Helen and Janette were placed in charge of finding the slips. ‘We had not thought it through,’ said Janette. ‘We had not thought of where we might be able to practise. So we drew up a list of marinas and places where you could launch a boat in the York and Hull areas.’
The first place they found was an old boatyard just outside Goole, not far from Hull. Quite apart from it looking like the sort of place where crafts came to die, it was too small and too tight to get Rose into the water there, plus it gave out onto the Humber estuary, which is very tidal and, we thought, quite dangerous. It was an accident waiting to happen. The next place was even more obscure. As Helen and Janette twisted and turned along the narrow roads, they ended up in what appeared to be a housing estate.
‘But we’re miles from the sea, or any bit of river,’ said Janette, straining to look out of the window.
‘Are you sure you put the correct address into the satnav?’ asked Helen, equally puzzled.
‘Of course I have.’
‘Where are we going to launch a boat from here? We’re in the middle of a housing estate.’
‘Maybe there’s a secret stretch of water round here,’ suggested Janette, eyeing the rows of houses. ‘Through a back gate…’
‘Or maybe…’ said Helen, looking back at the website, ‘this is not the address of the slips, but actually, if you look properly… the home of the club secretary.’
We decided not to bother the club secretary over lunch and returned to York, where after a few more weeks of negotiation we managed to find a place for Rose in York Marina itself, which was something of a coup. It was close enough for us all to get to and deep enough for Rose without too many obstacles between us and the river.
All we had to do now was collect her.
In one of our many meetings we had decided in our unending wisdom to have a fundraiser party for Yorkshire Rows at York Racecourse. We’d put the word out far and wide, and sold some 350 tickets, and we desperately needed Rose to be there. She was the main attraction, along with local BBC news presenter Harry Gration MBE, from Look North, whom we had managed to persuade to do the auction (his children go to the same school as ours and his wife was one of our supportive book-club friends). Handsome and talented as he is, we did not have a party unless we had the boat.
Janette wanted us all to go and collect her – after all, it was her first trip home – but neither Frances nor Helen could make it, so it was left to her and Niki to do the honours.
The journey down was without incident and we took possession of Rose easily enough, signing all the final papers and cheques. It was only as Janette turned out of the boatyard that things got tricky.
‘I ended up driving down the narrowest street in Burnham-on-Crouch!” said Janette. ‘I thought I was going the right way. That’s the satnav for you. It was the worst street you could ever go down for your first time driving a boat on a trailer like that. Literally, the wheels were touching the doorsteps. I had to go really, really slowly. It was so stressful. I was sweating profusely, but I was being very calm and saying, “It’s fine. It’s fine. It’s absolutely fine. We’re taking it slow. She’s not going to get damaged. It’s fine. Just let me do this. It’s fine” – as I gently drove over everyone’s front doorstep, taking out their milk bottles!’
And it didn’t stop there. Two hours further up the motorway we needed some petrol. This was not an operation that any of us had thought through. How would we get the van and the boat in and out of a petrol station? But the gauge was flashing red and we had no choice. We had to pull in to the next services. Why didn’t we think of that before we collected the boat? Which entrance should we use? Lorries or cars? The lorry pumps are taller, so we opted for the cars. Janette drove at an agonisingly slow speed into the forecourt – the last thing she wanted was to overshoot and have to reverse the boat/ car. She got out of the car and started filling up, and within seconds we’d drawn a crowd.
‘What is that?’
‘Where are you taking that thing?’
‘What are you up to?’
We’d thought Rose was very obviously a boat, but everyone else thought otherwise. The crowd grew, the petrol station became blocked and then everyone started honking their horns. While the crowd all chatted among themselves, Janette managed to edge out to pay the bill before slowly but surely, now with a huge audience, dragging Rose back out onto the motorway.
