Chic Gites

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Introduction

On the 1st March 2017 I will finally, weather permitting, set off to row the Atlantic Ocean. Now I know what some of you will be thinking - ...

Tuesday 9 May 2017

The Final Blog - Conclusions.

Maybe trying to draw conclusion so soon after finishing the row is a fool’s errand but that’s never stopped me doing things before and isn’t going start now! I’m sorry if this ends up being a little long but it will be my final blog entry for this particular adventure. I also want to quickly mention our sponsor, Chic Gites property rentals and announce a celebratory 20% off promotion for anyone quoting Atlantic20 when booking (all bookings except conference rentals). This offer applies to anyone so please feel free to forward/share. The site is www.accommodationcannes.com for anyone who fancies a week or two in sunny Cannes!


So for one last time, here goes…..


The human body is remarkable.
In hindsight we did an incredible amount of exercise during the 48 days of the row - 12 hours a day, almost no let up (a total of just 48 hours on the whole trip where we couldn’t row). The body takes about 3-4 days to adapt to the new regime and most of that is adapting to the sleep cycle rather than the workload. We were all in pretty good shape going into the row but hardly Olympic athletes. The rowing was more physical than I expected - no it wasn’t the intensity of a 2 hour row on the erg but it wasn’t very far off it either. At the end of a watch we were genuinely tired and 2 hours later we’d do it all again. But the body copes remarkably well. It quickly eats body fat and then muscles not being used (standing/walking/running muscles for example) to make up the calorie deficit. And on and on it goes. There were no injuries of note and any minor niggles soon sorted themselves out. Yes we all had some surface issues along the way (sore hands, bums, “privates”, chafing etc) but the main systems performed incredibly well all the way through the row and felt like they could have happily continued for far longer. The problem is that we so rarely make full use of this wonderful asset we all have. At a guess, most people would rarely push the body beyond about 40-45% of its capacity. It remains an untested asset for most, simply cruising along in 1st or 2nd gear. I would encourage everyone to use their bodies more and test yourselves physically - you’ll be amazed what your body can do for you and just how adaptive and resilient it is.

 One of the many sunsets on board

It’s kind of depressing how quickly we return to normal life.
It’s just 15 days since we arrived in Cayenne and it already feels like a lifetime ago. I run into friends I haven’t seen for a while who start with “Congratulations!” and I genuinely have to stop and think what are they talking about exactly - “oh yes - the row!”. Running water, toilets that flush and flat beds have all become normal again and I only occasionally stop and think “thank god I don’t have to row again in 2 hours!”. Other than that, life has returned to normal again. Now some of that is comforting and some of it is a little depressing. We’re so accustomed to our creature comforts and daily routines that it gets harder and harder to step outside of normal life anymore. And even when we do, even for nearly 2 whole months, we immediately readapt and reintegrate so quickly. A lot of people have asked me “what’s next?” and although I have no plans at all at the moment (and certainly won’t be rowing another Ocean!) I know I will inevitably be drawn once more to pushing myself out of my comfort zone and reminding myself of how much we can achieve when we test ourselves.

Arrival into Cayenne after 48 long days.


Adventures don’t have to be months or thousands of miles long.
There has been so much positivity from friends and family around our crossing. Many people have said they felt inspired to go out and do things (which is very rewarding to hear) but often people don’t know where to start and maybe end up doing nothing, quickly losing inspiration and returning to normal life. But adventures don’t have to be huge things. An English adventurer named Alastair Humphries came up with the concept, or at least catchy name, of “Micro-Adventures” - small, short and inexpensive adventures. For example, one weekend, go out saturday morning on your bike and don’t come home until Sunday evening. Or maybe take the whole family out, bring a tent and go for a hike that takes longer than a day. Or even just sleep in your garden one night with the kids. The point is, adventures can fit in with people’s busy lives and stretched budgets. It’s simply about stepping out of your daily routine, your comfort zone and spending time outside - alone or with friends or with children. You’ll be amazed how rewarding these micro adventures will feel and they may be the stepping stones to far bigger adventures in the future. The point is - get out there and do it! If you google “Micro Adventures” you’ll find loads of ideas to try.


