We have survived our first week at sea and are finally finding our “sea legs”!
Leaving La Gomera from the start line on Wednesday was surreal to say the least, as we rowed out of the marina we couldn’t stop laughing! 'As if we were actually heading out to Cross the Atlantic and had to keep reminding each other “this is not a drill!”
Within the first 3 hours of rowing, 3 whales surfaced and swam right under our boat! We both stood up totally amazed, it felt like they had come to see us off.
We broke up our first night shift 2 hours on and 2 hours off. Still fueled with adrenaline this seemed to work perfectly, until the sea sickness caught up with us. :(
For the next 3 days we suffered with savage sea sicknesses, crawling around the boat to change shifts like drunken slugs. We couldn’t stay more than 5 mins in the cabin before we had to bolt back onto the deck. We think this might be due to the sickness and lack of sleep but the hallucinations we have seen whilst night rowing have been absolutely crazy.......
We hear people chatting around our boat and dogs barking,as if they are in the streets outside our house and the land is just next to us. We see ships or other boats that aren't thee in the distance, this normally results in one of us waking the other up to check if what they have seen is true or not as we don’t want to see either of those things yet! One night, we came very close to making a direct vhf call to the moon almost mistaking it for a passing cargo ship....better safe than sorry :)
We have had a few flying fish come aboard, have spotted plenty of dolphins and even had a shark follow us for a while with plenty of very large jellyfish.
The salt rashes on our bodies are starting to show already, we can’t imagine what they are going to be like after a few more weeks!
We are slowly getting into a routine in order to pass the hours; 8am breakfast; 9am daily letters; 1pm lunch; 2pm to 4pm Harry potter audio whilst rowing together; 6pm dinner; 8pm critical minds audio podcast episode.
We are trying to row as much as we can together whilst we still have good energy. The surrounding is just total dark blue, the waves are so high and rolling we can’t really even see any horizon and we keep saying it feels like we are on some sort of film set rather than in the middle of nowhere. The waves are getting bigger, we don’t really know what to expect but we don’t reckon the Atlantic is even out of first gear yet.
We are getting used to life on little Boudicea. We hope to do a better update in a few days when we can hopefully look at a screen for longer than 10 minutes and have got rid of our “sea legs”
Love to all!
Lauren and Jem