It was evening by the time they all arrived at the farm. ‘I parked her very carefully and put a big blue cover over her to protect her,’ said Janette. ‘I was so worried that somebody might steal her that we pulled her into the back garden and parked her in front of the kitchen so that I could see her. I was checking out of the bedroom window before I went to bed, and as soon as I woke up, to see if she was still there.’
Over the next few weeks Rose was stored in a barn belonging to a local farmer while Ben was enjoined to build her a shed. ‘We were so worried about her,’ said Janette. ‘About her being outside and having to cover her up, and the wind kept blowing her covers off. We wanted to keep her out of the rain, because we got her in October and it was coming up to winter time, so Ben built a shed. The problem with the shed was that it wasn’t high enough for the aerial on top of the boat, so we had to take the aerial off to get her into the shed. And it was slightly too short, so her bum stuck out. It wasn’t ideal, but at least she had her own little shed to keep her out of the wind and rain.’
Rose left the shed to come to the ball at York Racecourse, and after a lot more shouting and reversing and people sharing their uninvited opinions, she finally took pride of place at the entrance.
As it turned out, we may not have been able to navigate our way back from the pub to Burnham-on-Crouch, but we could certainly organise a very good party. We drafted in a lot of help. Our friend Leigh, who works for an events company, sorted out all the logistics for sponsorship and ticket sales. We were inundated with donations for the raffle. Charlie and his nephew Angus came up from Essex to lend their support. Niki’s sister-in-law, Sharon, did the table decorations; her brother, Steven, took the photos and her parents sold tickets like there was no tomorrow. Frances raided her contacts book, selling tables and gathering prizes. Helen drummed up PR and support, and Janette put it all in some giant Dropbox folder.
It was such a fun night. It felt a little like we were all getting married again – at the same time! Our friends and family, relatives and kids, all in the same place. The atmosphere was great.
We had dinner first, at tables with comedy names such as ‘Sore Behinds’, ‘Three Sheets to the Wind’ and ‘Gone Overboard’. We had angel readings with Helen’s friend Dawn. We had a rowing machine that you could pit yourself against, and a photo booth where everyone could record their level of jolliness in a take-home snap. We’d issued ‘boarding passes’ instead of tickets, and upon presentation of said passes you were allowed to board the beautiful Rose – just so long as you took off your shoes first.
It was the first time we had really had to work together as a team. We’d done a few races, clung on to a couple of trees at the head of the river, but it had never been just us four organising something together before. In the lead-up to the party it was obvious that we each had very different strengths: some had an eye for detail, and others the big picture. Niki did a lot of sorting. Frances did a lot of advising, saying, ‘It’ll be fine.’ Helen did a lot of befriending people and making them help us, and Janette did a lot of profuse thanking.
But actually it was a team effort from all of us and all our friends and family.
Just as everyone sat down to dinner, all the lights went out and loud ocean noises of the winds and the waves were played into the room. The idea was to make everyone feel like they were there with us on the boat. Then we played the short film about the Talisker Challenge, shot the year before, which was terrifying and showed the level of danger faced by every competitor. There were plenty of oohs and aahs in the room, but just in case anyone thoug
ht we were taking ourselves too seriously, we suddenly arrived, pretending to row onto the stage to the tune of ‘Rock the Boat’ in our ball gowns.
Niki kicked us off to a dynamic start, thanking everyone for coming. Frances introduced the delights of the communal toilet bucket and invited our fellow guests to test-drive it. Helen graciously thanked everyone for helping to put the whole thing together and Janette asked us all to ‘capture some magical moments, create happy memories and surround ourselves with laughter and friendship. Have fun, go on… dance a little… like no one is watching!’
Having danced a little too much, and perhaps enjoyed a little too much of our own hospitality, we said goodbye to our guests and then realised we had to get Rose out of the building before we locked up. With Ben at the wheel, we all lined up behind Rose, our husbands in their tuxedos and us in our ball gowns, to give her a push. Left a bit, right a bit, heave! Manoeuvring a heavy vessel through a hall and up a ramp and out through some narrow double doors is not something we would recommend to anyone in their best sequins and high heels. But out she came into the moonlight, with one final push. A real test of teamwork!
