Toughening Up

The time has come to convert hard gym work to hard hands. Komale is out of the water at the moment and in Jeremy Rodgers yard for a refit so we have been rowing the Lymington Rowing Club boats all weekend and building up some callus.

Hamish's technique is coming along under Nick's tuition, but Nick denies him as a credible rower due to his lack of bib spandex.

Learning the ways of the Sea

Getting to grips with navigation and general seamanship holds the key to the successful completion of this challenge. We spent the Easter weekend under the watchful eye of our mentor Jim Crick and Hamish's Dad Nigel on board the yacht Coriander. This culminated in Nick becoming a qualified Day Skipper and Hamish a Yachtmaster.

Jim has shown enormous patience since starting to teach us the ways of the sea and we are extremely grateful for his help. Despite giving us insight into the doubts of many experienced sailors, we are now approaching the row from a much more knowledgeable platform.

Training Week

Things progress rapidly with Row for Heroes. Having a week dedicated to row training and preparation has paid dividends. It is so hard keeping the project moving when working and training full time.

We spent the week in the solent, rowing for between 2 and 3 hours a day with the rest of the time spent harassing all and sundry to help with kit, boat prep and the many other things we

need. Many people have been extremely supportive and generous with their advice and help, for which we are extremely grateful; without their help our progress would certainly be floundering. Our longest distance trip took us over to Cowes for a night where Komale snuggled in the luxurious Royal Yacht Squadron marina for a sleepover.

We found the time for some technical and safety training with Adam Wilson of Aquasafe powerboat school. Practising man overboard drills made Hamish realise that the water is still very cold (7 degrees!) and Nick that pulling a body from the sea is no easy feat. The session ended with Nick sweating and Hamish shivering and delivered us a salient lesson.

London Excel Boat Show

Following a particularly emotional journey through the snow with Nick to the Big Smoke, Komale nestled alongside the mainstage at this year’s Excel London Boat Show. Reports are that she came a close second in terms of raw crowd appeal to the daily appearance of bikini- clad dancers.

During her time in the capital, she led from the front as we raised £375.58 for the Army Benevolent Fund and £712.31 for Help For Heroes. Fundraising was done by a team of dedicated supporters to whom we are extremely grateful: Cherry (Nick’s Mum), Jono and Henry (fellow Army Docs), Rosie (Oar Fund bigwig), Angela and Nigel (Hamish’s parents) as well as Charlie, Rach and Fran (heroic friends).

We took the opportunity to launch the ‘Oar Fund’ in an attempt to gain more company on the row. The fund enables people’s names to be written on the boat in order to accompany us on our trip around the country. Please contact us if you would like to join the Oar Fund.

Komale, Hamish and Nick also made some great links with companies keen on supporting the project. Amongst other things Komale is very excited about having her new Forgen wind generator fitted, having her Comar AIS system installed, but like all members of the fairer sex is particularly pleased about International Paint’s kind offer of to provide new and rich colour to her top- and bottomsides.

Other news was the discovery of a reverse compass and an attempt at conquering the art of video interview by Nick when he managed to get the word ‘tides’ into a 1 minute interview with BFBS 7 times.

Nick with Sally Kettle (two successful crossings of the Atlantic, one of which with her mum).

Testing the brain power

We have had our heads buried in books for the last two weeks.

Jim Crick (RYA Yachtmaster instructor extraordinaire) has coached us expertly through the Yachtmaster Theory course and demonstrated almost limitless patience as we grappled withessential skills needed for the row such as navigation, pilotage, tides, weather and safety.

Nick began the course with little idea about marine navigation, and wrestled with new concepts such as why there are two tides each day. Fortunately with Jim's expert tuition he had an epiphany when it all fell into place. Sadly Hamish did not manage to completely overcome his chief nemesis; the tidal diamond.

We are extremely grateful to Jim, who kindly offered his services last year at the Excel boat show in support of the row. He has 35 years of experience of sailing the British waters, and many of those have been as a yachtmaster instructor. We have also discovered him to be a man of many talents playing a variety of instruments including the melodium and he is currently learning to douse. We are also grateful to his wonderful wife Sue, who kept us fed with mountains of sandwiches and introduced us to vegetable crisps.

By way of a grand finale to our course, Jim mentioned the possibility of demonstrating the action of old flares. We enthusiastically reminded him of this suggestion and soon had him rigging up a flare arena in an old dustbin. The results were staggering as we almost blew the lid off the bin. A spectacular, if slightly irregular, end to the course.

Rolling up the Sleeves

The last week has been spent with Komale at her home in Lymington Yacht Haven.

Last Saturday night she made an appearance at the Yacht Haven berth holders' party. She displayed excellent social skills and generated a lot of interest for the project. Our efforts at the moment are on getting the project going and raising money to cover project costs, so it is great to have opportunities like this to keep the charitable fundraising going; so far we have raised over £1,000.

C&J Marine have very kindly fitted Komale out with a fantastic new mattress. It is so clean at the moment that we are nervous of sleeping on it. We are very grateful to them for it.

Ben Fox from the marina escorted us into the Solent Hamish's Mum Angela, our chief snapper, to get some good quality photos of the boat from the water. It turns out that Ben is a computing ninja and has kindly offered to cast an eye over our rowforheroes.com website.

We also met up with Mike Devine, one of Lymington's finest marine electricians, and he gave Komale's electrics a once over. After much discussion and head scratching (at least on our behalf) Mike advised us to swap our GPS for a GPS plotter and also to get our hands on an AIS transponder system, which is a way of monitoring other boats and sending information to them without radar. Finally, of course, we discussed Hamish's daily requirement of audiological stimulation from Radio 4 and Nick's essential relaxation courtesy of Classic FM, plus an aggressive D.I.S.C.O rig set up.

http://www.britishmarine.co.uk/news__press/news_article.aspx?NewsArticleId=2451
http://www.cjmarine.co.uk/acatalog/News.htm

All things considered, things are progressing well.

Conquering the Solent

We have had some holiday this week and consequently some time to get to know Komale better.

We decided that the time had come for Komale to get back on the high seas and we set ourselves the modest challenge of escaping her berth at the Lymington Yacht haven with a goal of reaching nightfall in Yarmouth, on the Isle of Wight.

Having brazenly paddled out of the security of Lymington River we were at the mercy of the wind and tides. Fortunately we had planned the tides well and the weather Gods were truly shining down on us. The sea was calm and we bathed in glorious sunshine, so the crossing was remarkably easy.

Stronger winds greeted us over the next couple of days, but our first two nights on board were a resounding success. We even managed a cup of tea anchored off the needles and were pleased with the opportunity to show off our T-shirt tan-lines.