Indian Ocean Rowing

In the early hours of this morning we reached an enormous milestone...1,000 nautical miles to go...woooohooooooooooo. at approx 6.55am Tom and Matt were on the oars as the clock ticked down from 1,001 to the magic 1,000 and then some 10 minutes kater Peter and I saw it get in to the 900’s. It’s hard to explain the feeling of reaching this landmark, sufficd to say there was a real sense of achievement amongst the boys. Many teams had fallen by the wayside during this journey and we needed to remind ourselves that whilst we still had a long long way to go this was to be celebrated – the importance of this cannot be over stated given the amount of bad news we have had so far and I for one was determined to enjoy this moment...regardless of the searing pain i remember getting from my backside as we pulled ourselves into the 900’s.
It’s a weird thing reaching this place in the crossing because once the celebration is over suddenly the mind has the ability to bring you straight down to earth with dark thoughts about how long the last 1,000 miles had taken as well as dark comparisons with what this distance meant...mmm a call from Al didn’t help as he reminded us we still had to travel the equivalent of Auckland to Noumea. Not content with this thought i searched other more uplifting, or at least manageable from the head’s perspective, comparisons which would be easier to get my head around – these include 1,000 laps of the famous Ellerslie race course, 2,000 trips up the Auckland Harbour Bridge, 750 football pitches (Wembley) and an awful lot of double decker buses. Still as i say this moment was to be celebrated and from now on the milestones would be smaller but hopefully more frequent, the first one being to break 800.
The news was met with good winds and helpful seas during the day, potentially a sign that the good King Neptune had at last agreed to providing some slack to the boys from RFP – our thanks once again to Father Bannigan if this was indeed the case!
Sadly as has so often been the case the good times had to come to an end and an abrupt end it was. Last night the winds died and the current seemingly disappeared making each and every stroke once again a real slog. That said we had just had 3 to 4 days of uninterrupted bliss so i for one wasn’t going to complain...just yet anyway. So it was we just kept plugging away making the best we could of what was on offer knowing, or rather hoping change could be just around the corner. That’s the bizarre thing about this ocean stuff, the conditions can and do change in the blink of an eye so all we needed to do was keep pulling on those oars and hope to the dear lord of chocolate that we would be blessed once again.