At the end of it all, we had raised over £25,000, which is not bad for four mums with zero fundraising experience, and to do it together with the support of all our families and friends, with Rose as the star of the show, was hugely important to us.
The next morning, there were quite a few of us who wished we’d been a little more abstemious.
But there was not much time to sit around drinking tea and taking it easy. After our slightly disastrous outing in Burnham, we decided that we should get as much experience handling Rose as possible. We were not strapping Olympic rowers who would be able to power ourselves out of trouble should a giant wave or storm hit us in the middle of the ocean. Confidence in our boat and our ability on the water would be everything come the Atlantic.
In the second week of December, we all turned up at Janette’s to pick up Rose and headed off to Hornsea Mere, the largest freshwater lake in Yorkshire. Niki was driving us, so it was the first time we had not used Ben and Janette’s van to tow Rose. She punched the address of the rowing club into the TomTom and we set off. It was a cold, icy morning, but we were all looking forward to getting her in the water again. We were talking about the party and how surprisingly successful it had been and how incredibly relieved we were to finally be on our way in terms of sponsorship, when Janette piped up.
‘Are you sure this is the right way?’
‘That’s what the satnav says,’ replied Niki, carrying on ahead.
‘It must be right,’ nodded Janette. ‘Only I’m sure I don’t remember these roads being so narrow.’
Just as she spoke, the road slimmed down to a very tight lane, with unforgiving walls rather than hedges bearing in on us. It was impossible to turn or reverse, so we had no choice but to continue. The walls on either side grew tighter and higher as the road narrowed again. Time and again one of us had to squeeze out of the car to help Niki. ‘Why is it taking us this way?’ she said, her voice about three octaves higher in panic.
Then suddenly we crossed a cattle grid and the next thing we knew we appeared to be driving across a golf course.
‘This is a golf course!’ said someone, stating the bleeding obvious. The rest of us tried to look ahead, not at each other.
‘Oh crap!’ yelled Niki as she drove us down the icy hill ahead, picking up speed now that we certainly had more space around us. There were golf buggies scattering to the left and right, and some rather astonished looking gentlemen stared as if they’d never seen a car full of middle-aged women dragging a large boat behind them on the eighth green before. Clubs poised in mid-swing, mouths hanging open, they watched us bounce over the grass to another cattle grid at the bottom of the hill. Niki tried to pump the brakes to stop us, but the ice and the smooth golf-buggy path were not a great combination and we skidded towards the main road we were surely supposed to be on.
‘Shiiiiiit!’ Niki screeched. And together we all just closed our eyes and hoped for the best as we slowly slid across the main – and thankfully traffic-free – road and over to the other side. Finally the car and the boat came to a halt.
‘That was not supposed to happen,’ stated Niki, in case we had been in any doubt.
‘Umm,’ said Janette, leaning over from the back seat, the first of us to manage speech. She squinted at the TomTom. ‘Have you got that thing set to HGV?’
It was minus four degrees when we arrived at Hornsea Mere and the water looked particularly uninviting. As we slowly edged Rose towards the shore on the trailer, we realised that we had something of an audience. There was a group of four elderly men watching our rather poor progress with a slight smile on their faces. This was the first time we’d launched Rose ourselves and without Charlie to help it was something of a process. ‘Do you want some help?’ one of them asked.
‘No, thanks!’ replied Frances. ‘We’re fine.’
‘It’s like being asked if you want help from the cast of Last of the Summer Wine,’ hissed Helen as her wellingtons slipped in the mud.
‘Careful!’ declared another.
‘Yes. Thank you.’ Helen’s smile was tight.
‘At least let us clean the pontoon for you – all that goose muck over it, it’s worse than an ice rink,’ said one of the old men.
