Day 21 – Three weeks at sea

ByChris Martin

The topic for today has got to be unrelenting. For the crews this challenge doesn’t stop until they touch land in Barbados. Even when they’re not on the oars there’s no chance for the crews to really relax. Even when not rowing they will be thinking about their course, food, water, voltage of the batteries, speed of the boat, weather and a million other things. It is utterly relentless.

The wind and seas may have calmed significantly but the crews are starting to show signs of the extended period of effort they have been putting in. Three weeks in they have each added more than 500 hours of experience in the boat on top of all of their training hours. They are now experts in their boats and moving them in the most efficient way possible, but it’s still a brutal schedule.

Yesterday, Rowing Stones saw something which looked like a homemade liferaft and rowed over to it after receiving no answer on the VHF. It turned out to be a massive abandoned fishing net (also known as a ghost net) with thousands of fishes all around. Josh tried to fish for a second time but sadly had no success. I’m sure they would have loved to collect the ghost net and help keep the ocean clean but these ocean rowing boats just don’t have enough spare space for anything, let alone a huge fishing net.

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