A Legacy?
The World Record was not something that I or the other crew members every really thought about or talked about much. Yes, the 50 day target was something of a benchmark for us to measure our progress against and at times focussed the mind a little but a safe and happy crossing was all we were ever really interested in rather than breaking records. All that said, I have to admit it’s kind of nice/fun to now have a confirmed (by the Ocean Rowing Society, who will then inform Guinness) World Record to our names for the fastest mainland Europe to mainland S America crossing by rowing boat ever completed. Of course it will be beaten at some point in the future, probably sooner rather than later, but I can put up with being a “Former World Record Holder” for the rest of my life! But what we were all amazed by was how much the World Record Attempt captured the imagination of all of our friends and family. Most messages finished with something along the lines of “and make sure you break that record!” - who knew you were all such a competitive bunch!


The personal legacy for me and a large motivating factor for setting off, was the effect it would have on my two sons. Children being so adaptable, they barely noticed me being gone and pretty much instantly got used to me being back. But they are growing up believing things like rowing oceans are just normal. It’s brilliant - their father does things like that, their mother runs marathon (and soon far longer) distances, their cousin has climbed Everest a number of times and they know/have met people who cycle and run across whole continents, sail around the world etc. I love how wide their horizons now are - who knows what they’ll end up doing in the future themselves but right now for them, the sky is the limit.


One final legacy the row has left is the remarkable amount of money many of you have donated to Medecin Sans Frontiers - at the time of writing well over €5000. As readers of the blog from the start will remember, I was reluctant to ask people for sponsorship given the high chance of failure of our crossing (as well as Charity fatigue, tight personal budgets etc). But as the row went on more and more people were asking about sponsorship so finally with 1 week to go I grew more comfortable with the idea of raising money. Medecin Sans Frontiers is a charity I have supported for many years - I love what they do and how they do it. They simply pay for volunteer doctors and nurses to fly to war zones and try to treat all victims of war right there in the middle of war zones. Forget rowing oceans, these people are the real heroes. Their bravery and selflessness is an example to us all. And by donating money to this charity we can help these wonderful volunteers get to where they can do most good. It seems a small part to play in this remarkable effort but one they need to continue to operate. A huge thank you to everyone who donated so far and if anyone would still like to donate, the page is still open - https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/niallbates


The Volunteers of MSF - the real heroes 


Discovering, or remembering, what’s really important to you.
48 days at sea gives you a lot of time to think. Everything from guessing cloud shapes to solving world issues to new inventions to make millions to what adventure will be next. But by stripping your life back to such basics, the one thing that you really tend to focus on is what’s really important to you in life. Now this can be everything from the short term “what’s the thing you miss most from home” (bed) and what food do you most miss on the boat (steak), all the way to the more profound “what really matters to you in life”. The answer to this one for me was always the same - Family. I’m so lucky to have such a lovely little family and invariably take all of it for granted. It’s only when you’re separated and for such a long time that you really realise and start to appreciate what you have already right under your roof. I cannot tell you how much seeing Helen on the dock in Cayenne motivated me to keep going through the darker moments. Her importance to me is something that I have known from the day I met her but maybe I do still need occasional reminder. And although (as any parent will know) your kids can drive you mad (and already regularly have been since I’ve been back) I have to say I missed the boys far more than I expected on the crossing. The boys and I already have so much in common - a love of sport, travel and adventures - and I plan to enjoy as much of all three as possible with them in the rapidly disappearing time between now and when they set off on their own adventures as young men in just a few years’ time.    

The launch of Ariane 5 from Cayenne one week after we left

Monday 1 May 2017

The Crossing in Summary & Key Events Explained.

I'm going to try to break the crossing down into a number of sections. I don't have the exact dates/days to hand so apologies if the dates aren't quite right but I think for the most part the periods will be about right.

1st Section - Departure - Days 1 to 5.
This was by far the hardest section of the row from a physical point of view. It was just brutal. Although I had sailed in a watch system across the Pacific, the physical demands of the 2 hours "on watch" were far harder than I could have ever imagined. The body is remarkably resilient but does take a little time to adapt to significant changes in routine. These 5 days were exactly that. The rowing was more physical than I expected - it's not as intense as sitting down to doing a 2 hour erg but it's no walk in the park either. You are quite physically tired after the on-watch and of course get to repeat the pleasure 2 hours later. Sleeping in a small, hard, rocking environment also takes the body significant time to get used to, and once it does manage to fall asleep, is doesn't like being woken up an hour or so later. Intense fatigue kicks in after just 24 hours or so and the temptation is very strong to simply finish a watch and go straight to bed - the problem being you still need to eat a lot of food as regularly as possible. Initially I think we all ate the minimum required and tried to maximise sleep so the calorie defecit was significant. By 3 or 4 days of this you simply felt numb. The closest analogy I can think of would be the first few days of a hard-labour prison sentence - an alien and intimidating environment combined with a brutual physical regime. You can't yet wish you weren't there because you can't even think that clearly. Shell-shocked is the only way to put it.