And before we could say anything, they’d grabbed some brushes and scrapers and were shifting all the goose shit off the decking. Of course, it wasn’t us they were interested in at all, it was Rose, and after a few minutes of scrubbing the questions came thick and fast. Where was she from? How old was she? Where was she going? She clearly had the allure of a well-preserved Bond Girl. As we lowered her into the water, they were bowled over by her curves and her sleek lines.
‘She’s a beauty,’ one of them whispered.
If it was below zero outside, we could only imagine how cold the water was. It wasn’t so much frozen as a little crisp around the edges, with a hardened layer of shining ice across the mud. It was certainly cold enough to give us all a case of dragon breath every time we spoke, and it nipped the ends of our fingers.
‘Right,’ said Frances as she rubbed her hands together. ‘Does anyone know exactly how this works?’
She nodded towards the rudder that had to be attached to Rose while she was in the water. This was not a job for someone in waders. It required a drysuit. And out of all of us, Frances was the most game. In fact, she wanted to do it and, more importantly, she was the only one who owned a drysuit. After all, who in their right mind would want to scuba dive off the frozen shores of the UK?
As Frances slipped into something distinctly less comfortable, the elder chaps quizzed us a little more about why we – four middle-aged women – were the proud owners of such a beautiful boat. We told them our story and our plans and they were full of enthusiasm and advice. They were all keen sailors and one of them had been a diver in the Marines. So when Frances arrived in her suit, he was extremely helpful, handing her the rudder as she submerged herself into the freezing water. Attaching a rudder in the water is a difficult skill to master; add an audience and sub-zero temperatures and the prognosis is not good. After about five minutes, Frances’s hands were scarlet and so cold she could not move them. The rudder was proving more difficult than we’d thought.
‘Give me a minute,’ said the diving Marine as he disappeared off into the boathouse. A few minutes later he was dressed in a drysuit and up to his neck in the freezing water, attaching the rudder. ‘There you go!’ he said, giving Rose a pat. ‘Enjoy yourselves.’
Attempting to channel the panache of the ladies we’d seen in France, we thanked them and leaped into Rose, as one, before taking hold of the oars and setting off. Unfortunately, we had not been to the local Co-op and had a minimal amount of ballast, which in the gusty conditions was not nearly enough. Within minutes of setting off we found ourselves being blown back to shore with such speed and force it was impossib
le to row against. The ex-Marine watched our speedy approach and jumped into the water just before we crashed into the pontoon.
‘It’s a bit gusty today, ladies,’ he said, giving us an almighty push. ‘I’d try to get yourselves away from the shore.’
‘Yes, yes,’ agreed Janette as she pulled in the oar. ‘Thank you very much!’
Off we went again, this time really putting our backs into it. Niki was at the helm, urging us on. We had a point to prove now, so we all grimaced and pulled together. But Rose was like an ice skater; with every breath of wind she gently floated in another direction. No matter how hard we rowed we could not keep her going in a straight line. After about 20 minutes, we sat back in our seats for a well-deserved break.
‘Cup of coffee?’ suggested Niki, pulling out a thermos from the bag that just keeps on giving. ‘Jelly Baby?’ she added.
We sat in the middle of the lake, drinking our coffee, munching slowly on our Jelly Babies, enjoying our brief picnic, just as another strong gust of wind took hold of Rose and we began to drift slowly towards a forest of bulrushes. We all looked at each other and then over to the shore, hoping we might be rescued by our knights in shining armour again. We scanned the shore. They’d gone. Damn it! One of us was going to have to put the drysuit on again.
We had exactly a year before we set off from La Gomera – we only had 12 months to really nail this thing!
SHIP’S LOG:
‘We were starting to really form a team. We were becoming more cohesive and working out which of our strengths we could rely on. We had many challenges early on. It was not an easy ride, as we mostly learnt by our mistakes. It’s good to make mistakes – it’s a great way to learn, even if sometimes it can be a little bit dangerous. The moment you stop making mistakes is the moment you stop learning.’
(JANETTE/SKIPPER)
Four Mums in a Boat Page 11