The Grasshopper Book of Expedition Rowing

For those of us who grew up in English-speaking homes in the 1960s and 70s, long before the days of Wikipedia, our early education was shaped by Ladybird Books.

Extraordinarily, despite covering an extremely broad range of topics from Your Body, to Baby Jesus, via Ballet and The Beach (to name but four that I remember owning), there was never a Ladybird Book of Expedition Rowing.

There still isnt, but this is what one might have looked like. Particularly if their illustration department had been on strike.


Jane is an expedition rower. This means she likes to row long distances in new places.

She’s been on rowing expeditions in many different countries. Last year, she went on a long row in the Netherlands. She and her friends saw a windmill.

When she went on a rowing expedition in the south of France, the organisers expected her crew to drink two bottles of red wine at lunchtime. This is because the rowing tour was also a cultural experience.

Expedition rowers need to eat whenever they can. This is because rowing burns up a lot of calories. If they don’t eat enough, they become grumpy, say mean things to their crewmates and make poor decisions. That’s not good.

Jane always takes Jelly Babies with her on expedition rows. She shares them with the others. Recently she learned that the fourth Dr Who did this too, and she wonders if people think she’s channeling Tom Baker.

After you’ve rowing for several hours, you arse hurts. But Jane uses a special cushion called a “seat pad”, which delays the onset of the pain, and reduces it. In fact, she usually uses two. “Any idiot can be uncomfortable”, Jane laughs.

Expedition rowers just “shut up and row”. They don’t moan when their arses hurt. Or their hands, wrists, or backs. Anyone who complains doesn’t get invited again.

Expedition rowing boats are usually coxed. The cox is the person who steers the boat whilst the others row. The crew members take turns to cox.

Whilst they are steering, they usually also have to read the map, give information about how far into their stint they are, motivate the crew, eat, tape up their hands, take photos, and have a wee wee.

Coxes need to be good at multi-tasking!

Many rowing expeditions need a “land team”. This is a glamorous term for the poor bugger who has to drive the boat trailer from the start to the finish, whilst everyone else has fun rowing. Jane often appoints her boyfriend, Peter, to be “Land Team Manager”. The role is a functional one: there isn’t actually anyone else in this team.

He can track their progress on Yellowbrick. This helps him work out whether he’s got time to pop to the chippie before they get in. He can’t go to the pub, because he’s got to drive the darn boat home. Peter wonders if he should take up rowing.

If you think Janes hobby sounds super fun, and youd like to try expedition rowing yourself, visit www.PaddleducksRowing.co.uk.

Rowers Paradise

When an Olympic rowing medallist describes somewhere as "Everything you could imagine paradise to be, and we rowed there", its going to pique anyones interest, never mind the passionate expedition rowers.

Unfortunately, this wasnt the sales pitch, it was the after-the-event summary of a trip I DIDNT go on, but golly, I would have loved it... Crystal-clear water and World firsts, not to mention the impromptu lobster dinner. Wow!

And why didnt I go?
Basically, because it cost a lot. But youll notice I didnt say that it was too expensive. In fact, it was a very suitable price for its aims.

Heres why.

"Paradise", in this case, is in the Maldives, an island nation made up of 1,192 coral islands, of which fewer than 200 are inhabited, and straddling the equator (more on this later) in the Indian Ocean, southwestish of India. So, not surprisingly, everything there is incredibly expensive. For example, UK readers will known that petrol in Britain is more expensive than it is in mainland Europe, and massively more so than in the US. Well, apparently, its about the same price in the Maldives. And you dont need to be an economist to see that their average incomes, arent anything like ours. Almost everything needs to be imported, and that just costs.

Rowing to your hotel.

So, a major aim of this tour was to bring some tourist spend to these beleaguered islands, which are also under threat of simply disappearing below the waves as sea levels rise (lets face it, being the worlds lowest country isnt really something any nation would want).

This said, the Maldives are very good at tourism, and those on it enjoyed not only the incredibly beautiful environment, but the very warmest of welcomes, as well as superb hospitality aboard their air conditioned "floating hotel" safari boat.

