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Introduction – Over the past few weeks the team have been engaged in a serious training schedule. We made our own vacuum packed dehydrated meals because to buy them ready made was horrendously expensive – about £4000 compared to £2000 to do it ourselves. They were fiddly to do and we were a little limited in terms of menu which was Chilli con carne, shephards pie, soup, porridge, cereal, scrambled eggs, curry. But we took loads and loads of sweets and Faye also came up with a system to make bread which was an absolute lifesaver. Our biggest mistake was to take lots of chewy sweets because we expected that chocolate would melt. That wasn’t the case! The small amount of chocolate we took was fine, but the chewy sweets went all gooey and were a pain to unwrap. If we did it again we would take mountains of chocolate. We also took loads of powdered drinks supplements with us, but didn’t use any of it! That was about 4kgs of unnecessary weight. Despite their costs we did take three or four of the ready made ‘Adventure’ meals with us as treats and they were lovely.

Training — We started training in earnest about 1 year before the event. The first job was to learn to row which wasn’t too hard to get to an acceptable level – you don’t need to be technically great to row an Atlantic boat. We were out on the water 2 to 3 times a week in a 2 man scull, with the Saturday trip being a long trip (20 miles or so) and the others being interval based. In the gym we rowed on the Ergosat resistance 10 for 30 minutes during lunchtimes 3 days a week. Once a week we had a long non stop Ergo session (started at 15 km, resistance 8 on week one, then each week added 1 km until we reached 42 km and then held it at that), and then twice a week in the evenings we had a 30 minute ergo session followed by an hour of weights. In addition to all of that we were pedalling and running whenever time allowed. Cross training is very important because the way the boat moves about in the water and the effort you need to put in is totally unlike rowing on flat water or on a rowing machine.
Once we had bought our boat and got it seaworthy (about 5 months before the event) we tried to get out in it at least once a week, but we only managed to get out onto rivers and lakes. Our biggest failing was that we never had time to take it to sea which would have saved us learning several uncomfortable lessons during the race itself……

Sea Anchors and Drogues — Very very very important!! We had the sea anchor out 3 times in the race and the drogue out twice. Practice rigging it and retrieving it before the race, because when you have to use it in anger from the moment you make the decision to deploy it you have very little time to get it out before the situation gets dangerous. The sea anchor is a vital piece of kit and you need to think very carefully about where you rig it from and how you rig it. My overwhelming preference is to rig it from the bow so that when deployed the bow faces the oncoming waves, I would not even consider rigging it from the stern due to the loads transom would take. You need a very sturdy, reinforced mounting point too, and I would always have the sea anchor attached and ready to deploy – the last thing you want when a storm gets up is to be crawling on the bow of the boat trying to attach shackles etc.
I would go for a bridle arrangement to rig the drogue from the stern, and again, always have it rigged and ready for deployment. Have a nice long line for it to attach to, because the shorter it is the less effective the drogue is at maintaining your direction. Ours was 80m, but we also had another 20m so we could play with length to suit the conditions. You can also just deploy the line if you feel the drogue is overkill for the conditions, or you can deploy just the line with knots tied in it at intervals of 1 or 2m and this slows you down a lot.