All work and no play makes Roz a dull ocean rower, so I took a day out (en route from my presentations in Oregon to my next presentation in Colorado) and went to Canyonlands, surely one of the world's most stunning landscapes, and a place that I have had on my "Must-Visit" list for a long time.
I'd always thought of Quackers (my yellow pickup) as a cute and cuddly boat-towing kind of a truck, but in Canyonlands he came into his own as a 4x4, bouncing over the bumpy, stony tracks with ease. (Luckily I'd been able to leave my ocean rowboat with friends in Moab - she would have been too far out of her element here.)
This was not the most environmentally friendly way of seeing the scenery - I would have loved to mountain-bike the route instead - but unfortunately there were still many miles to cover to Telluride...
[Video: Canyonlands gave me an opportunity to test out the procedure for editing and uploading video to my website that I hope to use on the ocean - click above to view.]
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Last night's fundraiser for Search & Rescue in Bend, Oregon, was a great success - but now it's over, hence rather dodgy title for this blog. Hood River is also over - my presentation there was on Sunday night.
I arrived in Bend yesterday with 24-foot boat in tow at the height of rush hour, which was not ideal. The original plan had been to put the boat behind the theatre, but she seemed too tucked-away there. She is my best billboard, and deserved centre stage.
So Eric ran around to the front of the theatre - and raced back to announce, "Three parking spaces in a row - move NOW!" So I manouevered Sedna around there as fast as I could, and we got our billboard in place.
Sedna certainly helped draw the crowds, and we had an excellent turnout at the Tower Theatre.
And this morning I got a call from a local classic rock radio station wanting to do an interview after the show host had spotted my boat - probably not the kind of thing you see every day in downtown Bend.
Today Sedna, Quackers and I hit the road again - off to the Mountain Film Festival in Telluride, where I'm speaking on Sunday.
[photo: TV interview for Fox before my presentation last night]
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It is almost impossible not to laugh when you are around Mick Bird, although the Hawaiian-born rower must have had his sense of humour sorely challenged when his first and second attempts to row the Pacific both ended prematurely.
The first attempt, from Monterey, was attended by about 250 assembled media, sponsors and friends, but ended after two weeks when his comms system failed.
The second attempt, from Oxnard, was attended by about 20 friends, and ended after just a couple of days when Mick realized he was being swept too far south.
The third attempt, from Fort Bragg, was attended by a sea lion (the two friends who had helped him tow his boat there had already left saying, "Yeah, yeah, see you next week"), and ended triumphantly with a full Pacific crossing to Australia via Hawaii, the Marshall Islands and the Solomon Islands.
As Geoff Holt found, expeditions don't always go quite according to plan. But the setbacks are what separates the doers from the dreamers. I hope that a) I don't have to suffer the setbacks, but b) if I do, that I find the strength and determination to persevere as Mick did.
[photo: me with Mick Bird in Hood River yesterday]
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During my Pacific row I will be sticking electrodes on my body every day. No, not some demented way to make my ocean experience even more unpleasant - but a high-tech way to monitor how my body is coping with the stresses and strains of rowing an ocean.
On Thursday, as I was en route from San Francisco to Hood River, I stopped off in Eugene to collect my physiological testing gadget from OmegaWave.
Click here for the full story, as it appeared in the local press (please note that I was not, in fact, the first woman to row solo across the Atlantic. Just the first to compete in the Atlantic Rowing Race).
I have now taken delivery of all the gadgets I need to collect data for my WatchKeeper Project - which will provide a wealth of information to my website. allowing visitors to follow my every move as I cross the Pacific. As well as the OmegaWave testing station, I will have:
- a Davis Instruments weather station to provide meterological information (with forecasts provided by the Royal Navy)
- a MarineTrack tracking beacon to provide lat and long, current speed and bearing
- a heart rate monitor to provide details of heart rate and calories burned
- a psychological questionnaire, devised by Dr Neil Weston at the University of Portsmouth, to assess my mental state
- plus the usual blogs and photos, and hopefully podcasts and even video-blogs as well.
You will know more about me than you ever really wanted to know....
[photo courtesy of Register Guard]
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