Trip facts
This trip broke new ground, or should that be water, in so many ways. Taking place in February 2015, it was the first FISA Development Tour, and was organised in partnership with Rowing the World and the Rowing Association of Maldives. It  was led by British Olympic rowing silver-medallist Guin Batten, who is Chair of the FISA Rowing For All Commission, whos also famous for her 2010 solo crossing of the 60km "Zero Degree" channel between Fulmulah Island and the Vaadhoo Atoll, in a coastal single scull.

Guin Batten 

The total tour party included 20 people, aged 30-70, of 11 different nationalities.

Lasting 10 days in total, the rowing was a mix of:

• Serious challenges involving rowing considerable distances between islands.
• Learning safety drills for the above challenges.
• "Rowandering" about inside atolls, over the shallow reefs.

Add in some snorkeling (because "half of paradise is under water" so you need to be in it as well as on it), a load of BBQs, school children dancing, bands, mayors, lots of locals coming to say hello, and you can see why this trip was a long way above even the highly acclaimed "whats not to like?".

For boats, the tour hired three coastal doubles from the Rowing Association of Maldives, plus Guins single from her Zero Degree Crossing, which shed left for the Maldives rowing community to use. 

The serious challenges and the first "World first"
The group undertook two serious challenges, the first being a kind of warm up for the larger, second one.

But before I describe those, you need to know how a party of 20 fitted into just seven rowing seats, and it;s called hot rowing...

A water change: Step 1 

This is kinda the sculling equivalent of hot desking (and with temperatures regularly around 28 degrees Celsius, it was literally HOT too). But how to do do this, out at sea? The answer is "water changes".

The rowing boats were constantly supported by a local "dhoni", a motor boat whose propeller was carefully kept in neutral whilst the changes were going on.

Step 2

The "fresh" rowers jumped into the water from the dhoni, swam out to the rowing boats, sometimes on a static line, and used various techniques to get on board, including a "seal" entry" over the stern, as well as the more conventional push up on the side.

Apparently rowing in soaking wet kit was very refreshing! Although people suffered from great handfuls of blisters because of rowing with wet hands.

Challenge No.1
This saw the first ever sliding seat rowing crossing from Addu Atoll to Fulmulah Island, a distance of around 28 nautical miles or 50km. The whole team participated, and with days being relatively short here (it being on the equator makes them roughly the same length, of course), despite setting off at dawn, they didnt finish till 20 minutes after dusk, which must have piled on the pressure – because you really dont want to be heading towards a coral island in the dark.

Challenge No.2: the Zero Degree Crossing
The big thing about this crossing is not so much the distance of about 60km, but the state of the sea. Guin had, of course, crossed it all on her own - but shed also failed to do so a few months later in a coxed quad - yup, much more "woman power", but with only a 3-day window to try and fit the crossing in, the score was Sea 1, Rowers 0, despite them battling for 5 hours to try and make headway.

A LOT harder than paddling on flat water.

But despite success being far from a foregone conclusion, 14 of the party nevertheless decided to get up at 3.30am so that thy had a chance of making landfall at night, should they reach Vaadhoo. The first shift was the longest – even Guin described leaving harbour at night and venturing out into "surf country" as "scary", and those crews knew they had to keep going till sunrise, when it would be safe enough to do the first water change.

After that, there were 1 hour shifts, then 45 minutes, and finally 30 minutes, as crews got more tired.

Reaching the equator was a wonderful: the boats paused for 15 minutes, and all of those not rowing swan across the line. The married couple from Norway kissed (in the water), and Maldivian drums and music was played on the dhoni. Cool!

Although there was still plenty of hard work to do against the tide, they also picked up a good current as they approached landfall, and after 10.5 hours, they finally arrived "on the beautiful island you could imagine", where the floating hotel was moored, ecstatic and elated, albeit extremely tired.

Wow. Just wow.

"Rowandering"After all that achievement, the focus of the trip shifted to some gentler rowing, with more space to soak up the utter gorgeousness of the islands, the crystal clear water, and the wildlife. As they paddled slowly in the shallow waters within small atolls, they spotted sharks (nice ones), turtles, dolphins, and blue, green and yellow-coloured reef fish galore. As Guin said, "The pictures in your head will carry you through the rest of the winter."

