The build up to the race

For me I was at that change….in terms of rowing I was going to retire after ‘96, and I was really anxious about what I was going to do at that time, and then I saw this flyer and it was on a notice board at the Olympics, and it said ‘Atlantic Rowing Race’, and it kind of caught my eye, and I thought wow, and I read up about this concept, which was for two-person boats which would row across the Atlantic Ocean, I thought man what an extraordinary concept, and I kind of made a decision there and then to have a go at this thing. From there you know found a team mate in Phil Stubbs, perfect team mate for this adventure and away we went.

You know I could move on to a couple of things, I’d just like to say that it took us a lot of commitment and an extraordinary amount of time to get to the start line in that race in 1997. Financially I was on the bones of my bum. I had to resign from my job, and I went for it, and Phil together we formed an incredible team. We found each others strengths suited each others weaknesses, and we had a very good balancing thing going on there, so we could delegate jobs, focus, and come together and then work out where we needed to go from there. Getting to the start line was one of the most relieving things I think of that whole adventure, because it was such a big call to get there. And I think the big thing I made in terms of that….the big thing that got us there I suppose from both perspectives was our commitment and our passion. We were extraordinarily passionate about this adventure.

Anyway we got to the start line, and could you imagine we’d spent kind of a year or 15 months building this boat, preparing ourselves physically, getting the food together, getting to know one another, we didn’t know each other from a bar of soap, my partner and I, my team mate. And we got to the start line, and 30 boats and away we went, and I tell you what, it was the best feeling of my life. I guess the anxiety of the occasion mixed with the excitement of it was just extraordinary. Because we didn’t know what was going to happen, until that time there had been about 20 people had attempted to row an ocean before. Of those about a third had made it, about a third had been rescued, and the remainder had actually been lost at sea. So it wasn’t a very good statistic, you know 30 percent in theory in this race were not going to make it alive. And there were 30 boats, 60 people lining up for this first race.