Day 4/5 was also notable for the sudden and significant deterioration of my "bum-bones" which left me practically unable to sit nevermind row. Thankfully Ralph produced an old inflatable cushion for me to try sitting on and a beautiful relationship was born. I still have no idea how I would have completed the row without it and despite a puncture (and quick repair) it made it all the way to Cayenne with me!

The incredible calm at dawn the morning of the storm. 

2nd Section - The Storm and Approach to the Canaries - Days 6-10.
After the first few days of fairly gentle weather, we had a remarkable day of extremes. We started the day rowing on the calmest sea I have ever seen - you simply wouldn't believe we were in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. 12 hours later we were battling through 25 knot winds and 5-6m waves. Because both wind and waves were coming very favourably from the North East, progress remained good. Slowly though it became harder and harder to row because the sea state was so big that we eventually downed oars and let the boat drift/surf in the right direction (south west) at speeds of around 4 knots! The time off the oars was appreciated though it soon became apparent that sleeping 4 in the 2 tiny cabins was difficult. After a day of drifting towards the Canaries at high speeds, we realised that we couldn't afford to keep going at the same rate as we risked reaching the Canaries completely out of control. The risk of being shipwrecked on the shores on the islands was far too big so we had to drop the para-anchor to reduce our speed to a little over 1 knot. After 24 hours on para-anchor the weather finally subsided so we could resume rowing and plan our safe passage through the Canaries. By day 10 we were safely through to the east of Gran Canaria which would represent our last sighting of land until French Guiana. The passage through the Canaries represented mixed emotions - it was our first real milestone and seeing land was exciting but we all knew this was the last land we'd see for well over a month and I'd be lying if I said I didn't consider the "what ifs" of just stopping the crossing right there and then.

3rd Section - The Psychological Test - Days 11 to 20.
Thusfar the row had been fairly action packed - the excitement of leaving, the storm, passage through the Canaries. Then we hit both a literal and emotional lull. For some inexplicable reason having cleared Gran Canaria we then rowed directly SW into its wind shadow. I cannot to this day explain why we did this given we knew it was there but we found ourselves with no wind and no current so had to hack our way through still waters for 48 hours which was slow and frustrating. We finally realised what was going on and immediately detoured to the SE - slightly off course but in search of faster conditions. The frustration of the lost time lingered and then we had a few more days of light winds and slow progress. This was the start of by far the hardest psychological leg of the trip. The realisation hit home that although we had done well so far, that there remained well over a month still to go - another month of the same mundane 2 hours on/2 hours off survival routine. And although we were coping much better with the physical side of the routine, the brain continued to struggle to accept what was still ahead of us - no land, no excitement, no significant milestones - just around 4000km more of 2hrs on/2hrs off. I found this period very tough. In hindsight we went through pretty much the 7 steps of grieving - Shock, Pain, Anger, Depression, Upturn, Working through, Acceptance. I know it sounds dramatic but really that was the process - from "what have I done?" to "why did I ever sign up to this" to "I can't believe I have 30 more days of this" to final accepting "it is what it is". By day 20 I'd finally accepted the crossing for what it was - a long, hard, physical and mental struggle which would only end when we reached French Guiana. And once I'd accepted that, the whole crossing slipped into a much smoother phase where the routine finally became tolerable and even enjoyable at times!

