaine theaker, 54, a lawyer from Monmouthshire.
they’d spent the previous 18 months preparing exhaustively, and yet still, admits Di with a grimace, ‘didn’t acknowledge the seriousness of the challenge’ until they saw the size of the waves, which at times were almost vertical, the height of a ‘two or even three-storey house’.
‘We were physically in the best shape of our lives,’ she says, ‘but our bodies fell apart in the first two weeks.’ Worse, in the last 24 hours of their extraordinary adventure, survival hung in the balance as the weather worsened and the seas tossed the boat like a toy, capsizing it twice.
and yet 60 days after setting off, Di, Elaine and sharon made it to antigua on February 13. they were battered and bruised, had lost 5½ stone between them and could only crawl off the boat. But they’d broken three world records and officially finished in the fastest atlantic rowing race yet held.
‘We came in 20th,’ grins Di, ‘last but one. the winner smashed the speed record from 35 to 29 days.’ Not just ‘fast and scary’, but the fastest, and possibly scariest, atlantic seas the race had ever known.
It’s taken Di six weeks to recover. When I meet her at her home in shrewsbury, she is tanned and tautly muscular, and still bears the scars of painful salt sores, where the constant dousing in salt water repeatedly irritates and breaks the skin.
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is now officially the oldest woman to have rowed the atlantic (the other records clinched by the Ladies are oldest female trio and fastest female trio), but can’t quite bring herself to believe it.
‘It hasn’t quite sunk in yet, no. I think for all of us, during the first weeks back on dry land, the memory of the last very tough 24 hours overshadowed the rest of it. We had to process that before we could remember the good bits.’
For Di, the entire enterprise was conceived as an antidote to turning 60, a milestone many of us might celebrate with a gentle cruise around the Med. Four years before, after suffering stress and burnout in her job as manager of a national diabetic screening programme, she’d taken early retirement on medical grounds, and found herself in a kind of limbo. ‘I hadn’t got a job, wasn’t well, and had lost my confidence. and then 60 came along and hit me very hard.’
When a friend suggested she ‘do something completely crazy like row the atlantic’, the idea took root — though crazy it undoubtedly was. Di had barely been in a rowing boat.
‘When you’re faced with a challenge this size, you have to break it down into chunks,’ she says. ‘so for me that meant learning to row.’
Di was, however, a keen canoeist and in the seventies a member of the British canoe white water slalom squad, with a deep love of the sea.
Full of excitement, she started looking for teammates prepared not only to brave the ocean, but to commit serious time and money — all three dug deep into personal savings for the £100,000 it cost to build the boat and pay the entrance fees.
Meanwhile, her husband, Brian, a 64-year-old singer-songwriter, ‘went rather silent on me’, she confesses. ‘I don’t think he completely understood why I wanted to do it, but he knew how determined I could be, so there wasn’t much point debating it.’
Di started seven classes a week of stamina and weights, a private trainer worked on her stiff joints and psychologists gave the women strategies to stop them falling out, including ‘360 degree’ techniques to look at arguments from all sides. and though she ‘hated feeling fat’, she ate cakes, chips and drank Guinness to bulk up.
the rations on board would consist of freezedried packets and smash mashed potato, plus tins of gin and tonic ( theoretically, a genius touch) for the celebrations they’d miss: Christmas, New Year and two birthdays, including Di’s 62nd.
‘Oh, but it was so sad, the sea water corroded the tins, so we could only drink one!’ Not that they missed proper food — the first 20 days of the challenge were defined by constant sea sickness. ‘We didn’t have a quiet day, not one. the waves were always roaring in towards you and crashing against the boat.’ Often the boat would effectively surf the waves. ‘We’d climb up and then come down so fast, we’d get up to 15 knots (almost 30mph). I’d be howling with glee. I know those speeds frightened the others at first, but it reminded me of surfing in a canoe and eventually we were all whooping together.’ as their bodies got used to the constant swell of the sea, the sickness faded. and there were moments of beauty, if not tranquillity. ‘ the sunsets were extraordinary. We saw a pod of dolphins, a shark, a green turtle and at least one whale. We sang a lot and there was a glorious sense of being alone.’ Indeed the sea was empty — they saw no other competitors and though the support yacht was out there, they knew it could take ten days to reach them. they were acutely aware of their vulnera-