It was on one of the evenings after a day of potter-paddling in paradise that a little motor boat appeared at the moored safari boat, selling huge, fresh and incredibly tasty (so Im told) lobsters.

I really, really would have loved it. But so would you.

Rowing in the MaldivesUnsurprisingly, rowing has a long tradition in the Maldives. Rowing boats were long used to travel between islands; rowing played an important part in fishing, a key part of the Maldives’ economy; and there were many local or even inter-atoll rowing (makes perfect sense, but I still love this phrase) races in these traditional wooden boats, often as part of local festivals or celebrations.

Does your rowing club look like this?

All this changed as recently as the 1980s, when motor boats finally took over, and although there are still a few of the old rowing boats around, they’ve generally been retrofitted with outboard engines (despite the hideous price of fuel).

However, driven largely by Guin, rowing is now being reintroduced to the islands, and particularly promoted to women. Their Rowing Association has been established, and there are about ten boats based in two locations, and a series of volunteer coaches from Europe have been helping to establish programs and transfer skills to local coaches. Despite  all this progress, there are still considerable challenges facing the further establishment of rowing as a self-sustaining program: there is no government funding for grass-roots sport; there’s no culture of volunteering; paying subs; or even of sports clubs at all.

And then theres the whole issue of boat maintenance. All seats have to be double action, for example, because ball bearings will corrode quickly in salt water, and with no handy suppliers, as well as the punishing effects of sun and sea, even keeping the few boats they have in working order is no mean feat.

The tour supported all of this: raising funds for spares, and by visiting so many islands, it did a great job of raising the profile of rowing amongst the islanders who were so welcoming wherever the rowers went.

All photos © Guin Batten, 2015.

The hardest rowing challenge he could think of

When it comes to challenges of any kind, the enormity of the challenge is depends on the individual as well as what it actually involves. If youre rowing an ocean, the challenge is pretty much built in: theres no such thing as "taster" ocean. That said, the Pacific Ocean is a heck of a lot bigger than the others: I mean, you can position a globe so that its all you can see. But when my friend John Beeden, who already had an extremely fast (53 days) solo crossing of the Atlantic under his belt, was planning his Pacific crossing, he deliberately sought a route that was proper hard.


How to make a hard thing harder
First of all, he decided to row mainland to mainland, rather than make use of any offshore islands that still technically constitute an ocean crossing (my own Atlantic row, for instance, was from the Canary Islands to Barbados – not a mainland in sight). This may sound like just a couple of hundred miles more, but the extra distance isnt just any couple of hundred miles. Continents sit on shelves (please bear in mind I dont even have an O-level in geography), or something like that. This makes the edge of the ocean thats on top of the shelf relatively shallow. The wavelength of waves coming in from deep water gets shorter when it gets shallower (I DO have an O-level in physics). And short waves are a pain to row in. Its bad enough near islands and their small shelves, Proper mainlands are way worse. And then there are the onshore currents and winds, which can be either permanently unhelpful or swirly and unpredictable. Not sure which is better. Or worse.

Then, he decided to do it across the Equator. Again, this might sound a bit arbitrary, but it meant that he would have to get through the "Inter Tropical Convergence Zone" (ITCZ – remember that, it will come up later), commonly known as the doldrums, that spans the Equator, and features crazy currents and wild winds as well as really extreme heat.

And thats why John set off from San Francisco on the West Coast of the United States on 2 June 2015, around my bedtime, bound for Cairns, on the West Coast of Australia, 7,020 statute miles away as the crow flies, with not a chance of taking that direct route.

"Go."

What happened?
In the fine tradition of The Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy which reduced all of the detailed reports, graphs, and data that Ford Prefect submitted about the planet Earth to "mostly harmless", Ill summarise: he made it. 208 days later, after travelling 8,829 statute miles, landing on 27 December, exactly where he intended, albeit somewhat later.