4th Section - Autohelms - Days 21 to 28.
Our first autohelm packed up before we'd even left Portugal - it was no drama - we had 2 replacement arms and the first one was old and well used. We simply swapped it out, kept it "just in case" and ploughed on with our new arm. Like many of the key systems on board (autohlem, AIS (like radar), watermaker) you didn't give them much thought day to day but just assumed/hoped/prayed they'd just keep working. Around day 22 disaster struck when our second autohelm arm failed. We swapped it out for the 3rd and quickly realised by the noise that it wasn't actually a new arm at all but simply a refurbished one from somewhere else. We suddenly felt very exposed. Why did the 2nd arm fail so relatively quickly? And why did it fail in the same, inexplicable manner as the first? And how long could the 3rd arm last? We soon learned the answer to the last question - about 2 days. It was a sickening feeling when the 3rd arm failed, leaving us stranded in the mid Atlantic. Yes we could helm by hand but that required one of the 2 on-watch rowers to steer instead of rowing which would slow our progess by about 50%. So instead of around 22 days left we were looking at around 35 days more at sea. We immediately put out all the feelers through sailing forums, ocean rowing pages, friends, family - anyone who would listen really - to seek help as to why the arms kept on failing. And the response was simply overwhelming - the kindness of strangers is something quite amazing when witnessed first hand and the time and effort this small army of people were putting in to try to solve our problems was deeply touching to the 4 of us drifting around the Atlantic Ocean. In the end, with the help of Simon Chalk - an extremely experienced ocean rower - we managed to repair our 3rd arm and more importantly change the settings of the autohelm's computer to hopefully allow us to make it all the way to south america. It was a wonderful moment when the arm kicked back into life and although the threat of further failure contiuned to loom over us for the rest of the trip it was a pivotal moment in our crossing when we finally got up and running again.

5th Section - Slow Boats, Barnacles and World Records - Days 29 to 40.
Morale on board was closely matched to boat-speed and so after a few days of ever slowing boat-speed, morale reached something of a low around day 30. After a couple of dreadful watches of speeds below 2 knots, we decided to check the hull for unwanted passengers. It felt like a move born of desperation rather than anything else, but imagine our surprise when I jumped in with Clement to find a full "beard" of barnacles clinging on to Rose. It took us nearly an hour to scrape all of them off and by the time we returned on board we were pretty cold and tired. But as soon as the guys started to row we'd suddenly gained around 1.5knots of boatspeed! That afternoon we had a quick boat meeting and decided we had lapsed a little in terms of discipline and focus and vowed to do all we could to get the world record back in our sights. In truth the world record wasn't something we'd talked about at all until this point and rather than being the main target for the crossing it was something we used along the way to motivate ourselves and measure our progress. So refocussed and with boatspeed much improved we rowed on through the half way, then three quarter way milestones. Over the next few days and weeks, boat speed did continue to fluctuate in flakey currents which continued to frustrate but before we knew it we were less than 1 week out with Cayenne and the world record firmly in our sights.

6th Section - The Final Week and Arrival - Days 41 to 47.
There was a very notable rise in temperatures around 1 week out from the finish. In truth we expected this to happen a lot earlier given how far south we'd come but finally it did heat up. Days became really tough with water consumption up significantly. Nights, which had been the hardest/most boring watches thusfar suddenly became the most popular offering respite from heat of the sun. But it was still so humid at night that sleeping became difficult. It was hard to believe that just a couple of weeks ago we'd been sleeping in our sleeping bags because the nights dropped so cool and now could barely lie on top of them because it was so hot. And with one week to go we also started to focus on the logistics of arriving in Cayenne for the first time. Yes you could say this was a little short-sighted from our part but at the same time, when still over a month out you didn't dare even think about arriving yet. Navigation became a serious factor for the first time - for the previous 6 weeks we could simply row roughly south west and we were in the right direction. Now we had to think about final approaches, local currents, tide tables etc. As the fine tuning began we couldn't understand how we were rowing west/north west yet still going south. Of course we factored in currents, wind which might cause us to drift but then the computer was telling us we were sailing above 270 degrees yet our latitude continued to decrease we finally realised that our compass must have been mis-calibrated. So we basically ignored all our onboard navigation equipement except for the GPS readout (which we independently verified so knew was working). We had to keep the Latitude number stable and watch the longitude continue to go west - as long as we did that we'd get there eventually. Boat speed continued to increase dramatically in the last week as we finally found the currents we'd been looking for and the miles just fell away. Pretty soon we were just a couple of days out and planning arrival times to the nearest hour. Indeed our progress was so fast that we spent the last night drifting without rowing in an attempt to hit the river to Cayenne in time to avoid the outcoming tide (which was too strong to row against). And then it was suddenly the last morning on board and we could finally look forward to our arrival and everything we'd been looking forward to for the last 7 weeks. The job was done, the crossing was complete.