The night before launching. A huge thank you to my friend Joy for helping me pull it all together. Goodbye Portland! Gone fishing! My 'on Safari in Kenya' selfie, except I am rowing down the Columbia River. Same same. Heavenly light. The morning light was such a gift. Photo 1 - there is so [...]
Only 17% of biographies on Wikipedia are about women. My mother learned this on the radio. I found this article online citing the same stat. It gets worse... if there aren't enough visitors to these women's pages, the pages disappear!!! Thankfully my page has not disappeared and even more delightful, I recently discovered my Lia [...]
Yesterday - Thursday 23rd May - at around 3PM in Japan, Charlie Martell rowed out of Choshi Marina bound for the USA. Woohoo!!! This is Charlie’s 2nd attempt to row the North Pacific along the same route I will row next year. In his first attempt, Charlie departed Choshi, Japan on May 12th 2012 and [...]
It sounds like the beginning of a contentious joke, but next month is set to be an exciting month in ocean rowing. Two individuals - both of whom have rowed oceans before - are planning to set off from the US west coast bound for Hawaii. Part 1 - Man from China - Ruihan Yu [...]
On Monday April 15, I checked out of Marina del Rey - for now anyway. Destination? 1,200 miles away: Anacortes, WA (2 hrs north of Seattle). In January I had flown up to visit Betts Boats with a view to having Betts, build the new boat. [New boat update to follow.] In the short term, [...]
Last year as part of my training, I set myself a (smaller) challenge: circumnavigate the Farallon Islands - a chain of gnarly looking volcanic rocks some 26 miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge. You can see the islands occasionally, backlit by rays of low-lying sun or on particularly clear days as you cross the [...]
I owe a debt of gratitude to the following individuals - Don Bekins and the SFYC David Holscher of Night Train Swimmers David McGuire of Shark Stewards Dr Dave Birznieks Also a special thank you to Danielle Sellwood of FindItFilm for continuing to collaborate with me on the making of these films and to all [...]
Fishing-for-survival training begins THIS WEEK! From a selection of trolling lures, I have borrowed two lures for my first round of training. The blue one I have named ‘Blue Lagoon’ and the orange one ‘Tropical Punch.’ Proper fisher-people probably do not name their lures, but as an aspiring fisher-person I have decided I would. [...]
For Part 1 click here. Part 2 By noon, the visibility socked in, 1 mile or less. The wind increased its howl and rain poured down. I was drifting at around 0.7 to 1.5 knots - too fast - so I wriggled into my foul weather, donned my harness and went on deck to deploy a [...]
ROUND CATALINA Part 1 I left the dock at night into the teeth of 18-25 knots of wind. I wanted a romp, a fast blast to Catalina. Adrenalin kept me awake and the cold numbed my body until it became detached from my mind. Chaotic, messy, loud, colliding, the sea was rough and mildly nauseating. [...]