Seven months. In a 6m-long, 159cm-wide (at the widest point) boat. Thats a metre longer than my Volvo V70. And slightly narrower. And whilst I can pack a good deal of grocery shopping into the car, I dont think I could get 28 weekly shops into it. And thats just the toilet roll...

You can read about each of Johns incredibly arduous journey, including the 22 soul-destroying (well, it would be for most of us) days when he was blown backwards away from cairns including one ghastly stretch of eight solid days during which he lost 217 nautical miles (396 km), in his blog.

So when I caught up with John once hed started the process of "re-entry" to normal life (actually, he was on a business trip already), I made sure I didnt ask him to repeat any of the things hed taken so much care to write about, or ask the obvious ocean rowing questions like "What did you eat?", "Did you anchor when it was stormy?" and, of course, "How did you go to the toilet?", the answers to which will be familiar to the well-informed readers of this blog.

Instead, here are some insights into the mindset of a man who not only thought up this incredible challenge, but also achieved it.

Q. What were the standout memories?
A. Crossing the equator was a big day, being only the second person to reach the equator from north America was a big deal. It also made me think I could get all the way. The other big memory is making it through the ITCZ  which was such a difficult process, rowing 28 hour stints to break free of swirling currents, dealing with the heat and equatorial convections.

Q. How did you get through the sheer difficulty of it all?
A. I think it was a day by day process, writing the blog actually was a good release, it cleared away the days negativity. There is a point in the blog at which I stopped looking at the trip as a whole and it became a daily challenge to get the best out of the individual day. I was a true example of living in the moment, the day, the hour, the mile, the stroke.

[I didnt ask John whether he had studied the recently-popular concept of mindfulness or whether he just worked this out for himself. I suspect the latter.]

Q. You’re a lean runner at the best of times, but by the end of the trip you had very serious muscle wastage, pretty much all over and especially on your bum. Do you think you will suffer any long-term physical side-effects from the trip?
A. I lost 17lb, ending up about 10/11lb under my normal weight. I actually gained upper body weight but my legs (surprisingly) and behind changed substantially. Running has been difficult since I returned [Note: he went for his first run on 30 December. Im not sure if this is actually more incredible than his 209 days at sea] he and until I rebuild the muscle will remain so. I also managed to damage my Achilles tendon after 10 days or so, this is now healing well but holding me back. Long term I don’t expect any real issues.

"Plump" is not a word that the judges of the "Rear of the Year" award would use about Johns backside when he landed.

Q. How many pairs of shorts did you get through? [a question prompted by the saggy look of his shorts in the above picture]
A. I only wore clothing for about three weeks, I then packed all my clothing away and just pulled out a shirt and shorts for the big finish. [Serves me right for asking.] I did wear through five sheep skin seat covers though. [Stop press: Mans bare bottom proved tougher than small flock of sheep.]

Q. Ginger Nuts were mentioned frequently in your blogs with enthusiasm and later wistfulness (when they were running out). How many packets did you eat?
A. 82.
[Respect.]

A true fan.

Q. I know your family and friends kept you informed about important stuff from the outside world by satellite phone message during the row [including F1 race reports from one of his daughters]. Have you had any instances of things being referred to since you’re back where you’ve gone “hey, WHAT?”?
A. Not so much news but a lot has changed. Nearly everything I do on my laptop now has updated software layouts, and my online banking sites are totally different. It’s been a nightmare trying to do anything, updating and finding my way around new layouts and navigation.

And finally.. Wit amidst weariness
The video below was shot as John was approaching Cairns harbour: a local journalist is interviewing him as he rowed. The bit I particularly love is where the journalist asks "How are your emotions?", a fairly reasonable question as someone approaches the completion of such an utterly epic and unprecedented challenge. In similar situation, interviewees might, with justification, use words like "overwhelming", "incredible", "fantastic". And what does John, a native of Sheffield, say? "Im from Yorkshire so Im not very emotional." Not only is it quite clearly true, but dont you just love his quick thinking to come up with that when hed only had seven hours sleep in the previous 90. Cracking, lad.

Photos © John Beedens Blog on solopacificrow.com, with permission.